By Myles Palmer
JUST TIME for a few words on this Friday morning.
Arsenal will beat newly-promoted Portsmouth, even without the jet-lagged Gilberto.
Four days is enough preparation for Inter, who will come for a 0-0 draw.
Hector Cuper came with Valencia and lost 2-1 and now he will come back with Inter and lose 2-0.
It’s a huge game and PV4, Robbie Pires and the boys will turn on the style and win it.
Freddie scored two against Lazio, two against Juventus, so he fancies a goal against Inter.
Having studied the accounts, Arsenal is a well-run club.
If you look at Man United’s loss of Beckham,Veron and Kenyon,and the squabbles between Fergie and Magnier over stud fees, Arsenal is a very well-run, well-managed club by comparison.
If you look at West Ham, Spurs, Chelski – Arsenal is the best football club.
It’s not perfect, it has faults, it had faults in the past, (before and after David Dein arrived), but Arsenal is the best club in England by a million miles because the people who own it and run it are ambitious, but also sensible.
Having wages at 51% of turnover is about right, having £45 milion worth of debt is OK if you’ve acquired £94 million worth of property.They are only 50% mortgaged, which is fine.
Hill-Wood says : The club have all the planning permissions for Ashburton Grove, we have most of the CPO’s in place and most of the option agreements, and we are dealing with removal of water, gas, drains and electricity.
BUT UNTIL THOSE THINGS ARE ALL IN PLACE, THE BANKS CAN’T SIGN UP.
That’s the crux of it.
No bank can lend £40 or £60 million to a company which does not have planning permission on a site that is 100% ready for that structure to be built.
The AGM has been postponed until Thursday October 2nd and Hill-Wood may be able to stand up then and say : We’ve got the £260 million loan.
I’ve been hearing for weeks that 85%-95% of the finance is in place from five banks.
Incidentally, Arsenal has a significant new shareholder, Geoffrey Klass, who owns the Herbie Frogg menswear empire.
Klass is a trusted friend of David Dein and a season-ticket holder.
He has 2,006 shares, worth £3 million.
SVEN now has four icons, not three.
He has always based his England selection on icons, who are his group leaders, his winners.
He planned to go into the World Cup with three icons: Owen, Becks, Gerrard. But Gerrard was injured and missed the tournament
As I predicted before the Liechtenstein game, Rooney was much happier with his Scouse pal Stevie Gerrard alongside him.
Wayne played the ball back to Stevie, who crossed for human bullet Michael Owen to fire himself at the ball and butt it into the net for the first goal.
Then Gerrard nodded down Beckham’s cross for Wayne to fire home for 2-0.
Before the Turkey game in April(2-0) I wrote this:
Rooney’s gifts are obvious, that’s why he has skipped the Under-21s.
Talentwise, Rooney is a freak.
Rooney can see like Beardsley, shoot like Shearer, occupy spaces like Sheringham. He has vision, power, touch, an instinctive knack of knowing when to hold it and when to pass and when to shoot.
You cannot teach that. Players are born with it. Footballers are made by their mums and dads.
Sure, Rooney has immature moments, but so do 28-year olds with half his technique.
Over the next five years Rooney can become an Anglo-Saxon Kenny Dalglish, a half-striker who can think and invent the game from moment to moment in the last third.
So I said in April what many are now saying in September.
Sept. 12th 2003