Happy festive season to all our readers.
Good to get some time off from the demands of running a company, and doing a news review.
As you may know ANR has had a turbulent time this year, changing domain, re-designing, changing supplier, and changing server, not once, not twice but three times. We outgrew the business servers we were on due to the number of hits, and now have a dedicated one. ANR admin and finance etc; falls on me. But someone has to do it. Thanks for staying with us.
And so on to the news review. The portents look good on Boxing Day. Arsenal have only lost only one of their immediate post-Christmas Day games in 14 seasons, to Coventry.
Emmanuel Eboue (ankle) is still out, along with Gallas, Henry and Diaby, but Theo Walcott, Julio Baptista and Mathieu Flamini are all pressing for a start
Watford have scored 11 goals in 18 league matches this season. And although Wenger is expecting a long ball, physical game, he thinks his youngers players have learnt to cope with that from the experience of last season.
Meanwhile is Jose Reyes vying to be as unpopular as Ashley Cole? He claims in the Mirror that he was forced to go to Arsenal. He said: “Seville needed the money, otherwise I would never have gone to Arsenal. I didn’t want to go to England but I did what was best for Seville.”
The year contract ‘sword of Damocles’ is starting to hang over Jens Lehmann and Arsenal, and depending on which paper you read he’s either staying or going.
In the Mirror, Lehmann says staying at Arsenal is my Number 1 priority. But in Bild am Sonntag it is: “I don’t know.” Meanwhile the Mail says Stuttgart and Hamburg ready to meet his demands for a two-year deal: “I’m not saying that there is a 100 per cent chance I would stay in the event of an Arsenal offer.” Meanwhile the Guardian (rumours) says Lehmann is already wrapped up in string and brown paper and ready to go as part of a swap deal with Bayern Munich for Owen Hargreaves. [That must be tempered by the rumour Arsenal are to pay £11m for the Brazilian Ronaldo, in the same section.]
Still the Sunday Mirror says CSKA Moscow’s fine young keeper Igor Akinfeev admits he would jump at the chance of a move to the Gunners.
Meanwhile Robin van Persie tells the Irish Examiner: “I now work with top professionals. I am glad I’m in London and not Rotterdam. Arsenal want to be at the top. Arsenal think big, that is the difference with Feyenoord. At that club most people think only about the short term.”
“It might sound hard, but I’m glad that I don’t have anything to do with Feyenoord any more. Speak to a guy of, let’s say, 12 in Kralingen, where I grew up, or with a guy of the same age in London and you discover so many differences in values. You really get scared from that. Children in England are brought up so differently to us. They are much more polite. A Dutchman is more negative.” Is it wise to say those things?
Also in the Irish Examiner , it says Wenger signed Adebayor for a bargain £3million just 12 months ago, and has the French manager saying: “He has character and is an extrovert, a happy boy, which is good and there are similarities with Ian Wright. He has won the fans over because he fights and I think he has a good mixture between the English game and the French game.
“He challenges in the air, goes for every ball, likes physical contact and is good with his feet as well, plus quick – and that is why people have quickly loved him. Physically I can’t remember the last player like that. Maybe John Hartson, and Ian Wright a bit was a nasty guy like that.”
“He is sensitive and sensed when people were on his back, that’s why I used him more away from home at the start. But these guys who come from Africa have been educated in an independent way, they moved early to France from Africa at 16, so he has learned to cope with difficulties.”
Talking of moving from Africa to France, there’s a very critical review of Vieira: My Autobiography in the South China Morning Post. It says there’s nothing about how Patrick Vieira plays the game and there is plenty about football politics, but little of what it actually is to be Vieira. The story of a seven-year-old immigrant kid from Senegal, living in a tiny apartment in a tower block south of Paris, gets lost somewhere.
Still Patrick Vieira is my Number 1 Arsenal player of recent times.