Up For Grabs Now

So the news this evening is that Chelsea have been hit with an almost incredibly funny ban on transfers until 2011, for tapping up Gael Kakuta. The parallels with the Eduardo diving story are interesting. In both cases, the guilty party has been handed an unprecedented and apparently disproportionate punishment for an offence widespread throughout the game. Eduardo was banned for 2 European matches for taking a dive against Celtic a couple of weeks ago. Many fans objected to this, as proven by the lively discussion on Grabs’ blog, on the grounds that he was being made an example of.

The sting of this for Gooners, fairly mild at the worst of times (most agreed it looked like a dive, and few would complain that we’ll really miss him that much in a Champions League group that makes the Blue Square Premier look like La Liga), has now been almost totally eased by the decision passed on Chelsea, who as it stands may not sign anyone for two transfer windows, being the new year slot this season and next summer. For a club of their player turnover and incompetence with raising theier own young talent this is seriously disruptive, and more to the point hits them nowhere near their wallet. Abramovich could happily chin almost any fine thrown at him, but this punishment affects (as it ought, perhaps) their ability to function as a club.

Chelsea fans will think the ban outrageously harsh. They will say the same things we did a few days ago – that everyone taps up players, and if they’re going to be punished why not all the others. They will say they have been made an example of. They have been, and quite right too. These rules exist to prevent lecherous wealthy clubs from luring promising youngsters to break their contracts. Much as I’m on the side of Arsenal, a rich club, I also mostly like to think of myself as not being a total dickhead, and so in principle I totally support the little clubs. Football is biased enough towards the wealthy without this sort of thing too. Given that it tends to concern the livelihoods of young, vulnerable players, not to mention often the financial security of the smaller clubs, tapping up should be fought if at all possible.

The big clubs will always find ways to exert their extra strength. This does not mean FIFA ought not try as hard as it can to regulate against it. Similarly, players will always find ways to deceive the referee – this too does not mean the authorities ought not do whatever they can to fight it. I for one have long advocated using a fourth official, as in rugby, for contentious decisions. It rarely takes more than thirty seconds or a minute. Similarly, no player bar the captain should be allowed to address the referee, be it applauding a decision or contesting a penalty. If a few players got booked for this sort of behaviour its incidence would plummet. Players, like clubs, do whatever they can get away with. On the whole Gooners I know are on the side of fair play and non-twattishness, leaving that to the likes of United and Bolton.  We cannot wish it with one hand and wish it away with the other. We cannot bemoan UEFA’s inaction and then bemoan its actions too, however much of a knobber Platini might be.

After Eduardo, harsh as it seemed at the time, players will think twice about taking a tumble. After Chelsea, clubs will think twice about tapping a player up. No fan can disagree with these. It’s unfortunate that the first one happened to an Arsenal player, but in the context of Chelsea’s punishment it seems that, if it is the season of example-making, we have escaped rather lightly.

Now, all together now – let’s all laugh at Chelsea. 

Amid the understandable brouhaha over Adebayor’s delicious overhead kick, photographed in all it’s glory here, it has yet to be pointed out that this may well be the very first time during the Wenger reign that an Arsenal player has scored an overhead kick. Truly a momentous effort then.

Some will surely point to Eduardo’s chest-and-volley-on-the-swivel against City last season, but in my view that’s exactly what it was – an ingenious over the shoulder effort which can’t quite be classified as a thoroughbred overhead kick in the Ronaldinho/Crouch mould.

If you can think of others do put them in the comments, it may be that I’ve forgotten some gem or other.

It’s been one of my odder gripes over the past few seasons that we haven’t had players who were that keen to score overhead kicks. Sure, Thierry had a go once or twice, and there was never any doubt that we had players who were technically proficient enough to pull it off. For me, it’s an attitude thing. Wenger’s boys are all about crisp finishes into the bottom corner having bamboozled the entire defence in the build up. 

At their best, it’s more about running it in than walking it in, but this doesn’t involve a lot of crossing and when the ball does go in the air, our players immediately try to bring it down again to pass to a team-mate. The glorious thing about the overhead kick is that it is a desperate measure, a moment when tactics and team-mates go out the window, when all the player is thinking about is getting a shot in, however difficult that might be. And while having such intelligent players is fantastic, you do miss that impulsive, score-at-all-costs instinct that Ade showed on Tuesday.

While we’re on the topic, here’s the greatest overhead-kick I’ve ever seen. 88 minutes gone in their last game of the season, 2-2 against Valencia and needing the win to qualify for the Champions’ League, Rivaldo (having already scored both his team’s goals) produced this.

I want to see some of that from Eboue in the Champions’ League final, and then I want to see Peter Hill-Wood imitating the bloke at 0.10 in that clip. Top exultation from that man.

Moving on, it’s looking like Manuel our Spanish waiter goalkeeper will be sidelined with Le Gal for a wee while, which means Lukasz Fabianski has the chance to impress. Its a big chance for him, too. He’s been patiently chalking up cup appearances, and though he’s 24 he seems to have a good attitude and a commitment to biding his time and making it at Arsenal. He looked sharp on Tuesday and if he needs inspiration he need only remember Alex Manninger, who famously came into our 1998 side and performed heroically. Not that doing similar would necessarily mean we’d have to ship him off to Fiorentina, either.

With Djourou looking good, I hope we won’t miss Le Gal too much (though it would be very nice indeed if his injury turned out to be less serious than it looked), and with Silvestre on his way back we should have everything nothing to worry about.

Finally, if I was a betting man, which I might be, I’d haul my considerable crease onto Betfair and buy up some odds on a Liverpool comeback at Stamford Bridge. They need three goals, but they got four at Old Trafford and will, crucially, be attacking a Terry-less Chelsea, a team which often loses at home to very bad teams indeed. Plus if you do it on Betfair you can wait til Liverpool go a goal up and the odds swing enormously back towards them, sell some of your stake, and hopefully win whatever happens. Easy. Just don’t blame UpForGrabsNow if it all goes tits up.

I wish I could say that Grabber and I have been unable to blog this week because we have both been so exceptionally busy and important.

But no, our silence has in fact been the sound of a deep slumber, into which we both fell while trying desperately to excite ourselves about Arsenal.com’s brand new Andrei Arshavin mobile phone cyborg man (which makes him look more like a member of Narnia than the solution to our creative woes).

Finally, FINALLY, after a week so boring you could have given it an unsightly paunch and a smattering of facile populist witticisms and comfortably passed it off as Jeremy Clarkson, finally Arsenal have a game. It’s against Cardiff, it’s the first step in our 3 game map to the FA Cup semi-finals (all home draws) and, most memorably, it could see the return to full competitive action of Eduardo da Silva.

In fact, you couldn’t really have asked for a better night for a comeback. At home, against lower league opposition and with the team in need of a lift. I really hope he starts, though I would urge a cautious level of expectation until he has had a proper run in the team again. Even the best players don’t get their mojo back just like that and Eduardo will be no different.

One man who will be puffing his pink cheeks and stamping his pink feet in frustration if Eduardo starts ahead of him is Nicklas Bendtner, whose PR campaign took another turn for the worst as he revealed he is entitled to play “every minute of every game, no matter what”. How Mr Bendtner has arrived at this conclusion is anyone’s guess, really. Feel free to post suggestions in the comments if you have any ideas. It’s especially confusing because even the most amateurish body language analysis of Bendtner during a game reveals that he is just as frustrated as the fans are with his current performances, particularly his apparent inability to contribute anything other than the loss of possession. At least the fact that he seems to realise that he isn’t playing well would suggest that there is a “well” to Bendtner, just that we aren’t seeing it right now.

I’d like to see run-outs for Young Jack and Carl tonight, though I’m finding it hard to get inside Wenger’s head on this one. He picked a very strong team for the game in Cardiff and its hard to know how big a factor home advantage will be in his rationale. Very interested to hear your thoughts as the game approaches.

A lot of fans are getting huffy and puffy about Red&White’s upping of their stake in the club to just over 25%, and in a sense I can understand why, particularly those with concerns about Usmanov’s character. Yet I’m disinclined to pass any judgement on them as I simply do not know enough about them, specifically what their intentions are with Arsenal. Everyone was initially highly suspicious of Kroenke, yet now he is firmly one of “us”. Let’s just hold fire and see what happens. You don’t want to end up like the Utd fans who screamed “Utd not for sale!” so loudly before crawling rather shamefacedly back to Old Trafford when they saw the Championship and European Cup on their way.

Far too much has already been written about the ridiculous way in which the transfer took place. But am I the only one who enjoyed the whole sordid saga? Even found it a little bit funny? Was tickled by the spectacle of the online community nursing their wrath and bursting into infantile hissy fits every time the deal looked under threat? 

I can’t seriously be the only Gooner who was mildly amused by the spectacle of Brian Swanson (SkySports top dog) hoarsely bleating completely invented horseshit about Arshavin’s every move on the hour every hour. Swanson woke at the crack of dawn, hauled himself down to Arshavin’s hotel, saw a car leave with a man in it, made the appropriate mental sums, and informed the world that Andrey had departed for Russia – the deal was dead. What reason had he for saying these things? None.

It was as if Swanson chose to rage against the sheer indignity of his journalistic assignment (which could and possibly should have earnt him a restraining order had he not been wearing such a sharp suit) by seeing just how much misinformation he could generate in a single day – answer: a hell of a lot. As SkySports doyen Andy Gray would say (if Swanson looked a bit more like Steven Gerrard): “Take a bow, son.” 

SkySports have a lot to answer for regarding the mental health of most Gooners in the past few days. They kept releasing stories about Andrey’s various boardings/non-boardings of a plane in Russia. Again, it now emerges that AA was holed up in Paris and that once again Murdoch’s men had simply made the whole plane story up.

As we all know, the most important thing is not who you sign, it’s all about how much we pay and how successful the shirt-holding-up ceremony is. Tottenham are the absolute past masters at this. They won the summer hands down and now they’ve won the January window, leaking the kind of cash which ought to make them title-challengers but is more likely to make them 16th at best. If there was a trophy for believing the hype they’d be undisputed world champions.

They won the Summer. They won the Window. Now watch them suffer.

I will never, ever tire of linking to this article by the fine Rob Smyth in the sunshine of August where he confidently tipped Tottenham as the dark horses for the title this season. Also very pleasing to see that much of that logic was based on his belief that their signing Arshavin was imminent.

At least the fine folk at Arsenal.com seem to have finally realised the crucial importance of shirt-holding-up photographs of grinning young men in abating the transferlust of the faithful. They delivered in some style with a photo gallery of Andrey holding the shirt which went on and on until I could bear no more.

I’m not going to lie, by the end I felt bloated, a little queasy and kind of violated by the excess of red-shirted Russian flesh which I had just gorged myself on. My only disappointment was that they didn’t shoot it in the stadium a la Eduardo: I remember wandering vaguely onto Arsenal.com, leaping out of my seat and screaming “Who is that man and what is he doing with the number 9 shirt?!?

The other alternative is to have them pose with Arsene. This works especially well if the signing is particularly cunning. For example, no-one gets tired of those pictures of Thierry with Arsene on the Highbury pitch and the look in Arsene’s eyes which says: “I just signed a good ‘un. A really really good ‘un”.

Don’t forget you can stuff your mailbox with our fluff by signing up here:

1. Fabregas. You’ve gotta love him. He’s one of the very few footballers who seems to understand what it’s like being a fan and how terrified we are when someone starts claiming that your best player wants to leave. I thought the Out of Contextness of the comments yesterday was so obvious and the jump from Cesc saying “Milan are a great club” to headlines like ”CESC WANTS OUT!” was so big that it was very obviously bollocks. Soon there will be a whole industry (hold on, there is, it’s called the Spanish media) dedicated to asking Cesc innocuous questions and then twisting his polite replies into dire threats of his imminent departure. It really isn’t going to go away as it’s a perennially big story which the papers can run over and over again without doing any actual work, which is exactly the kind of story journalists love.

Yet still, great man that he is, Captain Cesc takes the time to issue a short statement on Arsenal.com effectively saying “don’t worry, it’s all bollocks I’m staying here”. Thierry Henry used to say he wouldn’t respond to every story about his future because if he did he’d have to be doing it all the time and the stories would just come back next week. Well, Cesc does it all the time and it doesn’t exactly seem to be a full-time job, Thierry, and yes he is balancing brief statement-making with the captaincy. Cesc seems to realise that though the stories won’t go away, what matters when Arsenal fans see these stories is that they have some kind of confirmation that they are the same old guff.

Captain Cesc, we salute you. You are a warrior and a gentleman.

2. Eduardo is coming back! Arsene has said he’s been playing training matches, will be back as quickly as possible and should be getting games soon! I think we all know that we shouldn’t expect too much of the boy especially when he first gets back, but I can’t really stop myself thinking about how great it will be to see him back in the shirt and how incredible it would be if he got back to his pre-injury level of performance. It could also be vital for our season, though the icy realist in me (he’s called Olie and he’s been having a great time all season) keeps insisting that we’re unlikely to see him back at anything like his best until next season. Still, haste ye back, Dudu.

3. We’re going to annihilate Wigan. I can feel it. I know as I write this that I might end up eating a My Words roast on Sunday with a My Words sauce and My Words dumpling but I’ll go for this anyway: I think we may have turned some kind of corner. I know we’ve had more than a few false dawns and I don’t expect everything to suddenly be hunky-dory again, but I don’t think we’re going to see as much utter piffle as we’ve been subjected to in recent weeks.

My confidence for the Wigan game is based on two things. Firstly, Wigan are really bad and Titus Bramble plays for them. Secondly, the kids got duffed in the Carling Cup and two of our most abject first team displays have followed triumphant Gunnerlings victories. Not so this time. I expect a three-points-sandwich for Saturday’s supper.

4. Veet-hair-removal-cream-nemesis Ryan Giggs, a player for whom I have infinitely more respect than the detestable Roy Keane (see previous post, the guy resigned by text message – what a clown), has hailed Aaron Ramsey as the future of Welsh football. If this sounds a bit like saying that consonants are the future of the Welsh language it’s because it is, a bit. There’s not much competition from the vowels, admittedly, but I reckon Giggs has seen enough promising young players to have a pretty shrewd idea when you’re looking at a future great and this is what he seems to be saying with Ramsey.

5. Finally, today’s your last chance to enter our Sagnatastic Chant Composition Competition. Write us a top new Arsenal chant and pop it in the comments section and if yours emerges on top from the bloody struggle with all the other entries then we will richly reward you with a crown of laurels* and a photo of Bacary Sagna, signed by His Majesty The Right Back himself. You might as well give it a go.

* the crown of laurels aspect of the prize is purely metaphorical, an e-crown of laurels to be worn with pride.

Update: An additional reason why it’s great to be a Gooner today – Ronaldo almost signed for us but didn’t. Hmm. Don’t know how much support that’s going to get as a reason to feel great, but you will admit that the guy is a complete tool whose victory in the Ballon d’Or was a shame for football. Plus we had Reyes instead, didn’t we. Hmm. I can see this is going to be difficult, so let’s move on.

Can anyone make a whole team of players we nearly signed who then went on to greatness? This might be a bit painful, but off the top of my head there was Cech and Ronaldo (both of whom we were very close to), Terry might have been on the cards before Abramovich arrived, Robinho was fairly close before he went to Madrid and Torres was looked at very seriously when he was 17. Wenger almost signed Makelele before he went to Spain. God, this is depressing – anyone remember any others?