Up For Grabs Now

 Up For Grabs Now has exciting news: we’ve teamed up with our favourite purveyors of high-quality and innovative football t-shirts, Philosophy Football to provide an extra-special competition for you lucky readers.

Philosophy Football have franglaised ’Arsenal’ in tribute to Monsieur Wenger who has brought so much joie de vivre to the red half of North London. The design is inspired by the superb book Arsènal by Alex Fynn and Kevin Whichter, which is strongly recommended to anyone who prefers their Arsenal media to be high-quality and printed rather than low-quality and online.

The shirt is available from www.philosophyfootball.com we have 5 to be won in our February competition. To enter simply answer the following question:

What club was Arsène Wenger managing when he was appointed Arsenal Manager?

Send your answer to admin@philosophyfootball.com with full name, address and T-shirt size, with the subject heading ‘Up For Grabs Now competition’. Entries close 28 February. The site also has a host of good t-shirts, both Arsenal and general, perfect for the discerning football fan (i.e. all of you lot who read our superior guff).

In other news, we’re becoming increasingly erratic. Whilst before Up For Grabs Now was a haven of daily rubbish, we now concentrate the rubbish into gobbets every other day. As we get back into the football proper this will change. But for a while I hope you’ve enjoyed this little rest as much as Arsene seems to have.

This is all the more true since at the moment there is basically nothing going on to talk about, particularly since I refuse to discuss Andrei Arshavin until something happens for sure or not. I’ve already said I’m not sure what he’ll bring to the table, and from that point of view I’m happy the club seems unprepared to pay over and above the odds for him.

I’m more surprised that we haven’t brought in someone to shore up the middle, but then again the existing players aren’t as far off as people seem to think, and there hasn’t been much in the transfer window (aside from Man City and their comedy purchases).

Speaking of which, given that they’ve bought him I’m amazed that nobody, to my knowledge, ever mentioned Nigel de Jong as a prospective Arsenal target. About the right price and pedigree. Anyone know anything about this? Would he have been a good Arsenal player?

To continue our ‘laugh at Tottenham’ trend I found this little nugget of brilliance from ‘Onest ‘Arry on MSN:

Redknapp added: “He’s the only goalkeeper I’ve got and this is a football club that has been put together by I don’t know who and I don’t know how.It’s a mish-mash of players with people playing where they want to play. It’s scary.

Our love of Tottenham Hotspur condenses in the final sentence: ‘It’s scary’. Quite right ‘Arry, and we’re all delighted you’re on board to escort this mish-mash all the way into the Championship. Harharhar.

Now for Kung-Fu Panda. Come on the Arsenal for Cardiff tomorrow – we’ll have a full preview later, but I’m hoping there are some opportunities for the youngsters, and fingers crossed a returning certain E. da Silva…

We’ve languished five whole days in the transfer window. Five. Seemed like longer than that, didn’t it? Arsene has ducked and dived and the many Arsenal fans who have been holding out for a hero to arrive on whom they can pin all their hopes are still waiting for that man. Some are becoming desperate, pleading for Arsene to spend many millions on players like Stewart Downing. Any signing, they cry, is better than no signing at all.

Arsene says he wants “super-class” talent or nothing. That was the approach in the summer and that got us Nasri and a cavernous hole in central midfield. By the way, could people please stop saying that we “didn’t sign anybody” last summer? Nasri was quite clearly a signing, as was Ramsey. What you mean is that we didn’t sign the right players or that we didn’t sign enough players or that we didn’t sign players for the right positions. But we definitely signed players, so don’t pretend otherwise.

Yesterday saw us tie down Young Jack Wilshere to a reported 8 year contract. Wish they’d give me one of those. He’s the sort of talent that is very very hard to find, and it’s interesting that almost exactly ten years on from Arsene saying it would take ten years for Arsenal to start producing young players of adequate technical ability, along comes Young Jack. Shows you he has a fair idea what he’s talking about. Hopefully there’s more coming too – I hear Ashley Young’s kid brother Kyle is pretty useful.

Speaking at Jack’s signing, Arsene said (not for the first time) that he thinks Jack has “tremendous penetrative power“. Crumbs, and only just turned 17! Along with the importance of defending set-pieces assertively, Arsene has never really grasped the British obsession with innuendo, has he? Perhaps someone should have sent him Carry On for his Christmas in order to school him against pulling out such cracking gags in public.

One team who has been very active in the transfer window is Sp*rs, who look like wrapping up Defoe for £15 million. That’s a real bargain when you consider that Bent was £16.5 million, but when you remember that Bent is amongst the worst footballers on the planet and that Defoe is very, very average, and that Sp*rs only sold him the other day for much less than that, the whole thing actually appears to be a scandalously poor piece of business. Why do they keep trying to re-buy players they only just sold? Or sell players cheaply that they only just bought expensively? It’s like they’re short-selling in reverse, seeing how much of a loss they can make. Kaboul is another classic example. Hell, if we really want Luka Modric why not make a cheeky £2 million bid for him right now? At Tottenham it’s instant impact or you’re out the door and they don’t care how stupid that makes them look as judges of footballing ability or how perenially shite it has made their football team. Those Gooners getting antsy about Wenger’s apparently inexhaustible patience with players like Bendtner should thank their stars he at least has some pride and some stubbornness about him and that we’re not as hilarious or as crap as Tottenham with their insistence on massive player turnover year after year.

Redknobb has done a fine job at his recent clubs – Southampton, Portsmouth, West Ham – but it’s interesting, isn’t it, that they are now languishing financially and having to sell (or having already sold) the very players who brought them their success under Harry. Hopefully the Levy-factor will limit his success at Sp*rs and when he is sacked 7 games into next season he will leave his traditional legacy of financial meltdown and relegation struggling, something I think we’d all like to see more of at Sp*rs, if only to provide an amusing side-show to fretting about our own problems.

A cursory round-up of today’s transfer guff, with the tabloid hacks already wearying of their task.

Man City to buy Yaya Toure for £24 million! Folly, sheer folly.

Arshavin to buy out his own contract! Ok, go on then son.

Kranjcar to Arse! Fine. Probably won’t happen but wouldn’t mind if it did. A vanilla-flavoured gobbet of gossip if ever I licked one.

Bendtner + £5m = Matthew Upson. If this is anything to go by, The Sun’s journalists obviously weren’t any use at algebra when they were at school, which is possibly why they ended up writing Arsenal fetish erotic fantasies with no basis in reality and publishing them in that foetid abcess of a newspaper. The might as well have written 1 + 5 = 16, which as we all know, simply isn’t true.

Roooaaaaarrrrr.

Is emphatically not how I feel. But then again, how I feel is nothing compared to how I look. How I look is like a man covered in glow paint, a small amount of beard and a larger amount of self-loathing.

Ah yes, the Arsenal.

Surprisingly little Arsenal news this morning, all things considered. Mostly there’s fall out, or whatever fall out’s happier cousin is, perhaps ‘step up’? Or ‘climb in’. Yes, climb in. So, mostly today there’s climb in from the Wigan game, with particular praise being lavished on the transpubescent shoulders of Young Jack Wilshere, alongside the less novel plaudits for the Ramzoid and Carl. Nothing to get a newspaperman’s attention like a young Englishman who’s good at football, is there? And yet still, people will doubt winge that Arsene has never made an English footballer, or some other rubbish.

Apparently Young Jack Wilshere is like Paul Gascoigne. If he’s like Paul Gascoigne then I would like to use this forum to advertise myself for the position of his Fivebellies. Aside from helping him to keep it real, I’m also handy with a fire extinguisher, good in a dentist’s chair and not mental.

Speaking seriously I hope Young Jack Wilshere has an alright time of it. I know people will look to Theo and talk about Wenger’s track record with bringing through youth players, but I feel Wilshere is a special case in that he is so young, and comes chasing both the expectations created by Theo and also an Emirates crowd aching for a London boy – you can hear the extra roar when his name is announced over the tannoy. They’re bitter about Cashley Hole. Bitter and angry, and a wholesome homeboy is just what they need. It’s occurred to me that all this talk of the collective need for a boy is questionable, so I’ll stop, but you get the idea. I just hope he’s got a cool young head on his young shoulders – I’ve always felt that Theo was uniquely together and collected – it’s easy to assume all youngsters will be equally able to cope.

Anyway aside from all that bollies it’s probably worth mentioning the scum, and specifically their worrying discovery of how to play football. Harry Redknapp, to my mind, has so far escaped becoming a knob, but if his team continue to score goals then his name may have to become Harry Redknobb, and nobody wants that…

But with Liverpool and Chelsea both out the competition is seriously open. If we can get rid of the mankers then there’s a competition the Colts can cast a realistic eye towards, and what could be better? Other than the other competitions, of course, but a winning Colts team will put some pressure on the old boys. If I were Bendtner I’d be seriously worried about Carl, who appears to be his opposite, being short, dark and able to play football. Perhaps if they ever play together one will have to destroy the other, like a Dostoyevskian doubling. I wasn’t so worried about damaging his subjunctivity, and if I were the manager, I’d be seriously tempted to start Carl against Villa. Let me know if that’s wrong.

I’m not mentioning Dooda Monster’s antics last night, because they’re beneath contempt. He’s as close as you can get to a giant bannister covered in vagina.

And anything else. Until later.