Up For Grabs Now

So the barnstorming little Gunnerlettes destroy a Premiership team with a grin and a swagger. 3-0. “Too easy!” they cry, “Give us someone more difficult to humiliate with our Average Age Statistic and frightening ability to retain the ball! Please Mr Wenger, let us tear into Aston Villa this weekend. We won’t let you down!”

Wenger the Wise thinks about this. He strokes his wise chin (the chin the tabloids once hailed as the natural successor to King Solomon’s chin, which was well known for its wisdom). He sighs, looks up and says “I thought the team showed great spirit today, great mental strength and were again unlucky… Sorry, what? Oh it’s you Jack. For a moment I mistook you for that knave Geoff Shreeves. Sorry about that. You say you and the other young scamps want to play against Villa tomorrow? Hmmm. That is tempting.”

Wenger the Wise strokes his wise chin a bit more. “No,” he says at last, “I’m going to stick with the other team for this one. But I might play Carlos.” Please do, Wise Wenger, please at least give us Carlos.

And stick with them he will, except those members of the Other Team doomed not to play by the doom-mongers at Arsenal.com: Van Persie (suspended) and Eboue (injured). I reckon Arsenal.com should have a fanzone match preview where the real reasons for player absences can be properly recorded: Van Persie (rather brutal assault on Stoke goalkeeper), Eboue (not good enough, really, and a bit of a twerp).

Wenger himself said Eboue “is not fit“, which could be taken in two ways. Either he’s “not fit” in the sense that his physical condition is not really up to a game of footie, or perhaps Wenger has finally started applying a “right and proper persons” criteria in his selection of teamsheets, in which case Eboue may well have been overlooked because he is such a twerp.

Hamstring, 2 months. Cruciate Ligament Damage, 7 months. Dead Leg, 2 days. Twerp, rest of life.

Arsene: “We hope to have Eboue back very soon, but unfortunately for the medical team there is very little they can do when you have as big a twerp as Eboue to deal with. We hope to send him to a specialist in Los Angeles next week who will hopefully sort him out.” Fingers crossed, eh?

Villa,  of course, had an impressive start to the season and spent a ton of money in the summer. As soon as Tiny Totts went tits up and Arsenal stuttered a bit, Villa were suddenly everyone’s pick for fourth. At which point they immediately started dropping points. That said, they have a good team from front to back, including a few players I wouldn’t have minded seeing in red and white. Obviously there’s Barry, but Young is another one who looks a bit like an Arsenal player in disguise and was a great signing at £9m even though it seemed massive at the time. Think of the utter piffle that Totts are always spending £9m on.

So it could be tricky against them. Hopefully because they are quite good they will attack us a bit, forcing our players to try a bit and then we’ll win. If I was O’Neill I would get my team to pretend to be really bad and refuse to leave their own half. In this instance Arsenal, as always would idly piddle away 9 great chances before conceding to the bloke Gallas should have been marking at a corner.

Please no! Let’s hope for something more like this.

Tags: Arsene Wenger, Eboue, twerp

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