In a revolutionary new gesture of his internet savoir-faire, Arsene Wenger is to let the online community have their say in who he buys in the January transfer window. A secret shortlist of blogs has been drawn up, to be notified in the next fortnight, who will form an Action Committee to help decide where approximately £10m is spent in the new year.
Wenger is reported to have said:
‘As one of the greatest football managers of all time, I feel that I’ve suddenly become completely incapable in this job, and am instead going to forget my judgement and hand over spending power to a crackpot delegation of the credulous, the naïve and the constitutionally inept. It’s been drawn to my attention that they all love the club and are proper fans, who would never boo the team and who have seen, through their years of watching television from a sofa, exactly who the team needs. It has become clear to me that watching television from a sofa, together with sporadically contributing inane abuse to online forums, affords one a much better perspective on the European transfer market, and the Arsenal team, than I could ever glean from my famously encyclopaedic knowledge of world football and my team of highly paid and experienced professional scouts and coaching staff. It is also true that watching the occasional match on a 3×2 inch window streamed through an Arabian website gives you a far more nuanced outlook on the shortcomings of the Arsenal team than training with them every day. I look forward to the gems that my Action Committee will no doubt come up with. Particularly I hope that they each pick a different world-famous central defensive midfielder and then argue their case blindly until the cows come home.’
Enough of that. But if anyone knows which blogs might be asked, do let me know.
Mystic Silvestre has offered us his opinions on the team this season, which is good of him, since he hasn’t been doing much of anything else recently. Actually I take that back – he hasn’t been doing much of anything like playing football effectively for Arsenal and making a positive contribution to our attempt to win things. For all I know he might have been doing lots of other stuff – fishing, perhaps, or ruminating on how he gradually changed from being an ambitious professional to being a comedy summer transfer pawn. If you’re bored there’s quite a fun game you can play (or could have played last night, at least) whereby you scroll down the newsnow feeds and count all the different positions reported to have come from Silvestre. From ‘Silvestre: we can win the league’ to ‘Silvestre slams Arsenal’s disappointing season’.
Anyway. None of that. Sport.co.uk points out that Senderos could come back in January. Given our recent record of throwing lifelines to underperforming centre-backs, it might make sense to get back one of our own. Maybe he and Djourou will suddenly form an impenetrable defensive shield, and those problems will be solved forever, leaving us free to buy an amazing midfielder. But I’ll wait for the Action Committee to pass judgement on that.
Then we could call them, collectively, the Swiss Guard. Or the Swiss Wall.
Little else to mull over at the moment. Boro tomorrow will be tricky, I think. Very tricky.
More then.
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