Up For Grabs Now

Dear Hotspur, T
This must be
The apogee
Of your attempts to avenge Sol Campbell.

It ranks with the triumphant parading
Of Rohan Ricketts.

Oh, Rohan Ricketts!

Why do you now trade your sorry ply at
Moldovan Intertoto Cup outsiders FC Dacia Chişinău?
Was it because you went to Tottenham?

If Gallas wants some Ricketts, he can have them:
Dennis, God, the real red 10,
Knows ‘Cappy’ (sometime ‘Crappy’)
Has had every other injury besides.

Besides which, he wasn’t nice to Kolo,

And now he’ll limp beside Trauma King and Surgery Woodgate.

He wasn’t a good defender
And when he used to score
With his famous penis
(Deft from corners sometimes)
It somehow felt just slightly not as good
As every other time that Arsenal score.

Not long to go now.

Tiny Totts are coming to the Emirates. Let’s hope we can dish out a long overdue pasting to make their Week of Hubris appear even sillier than it already does.

First there was the release of pictures of their new stadium, White Elephant Lane (aka Emirates Lite, Diet Ashburton, Theatre of Squirms). Paid for God only knows how by this puny minnow of the Premiership era, Tiny Totts deserve a healthy dollop of rack and ruin if they ever actually build it. Where does their money come from?

Then came Spurs’ bench-warmer and former Liverpool bench-warmer Robbie Keane claiming that Spurs had more strength in depth than Arsenal. I took this to mean that he is still bitter about never having made it as an elite player and being condemned to spend the best days of his career at a third rate club with no serious European aspirations. Certainly, there’s no way he can seriously be claiming that Spurs have better players than we do. Cos that’s just daft, plainly. Hasn’t he ever seen Arshavin play? Perhaps the wee Russian can show him a thing or two this afternoon.

And now Crazy Harry doesn’t fancy us. Which is fine. We don’t fancy you either you slack-jowled, watery-eyed, club-bankrupting, West Ham-relegating nobarse. He thinks we’re soft-centred and he might have a point. But let’s hope today Vermaelen headers the fuck out of anything that gets anywhere near our box.

In short, Spurs are feeling a lot better about themselves than they usually do, and it is incumbent upon Arsenal to return them to their natural state as the snivelling, bitter joke-club we know and hate.

Team News: Wenger has been saying nothing on this. Which means we might see Cesc and Arshavin rested and Eboue and Diaby included in an otherwise unchanged team from midweek. Today could be the day we finally see Eboue deployed as a lone striker. And what a day that could be.

Excited as I am at that prospect, I would slightly rather we actually started Almunia-Sagna-Gallas-Vermaelen-Clichy-Song-Fabregas-Nasri-Arshavin-Bendtner-VanPersie, though I doubt Nasri will make it after just a single game back so I reckon Diaby could play there instead, though after mid-week Ramsey must be getting very close indeed.

Spurs are without Defoe (sore tummy), Modric (penis wound) and Aaron Lennon (existential crisis). They are also without a soul, a real trophy for about 40 years and any sense of pride/shame.

Today of all days I want no funny business, no nonsense and most definitely no mucking about from the lads. Search and destroy. Pass, move, shoot. This means the scoring of goals and the steely retention of winning margins right to the last. It means not tapping the ankles of known divers in the last minute, and it definitely doesn’t involve stumbling over the ball on halfway and conceding possession needlessly.

I’ve a feeling today will turn out well.

Oh, what to make of it all? There was a time when I looked out for the Man Utd and Tottenham results and wanted them both to lose. It didn’t really matter who they were playing, except when they played each other when I generally hoped for a draw, injuries to key players and some long-term suspensions.

Yesterday Ashley Cole scored against Spurs. What was I meant to do?

It was the most emotionally confusing moment since a couple of hours earlier I found myself cheering Michael Owen’s winner for Man Utd. Then I saw the United fans celebrating and I stopped. Then I saw Mark Hughes’ face and I started all over again.

And what’s a Gooner to do when confronted with the spectacle of Craig Bellamy punching a United fan in the face? Whose side are we meant to be on?

Truly, Arsenal are a club surrounded by a wilderness of cunts.

Spurs and United are clubs with a long and despicable tradition of being cunts, whereas Ashley Cole may be the worst bloke alive, but he is only one bloke, not an entirely evil institution with a proven history of cuntishness – and City have only recently become complete cunts, though that doesn’t look like changing soon.

So yesterday was confusing. And there’ll be more like this to come with so many hateful clubs and individuals now in the mix, and that’s not even counting former footballer David Bentley.

My advice is to focus on the player/team that comes off worst, and to revel in their misery.

So don’t think about Cashley, think about Daniel Levy. Don’t think about United winning the Champs League, just remember John Terry making a tit of himself with the most important kick of his career.

In other news, Thomas Vermaelen’s goalscoring, fist-pumping, brave headering start in an Arsenal shirt has forced us to revise our previous comparisons – we now insist that Nemanja Vidic be referred to as ‘A Poor Man’s Thomas Vermaelen’ .

It has also strengthened the impression that new signings are always better than what we already have, not just because they’re new and shiny, but also because they’re better.

This impression only adds to the clamour for more spending, but we’d do well to remember that some signings are absolutely pants, and that Wenger’s recent purchasing of two players (for whom Man City would now almost certainly be prepared to pay £60-70m) for just £25m combined makes him a complete genius.

Signing players this good isn’t at all easy. And seeing as we’ve got very little cash, it’s just a good thing we’ve got the right man spending it.

Talking of Le Gaffer not being a mug, here’s a Gaffer mug. It is, as you might say, up for grabs now  (ahem) as part of our glamorous tryst with our friends at Philosophy Football.

To get your mits on Arsene’s mug simply answer the following question: how many domestic doubles have Arsenal won with Arsene in charge? Please email your answer with name and address to admin@philosophyfootball.com with ‘UpForGrabsNow Competition’ in the subject title. Entries close on the 30^th September.

Let's hope this isn't the only cup with Arsene written all over it this season

Levels of doomed oneupmanship reached new heights across North London today as Paul Barber, Executive Director of tottenham hotspur, (alleged “Football Club”,) very nearly bragged his own balls off about their planned new stadium.

“Fans want a better atmosphere than the Emirates,” Barber said.

“Our architects have drawn up plans to make the front row of seats at the new stadium 5 metres closer to the pitch than the Emirates.”

Fuck! They must have architects working with an exact scale replica of the Emirates and they just tinker around with it a bit to give them a piffling sense of superiority. Dye it white, for example. that’s a good start. We may have a crap team and be the worst run club in the world, but I am oh so much closer to Pascal Chimbonda than you’ll ever be. I can really smell the pungent stench of mercenary mediocrity. Wow. Now could you fill it with a really good team? Didn’t think so.

Chairman Daniel Levy added “Too often new stadiums are surrounded by empty, dead space and we did not want that in Tottenham.”

And if he was telling the whole truth he would have added “We keep our empty, dead space on the pitch, and in my thick bald head, and in our trophy cabinet. But by God, we won’t tolerate any around the pitch, that would be dreadful.”

T*ttenham have nothing.

Actually, nothing. Against one of the weakest Arsenal sides they will have come up against for many years, a side down to 10 men and lacking in confidence, they showed absolutely no ambition and deserved to be punished for it. They haven’t beaten us in the league since 1999 and you could see how terrified they were all through the game. Modric’s pathetic miss at the end told you everything you need to know about that football club.

Losers.

Then there was their fans, chanting “Same old Arsenal, always cheating” as Gael Clichy lay bleeding on the ground, having quite clearly sustained a nasty wound to his head. A few weeks ago, the police found out a pretty significant section of their away support for the yobs and racists that they are. Their chanting at Gael today wasn’t racist, it was just the nasty, bitter, jealous yells of a group of extremely unpleasant people, people who represent a club which is ugly at its core.

On the face of it, we should be pleased with a point, yet it always felt as though the game was there for the taking. And it should have been ours to lose, had Mike Dean not made the first of many cowardly decisions when he ludicrously disallowed a perfectly good goal by Eboue.

Eboue’s frustration was obvious, but his response was childish and inexcusable, displaying an attitude to be expected from a Sp*rs fan, not an Arsenal player. His booking for dissent was idiotic and I’m convinced that it was his petty behaviour after the Modric incident rather than the little kick out itself which made the referee to send him off. Why else did he take such a long time between booking Modric and sending Eboue off?

We’re not great fans of Eboue here on UpForGrabsNow, but I really do admire the loyalty of those fans who have stuck up for him this season. I can’t help feeling that he mocked that loyalty this afternoon.

The backlash is likely to be severe, and Eboue will have to play out of his skin when he returns from suspension if he’s to command any sort of respect with most Arsenal fans again. Wenger is a loyal person who clearly sees something in Eboue as a footballer, but you wonder how much longer his patience can last.

There will be those who wanted to see Arshavin today, but I think the boss was right to keep him on the bench. He still hasn’t trained with the rest of the squad and it will be far better to ease him in over the next few games. Eduardo will be itching to make his first team return, and while everyone (including us) laughed at Wenger’s saying his return would be like a new signing, I think it’s actually going to feel even better.

In terms of our season, it’s going to be a long hard fight for a top four place. Villa have been lucky, but they’ve bagged the points and sit seven clear of us. Chelsea are on a poor run and are within five, but are likely to prove resilient as the season wears on. If we can hit form, we can still catch both clubs. We just need to hit form now.

It also looks like we’ll be seeing a lot of Nicklas Bendtner over the next few weeks as Ade’s hamstring popped in the first half and he’ll miss the rest of February.

As always, delighted to hear your thoughts. Just stick ‘em in the comments and we’ll have a right old chinwag.

I just had a conversation with a wise man. He was walking out of a door when he looked at me strangely, and said

- Who are we playing today, again?

- Tiny Totts, I growled.

- Who?

- T*ttenham. There, I said it.

- T*ttenham? Well I don’t know why you look so worried. They’ve only beaten Arsenal once in the last 25 league games between the 2 clubs, and that was back in 1999. Plus they’re in relegation trouble and used up every last ounce of their luck against you in the Emirates fixture which scandalously finished 4-4. I mean, this is a club with a sense of humour. Self-deprecating, like - they like nothing more than a joke at their own expense. It’s actually rather touching. That’s surely why they re-signed Pascal Chimbonda. The kind of mood Daniel Levy’s in right now he’ll probably be lacing their bacon butties with laxatives as we speak, just so he can take the piss out of himself when Van Persie bangs in number five. You mark my words.

Then that wise man shook my hand, ruffled my hair and went down the pub, singing:

Oh to, oh to be….

I really hope that wise man’s right today, and I think he probably is. You can never tell with T*ttenham… except when they’re in a position to actually do some damage to Arsenal Football Club. In those situations they’re always terribly obliging. They lie down, and take a humiliating beating. Remember when they had the chance to leave us without Champions’ League football for our first year at the Emirates? It was such a great opportunity for them to inflict some serious pain on us Gooners, by totally ruining our Goodbye to Highbury.

What did they do? They shat themselves, (tragically this is one of the few times on the internet when this is actually true and not at all some sick exaggeration). They complained loudly and lost to West Ham. Truly, a club with class.

Of course, today’s match up has been billed as Arshavin VS Keane, almost as if people were still willing to believe the tabloid journalists who say football is not just about big name forwards, it’s really about whichever big-name forward your club happened to buy most recently.

An Opta study commissioned for the Daily Star on Sunday found that the number of times a player’s name was crudely punned upon in a back page headline was a far more important factor in a team’s success than ‘performance related’ factors such as the player’s ability to score goals, not concede goals or play well. The survey found that football is a sport played entirely in the minds of infantile fantasists who believe the hype.

Arshavin might well make the bench, though I doubt it from the tone of Wenger’s remarks in the week. The guy hasn’t played since November, and he started sulking way before that, so chucking him into a PremierLeague game (admittedly against poor opposition) would seem a bit sudden. But who knows? If he comes on and scores a zinger I’m not going to be musing about his lack of match sharpness, I’m going to have my throat jammed squarely against the ear-canal of the nearest Spurs supporter, and I’m going to be making noises that sound a bit like:

“How do you like the smell of the foot of the league you relegation battling nobodies?

“Eat our goal!”

“Perhaps it’s time you re-signed Paul Robinson?”

… and other such pleasantries.

If it was up to me, I’d start with our Spanish waiter goalkeeper, Gael, Sagna, Djourou, Gallas, Nasri, Denilson, Song, Vela, Ade and Robin Van Persie, whose name I italicise to indicate that he is absolutely phenomenally good at playing football. Players in bold have a high chance of appearing on the actual team-sheet as “Eboue, E”. It’s annoying that Diaby is banned/injured as he would have been a useful bloke to have around.

I’ve heard suggestions that we should stick Bendtner on the right, Van Persie on the left and play a sort of Liverpoolish 4-5-1. I can’t say I fancy that idea that much, to be honest, and if you were going to insist on it, then I’d far rather stick Robin on the right (where his goodness at football makes him a potent attacking force) and Carlos Vela on the left.

T*ttenham are likely to start with King and Bentley out injured, and manager Harry Redknapp also has concerns over Luka Modric, Aaron Lennon, Tom Huddlestone, Darren Bent and Jermaine Jenas. Redknapp mumbled:

I have concerns over Modric, Lennon, Huddlestone, Bent and Jenas. Modric is too small and can’t really be arsed, Lennon is really bad at playing football, Huddlestone is morbidly obese, Bent has caught the same thing Lennon has (badness, a lifetime) and Jenas looks and plays like a 7 year old girl.

COME ON YOU REDS

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Not a great weekend for Arsenal I know, but spare a (typically joyful) thought for Tottenham.

First of all they get all excited about their comeback only to see David Bentley balls up his job on the near post and lose them the game.

As if no points wasn’t enough, it now seems as though they may actually end up losing points as a result of illegaly fielding overpriced new signing Wilson Palacios, who ought to still have been serving a suspension. Let’s hope the FA throw the book at them.

Well, shucks, they’ve only got 24 points as it is, which doesn’t exactly leave too many spare for deduction. They could be in real bother if you ask me.

Don’t forget our fantastic Philosophy Football giveaway: you can win a fantastic and strictly unofficial Arsénal t-shirt. Grabs and I both have them and they’re brill – to enter simply answer the question:

Who was Arsene Wenger managing when he joined Arsenal?

Email your answer to admin@philosophyfootball.com with the heading Up For Grabs Now Competition – deadline for entries is 28 February. In the meantime feel free to visit their website: lots of good stuff on it… http://www.philosophyfootball.com/new_win.html

‘I can’t believe it. I have literally no idea what’s going on.’ 

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.

My apologies for the lateness. I was having a steak.

Spurs, rather sweetly, have released the first images of their proposed new stadium, which is to be called ‘White Elephant Lane’. I know this sounds like a joke, but it’s all been explained. Apparently the Elephant was Spurs’ original heraldic symbol, but was replaced at the beginning of the century because it gave a false impression of the team’s stature, and also was considered racist by people living under British colonial rule in India. Club chairman Daniel Levy said:

‘We hope that by calling the stadium ‘White Elephant Lane’ we can prove to the supporters that we have a sense of humour about our stadiums as well as our squad selection, and also tap into an important part of the club’s heritage.’ Harry Redknapp has yet to comment.

I didn’t read it in detail, but the gist of the bumf seemed to be that the ground would be a fitting museum to a once-famous football side, and also (and this is equally clear from the pictures) the architectural equivalent of a tribute band to our own stadium. If the Emirates is Abba, White Elephant Lane will be Bjorn Again. If we’re Oasis, they’re Noasis. If we’re Madness, they’re badness. And so on, and so forth. People will disagree, but I think the whole spectacle is quite endearing, somewhat reminiscent of a small boy trying on his father’s shoes and suit jacket, and then clomping around the house talking about how he’s ‘going to work’.

Oh well – it’s just a phase, they’ll grow out of it soon. You’ve got to hope that there’s some amused Arsenal fans on the board for planning applications who let it go ahead, if only so we get the plaintive cries of twenty thousand Spurs fans echoing around their vast empty stadium as the club gently haemorrhages cash to death. Surely no Spurs fan would ever support the venture…

In Arsenal news, Rio Ferdinand has written off our title hopes. Given that many of us fans (though not myself) have written off our title hopes, this is not too surprising, but then again what kind of a scoop were you seriously expecting from the retarded-Egyptian looking bastard? Whatever Rio Ferdinand wants for Christmas, I hope he doesn’t get.Vieira has also dipped his oar in (origins, anyone?) by suggesting that we have quality but not experience. I guess that makes us the footballing equivalent of the really good looking fourteen-year old who’s not done much pulling. All we need is to go out on the town a bit, perhaps find an old lady who can show us the ropes, and we’ll be good to go.

Here’s to hoping that Liverpool can provide the proverbial old lady of our title ambitions, and that we can duff them at the weekend. For some reason I’m more apprehensive about the Liverpool match than I was about United and Chelsea. I might be wrong. Anyway enough on that for the time being. I’ve got to go and pen a strongly-worded letter to whichever confederation of charlatans organised the vote-rigging of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award and gave it to that fat-legged pedal-pushing humour-bereft Scotsman Chris Hoy in favour of the love of my life Becky Adlington with her wonderful swimming shoulders.