From James M. Levitt :
Hi Myles,
Feels like you’re refreshed after your break.
I sense a calm in your writing so I hope you’re enjoying the Summer.
Anyway, I was mightily relieved to hear your thoughts that Alexis may stay AND most importantly sign a new contract. Can you elaborate please?
Also, what are your thoughts about players coming in please?
We hear about Mbappe, Lacazette and Aubameyang? Any truth to it?
I’d choose Aubameyang for sure!
Appreciate your insight. Thanks and kind regards.
Myles says:
Right now I’m rather dislocated in the year, having lost my rhythm, my sense of the seasons.
Why do I feel displaced? Because we went to Italy far earlier than we’ve ever been away before, and came back mid-June, two months before Premier League football starts.
Breaks are refreshing, James, but when you come home it can be hard to get out of holiday mode.
We had a soft landing in Florence because we stayed with brother Neil and his computer scientist wife Martha, who know they their way about.
A day-trip to Siena,with Martha taking a day off work, allowed the four of us to walk through the beautiful city and go down a steep and roughly-paved medieval alleyway and come suddenly into the square that isn’t square, the Palazzo Communale, the most stunning public space I’ve ever encountered..
That was a Wow! moment.
To say I was gobsmacked would be……. an understatement.
Forte Dei Marmi was a sentimental journey for Jan, whose best friend (Halifax Jan) had driven them there via France and Switzerland, staying at campsites in the summer of 1971.
After Florence, Mrs Palmer had booked us into a lovely hotel and we were upgraded to a bigger room on our first day, so that was our second soft landing in Tuscany.
I was reading Eric Newby’s classic WW2 memoir Love and War In the Apennines within sight of the snow-capped mountains featured on the Paladin paperback cover.
When I said Sanchez would stay it was a guess, a feeling, a stab in the dark, an off-balance shot that might go in off the post. Nothing more than that.
Any gossip?
Last Friday I heard a whisper that Mbappe to Arsenal was a done deal.
But I didn’t believe that.
However, the French way is to always do business with their own people.
It’s not even patriotism, just the way they’ve always been.
Coming back into a lull in London, that was a third soft landing. Nothing to write about or worry about.
Because CEO Ivan Gazidis, the catalyst for change, had been comprehensively crushed, castrated and humiliated by Kroenke and Wenger.
My guess is that Ivan will take over as MLS Commissioner at the end of 2017.
He can wake up at least 3,000 miles away from King Wenger, and he’ll love that.
ThIs summer reminds me of a conversation in Avenell Road in the Eighties.
Before games I used to chat to fans in the street before going up the press lounge, as fans knew more about the club than reporters did, and had often heard things that the press didn’t know about.
I knew Charlie Nicholas’s agent Jerome Anderson and his father Maurice .
One summer we were all waiting for transfers to happen and Jerome said, “It’s the domino theory. As soon as Dean Saunders decides where he wants to go, the clubs who didn’t get him will buy other strikers.”
PS. One of my history lessons is here.