By Sir Hardly Anyone, celebrating the good guys and the bad in this week of no proper footie.
1: Nacho Monreal
“Nacho Monreal fiercely defends under fire Arsenal teammate” according to
“Ozil and Emery row at ‘invented’ – Monreal” was
And the Daily Mail even picked up on the piece saying, “Ozil’s problems with Arsenal boss are invented by his critics: Monreal”
Good for you Nacho. I mean really, really, good for you.
2: Matteo Guendouzi
Untold was doing the shake rattle and roll (you won’t get that unless you are of a certain age but it means being excited) within two minutes of Matteo coming onto the pitch in the pre-season tourney, and we couldn’t work out how a player this good could be that cheap. But he is, and he was.
Football London always rather late on the scene because the story, and when they got there went over the top of course, reporting fans calling him “The New Xavi” but that is what they do. “Arsenal fans go nuts after Matteo Guendouzi wins award” was the headline.
Indeed the old 40-a-day computer churned out more on Mat giving us another headline, “Arsenal star Matteo Guendouzi is the example to follow for young Crystal Palace forward.”
From France Div 2 to being an example to Palace in a couple of months. But is that progress?
3: Jayden Adetiba
Yes it is our new signing, who can’t play for us unfortunately because, well, he’s only nine years old. But that didn’t stop everyone getting very excited!
The Independent reported that the “talented youngster” had a five-week trial with Arsenal in South Africa, his home country.
“Arsenal swoop to land South African sensation, aged just 9” said Teamtalk, while it was “Arsenal sign South African wonderkid” on ESPN.
4: Lacazette
“Keown blown away by ‘impeccable’ Arsenal ace, urges Emery to build around him in rave review” That was
At least he was positive up to a point, because he was critical of the manager for not giving Laca more time, but he reflected what quite a few of us were thinking that Laca and Auba make one hell of a pairing up front and could win us games we might otherwise draw.
5: The Manager
“Genius: Emery has got these 2 things absolutely right at Arsenal this season” is a headline from Transfer Tavern who have in the past spent most of their days and nights inventing anti-Arsenal crisis stories. Perhaps a tune is being changed.
Their two things are recognising the talent of Guendouzi (and indeed bringing him to Arsenal, since it was the boss who insisted, having known the player while at PSG) and recognising the talent of Aubameyang – although to be fair, I am not sure that was hard to do.
Meanwhile, the bonkers stories do of course continue…
“The 7 Arsenal transfer targets Mislintat and Emery could scout during the international break” says Football London now they have repaired the program so it stops writing pro-Arsenal stories by mistake. Don’t they know that in the last two years of Mr Wenger the club put in place a huge array of new senior management to search for, find, negotiate with, do deals about and sign up, players?
But Foot Lond have not heard of such things. One can just imagine the Arsenal senior management team sitting around in the boardroom playing cards saying, “this international break is so boring…”
At least The Hard Tackle thinks something is happening with “Arsenal in four-way battle for 23-year-old prolific star.” It’s not worth thinking about who as there is only a 4% chance that any of it is true – at least based on the players mentioned last summer.
However here’s a twist – an enigma if you will. Now football reporting doesn’t do enigmas normally because the journalists don’t understand them and their editors think the fans don’t understand them, but look at this for a headline…
“Hector Bellerin not the problem, but Lichtsteiner can be solution”
And we can’t do a roundup without saying “Welcome back Zelalem” – let us hope and really hope above hope that he can stay injury free.
Meanwhile this week’s silly billies who are risking life and limb by playing international football are
Sokratis Papastahopoulos, Stephan Lichtsteiner, Konstantinos Mavropanos, Mohamed Elneny, Henrikh Mkhitaryan, Aaron Ramsey, Lucas Torreira, Granit Xhaka, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Alex Iwobi and Danny Welbeck.
Let’s hope they each make it back in one piece. Ramsey was getting rave reviews last night…
But remember guys, as we have said so often before, you are playing for car thieves who having run you into the ground and smashed up your bodies will hand you back to Arsenal saying “get him fit and ready for the next round”. Those really are the sort of people you are working for when you abandon your club.
- Get rid of this jobbernowl, this ninnyhammer, this niddy-noddy, this stookie, this puzzlehead, this dizzard, this doddypoll
- Playing with the rule book, the stupidity of reading body language, the Europa squad
- The bleating of the England camp and non-savvy journalists is a danger to club football
I didn’t read the article, just the snippet in Google News. But it appears that PITA has already discounted what Nacho did to start banging on Mesut again.