Up For Grabs Now

So a nice comfy 3-1 against Plymouth, a team known as ‘The Pilgrims’ and not, as one irate ‘Pilgrim’ pointed out to us yesterday, as ‘The Posh’. Peterborough United are ‘The Posh’. Barry Fry, trains to the North and that sort of thing. Not very ‘posh’ at all, so you can see why we were a bit confused. It’s sometimes difficult to keep on top of the nicknames of *so-called lesser* clubs especially when their names aren’t so good for rhyming headlines, so we’re deeply sorry for any difficulties which may have been caused.

Our performance was characterised by skipper for the day Van Persie trying his oranje balls off, scoring 2 and brilliantly making another. Gallas must have been overjoyed to see Van Persie wearing the armband. Wenger made a good point that when Van Persie arrived you wouldn’t have immediately guessed that he was a future captain. Scrawny arrogance with a brill-cream quiff and some unsavoury headlines – all in the past, eh?

We also saw Bendtner being crap, Eboue revelling in his free role and Nasri pulling some pretty slick strings as he cut inside in the second half. This has got the inevitable “Can he replace Cesc?” whispers going. Maybe, and yes he did play centrally for Marseille and France. The thing is we then have absolutely nobody to play on the wing which is what we lacked so much before Cesc got injured. So yes Nasri in CM is definitely an option, but it would need to be accompanied by one or two signings for the wings.

There was also our stubborn refusal to defend, fast becoming a jaw-droppingly painful aspect of the season. Plymouth launched a rare attack straight after our second goal. Our back-four had a brief meeting and took the extraordinarily bold decision not to bother defending the goal at all, preferring a revolutionary new conception of the role of a ‘defender’ as a man who stands in the space traditionally occupied by so-called ‘defenders’ and wears all of the kit necessary to carry out defensive work but in fact fails to do any of it.

I saw the minutes of the meeting. They said “we the undersigned declare that during this next bit of pressure, when Plymouth are likely to attack more forcefully than at any other stage in the game, we will neither tackle, nor mark, nor block, nor make any movement to impede opposition attempts to score which might reasonably be construed as constituting defending. Signed, Messrs Gibbs, Gallas, Djourou, Sagna.”

As a response to enemy aggression, it’s not even appeasement or diplomacy – it’s just sordid, inexplicable slothfulness. I’ve had enough of it and I suspect I’m not alone. Please defend.

While we’re on the defence, I notice that not a single Gooner has batted an eyelid at Silvestre’s 3-week lay-off. Well, I’d like to be the first. I’m not that upset, but it’s a bit annoying purely in terms of squad numbers. So Mickael, this bat is for you, son.

The News of the World is a silly organisation, isn’t it? If you didn’t know anything about it you might see the title and think “Wow, that’s good! News! From the World! I must purchase this informative gazette and peruse it at my leisure!”

If you did that today you’d be in for rather a nasty shock. Far from reporting world events by, say, detailing Israeli military aggression towards the civilian population of Gaza, this so-called “newspaper” is instead concerned with peddling heinous untruths about Arsenal Football Club and apparently celebrating the very existence of the human mammary gland.

They claim we’re signing Steven Ireland! I wouldn’t mind, but you just know it’s cock-rot don’t you? They then claim that Theo is desperately unhappy with not having a new contract. Pish. They quote “a source close to Walcott”. Here’s a World Exclusive: “a source close to [insert professional footballer's name here]” is nearly always actually “a man sitting next to the hopeless tabloid hack in his crumby office”. Don’t believe a word.

Similarly, don’t believe a word of the Daily Heil, who carry the bizarre claim that Arsene is in a massive tizzy with the board because they won’t put up the cash for Arshavin and that he’s off to Real Madrid. Arsene denied all this roughly one day ago. Maybe they got a bit confused?

UPDATE: 4th ROUND DRAW: We’ve got Cardiff away. Which is fine to be honest. Certainly preferable to Tiny Totts, who are going to Old Trafford. Point and laugh. No end in sight for their major trophy drought.

Afternoon all.

Cup game against Plymouth Argyll today – this’ll be a quickie as I’m off to the Emirates to watch it, lucky me, on this bright, cold day in North London.

I’m feeling better than I was last night, because last night I got in an argument with a West Ham supporting gentleman of a certain age, who claimed that the Premiership wouldn’t let West Ham go down because they’re too popular, and then refused my logical refutations. Very frustrating. He also said he hated Arsenal and thought we would never win anything ever again. The muppet. We’re going to win things this year, just you wait.

Not quite sure what the team for today will be. Fabio’s in goal, but other than that it remains to be seen. I hope it’s a healthy mixture of young and old, by which I mean, because it’s Arsenal, a mixture of the young and the infant. Could be a chance for Ramsey and Young Jack Wilshere to stake their first-team claims.

In other news the transfer window rumbles on. One nice thing about having it is it means that everyone feels they have to talk about transfers very intensively for the whole period, rather than occasionally mentioning them as and when they occur. However, this obviously increases the onus on people talking piffle about rubbish, whereas in bygone years it has been as easy to wait for things approaching stories to emerge before writing, er, stories about them.  

I don’t have much to say about Arteta, Arshavin et al, except we’ll wait and see. Arsene is obviously not going to be helpful in his public comments, it wouldn’t make any business sense, so I’m also wary of taking anything from his comments, particularly when he’s being provoked and then reinterpreted by hacks fat from Christmas turkey and salivating over not having to do any reporting for months and months. I also feel we at UFGN don’t need to scrabble around in the blogging dirt to deliver crude and idle speculation.

I would say that David Moyes is acting like a cock. But maybe that’s what happens when you’re a goggle-eyed Scotchman around the Hootenanny period.

I’m also a bit worried about the Kolo Situation. There’ll be more on him next week, I expect, but it doesn’t feel like we’re out of the woods, whatever Arsene says about the differences having been patched over.

Daniel Finkelstein has an interesting (he usually is) piece in the Saturday times about the FA Cup. He points out that we’ve got a better chance of winning the cup than we do of winning anything else this season. So it’s well worth our trying to win it, then.

More later.

Come on the boys.

Afternoon all. Many apologies for the tardiness of the post – I was returning from the land of rural dial-up, where I went armed with the wrong shape of cable. Idiot. Anyway, normal service should now be resumed on UpForGrabsNow, taking you through the transfer window and beyond into Arsenal’s 2009. Will be great to have you along for the ride.

I’ll start today by simply drawing out a number of things that Wenger said at his pre-match press conference this lunchhour. At the end of the day, I can blog until I’m blue in the balls, but it’s The Word of Wenger which actually matters. He was predictably barracked on transfer strategy and raised some points which regular readers will recognise as familiar from the ideas we’re always rabbiting on about on this blog:

“I believe that what we want to do is not basically linked with money – I read some ridiculous amounts of money that are completely crazy.

Quite right too. I’ve always said it. All this “we need to spend big” chat is just witless tabloid garbage, which we can do without at Arsenal FC, thanks very much. Back to Arsene:

“When I accepted to stay I knew what would be available and what kind of restrictions would be existing. I deal with that and have no regret and no imagination about how much money is available. What is most important is the Club has built a new stadium and we live in a very strong and healthy situation financially.”

Sounds like we don’t have much of a transfer pot and possibly didn’t have in the summer either. If this is the case then PHW has been telling big porkies. It would also put blogs like Le Grumble to shame, always whinging about Wenger’s apparent refusal to spend. If it just wasn’t available then that’s a whole new barrel of badgers, and Wenger’s loyalty is all the more admirable.

“How many clubs have managed to build a new stadium, have a good financial situation and continue to play at the top? This team is together getting stronger and stronger but what we need to focus on is continually developing and not live in dreamland where we are linked with players of £30-£40million because that’s not realistic.”

It’s nice in that Dreamland, isn’t it? I’ve been there once or twice myself and it was lovely. A youthful Johann Cruyff signed for £497 million, pulled on an Arsenal shirt and nutmegged me before thrashing the ball past Van Der Sar. It was great.

“Chelsea haven’t built a stadium and they lose £100million per year. How do you imagine you can deal with that at Arsenal Football Club without going bankrupt? We have to be responsible.”

And here comes the bombshell. The Big One. The Big Moan that has grown and grown this season got popped, as quickly as it took Arsene to say:

“It is not that we don’t want to spend. I believe that we have gone for a policy and we need to have a logic and a line of conduct inside the Club that has to be respected. We have gone for a policy that is to develop our young players and we have to show some character and strength and not listen to everybody who comes out every day with a new name.”

This suggests Arsene did consider using the Online Community (as that linked article suggests) in dictating his transfer policy, but on balance has decided against it. Probably a wise decision.

 ”If you look at the best players we have had over the years – in the last 10 or 12 years – we have always played at the top. The best players who have made a massive impact here are not always the ones who have cost £30-£40million. I can cite you players in the last 10 or 15 years who have cost £30million and have been a flop. It is not necessarily linked that you spend £30million and get a massive player.”

We’ve said it before, and we’ll keep on saying it: it’s quality we need, not headlines.

Wenger also talked about Arshavin, rather coyly, as seems to be his approach to this particular transfer saga, unlike Arshavin’s tired old whore of an agent who has been flagrantly exposing the transfer-market equivalent of his diseased genitalia all over the red-tops all week. We’ll be calling Andrei a Gooner in a couple of weeks for about £8 million, I reckon.

Finally, Arsene admired Mikel Arteta but said there had been “no enquiry at all about him”. Unlike his flat denial of interest in Shay Given,this doesn’t rule anything out, and it would be nice if we would enquire about Arteta wouldn’t it? It would be even nicer if we offered them a grubby fiver and some of Eboue’s old y-fronts and they accepted with open arms. It is the credit crunch and all that, isn’t it?

Happy the day after the no blog day. Sorry about that, all. Myself and grabs both found ourselves inconvenienced around the UK yesterday. We hope you didn’t find it too traumatic an experience.

Also Happy New Year to you all, on the off chance that there is anybody reading this and not swimming in afterbeer, I salute you, and apologise for the random and gossipy nature of all things Arsenal.

However, since this blog was established to bring you the finest in eloquent Arsenal twaddle on a daily basis, it would be rude not to say something.

The feeling for Arsenal fans today, as all chaotic hell begins to unleash, is something like being on a small Caribbean island with no boat as a hurricane slowly approaches. For the time being it’s quite calm and pleasant, and there’s a miniature umbrella in your drink, but the winds and rain are starting.

Only in this case the winds and the rain are transfer stories and wild speculation about the future of Arsenal players.

The big news is that Kolo Toure has apparently had a transfer request turned down by the board. A very strange story given what we know of Kolo, but perhaps not surprising. He must feel a bit like he’s lost his mojo at Arsenal, and centre backs are such funny players – rock solid one minute and then not the next.

You can see why we wouldn’t want him to leave, but at the same time how many players that you know want out can you afford to have on your side at any moment? Mind you we super-really can’t afford to have Toure and Gallas go at the same time, so perhaps the refusal is holding out to see if Gallas goes. If he doesn’t then maybe the board will feel better about letting Kolo follow his heart.

Other than that it’s the usual codswallop about people coming and going, none of which I’m prepared to take too seriously. The newspapers have begun doing their thing where they put little boxes for every club talking about who needs to be bought and sold.

None of them say anything interesting, although I wonder if the fact that every newspaper is now linking us with Arteta is anything to do with Arseblogger’s championing of him the other day.  Journalists are not a hard-working bunch, as a rule, and around Christmas time they are particularly lazy (does it frustrate anyone else how crap newspapers are around this time?), so it wouldn’t surprise me at all.

I for one am still hoping we buy a wide player as well as a central player (and possibly now a defender too). But not Arshavin. Too expensive, and too bad.

The other funny thing is how they all claim Manchester City have unlimited money to spend, which just isn’t true. No matter how much oil they might have, these guys are not going to simply chuck unlimited cash at the team, particularly not at Mark Hughes. They’ll buy some players, certainly, but I’m not sure it’ll be as wild as everyone seems to think. The price of oil has fallen dramatically of late, too, and everyone’s feeling a bit more careful about that sort of thing.

The other story is that Wenger will go to Madrid. Not a chance in France, if you ask me, which is somewhat ironic because one of the few other jobs Arsene might take is the France national team. He’d hate the lack of control at Real – he can do whatever he wants at Arsenal, even if sometimes it seems like it’s not what the fans want. But it’s a good scare story.

Have a good day off.