Up For Grabs Now

In the spirit of originality which I was harping on about yesterday, I’d like to say how much I am looking forward to next year’s UEFA Cup Campaign.

Five points ahead of Everton at this stage, we look well on course to secure a coveted 5th place finish, a not inconsiderable achievement when you consider how comprehensively outspent we have been this season by the likes of  Manchester City and Tottenham, (the tabloid logic being that money spent translates into goals scored and points gained).

And not playing in the Champions’ League  will have its advantages. We always play in the Champions’ League and it will be nice to have a bit of a mid-week change of scene. We can to go to exciting new places, such as Latvia and Northern Ireland, rather than sticking to the usual Spain-France-Italy-Holland-Germany rigmarole, which is frankly becoming a bit dull.

It will also be ludicrously easy to win. The main problem with the Champions’ League is that it’s much too difficult to win due to the preponderance of top sides.

The UEFA Cup is like the Carling Cup but with even more disappointed looking chief-executives of major sponsors and half-hearted celebrations from the winners – except when Tottenham won it, when celebrations got comically cataclysmic, proving that

1. there is such a thing as overcelebration
2. that any pride temporarily restored to minor football clubs by the winning of minor competitions can be quickly lost by the spectacle of said minor football club’s fans celebrating as though they’d won the World Cup and Champions League double
3. that some people, (see “Keane, Robert”,) have absolutely no dignity. 

So yeah, the more you think about it, the more playing for 5th makes sense. Last year we could have faced Rangers in the final. Which I would certainly have enjoyed. We could also have enjoyed the expert analysis of Channel Five’s Stan Collymore [That's enough originality - Ed.]

Phew.

If our players want motivating, which on yesterday’s performance, they clearly do, Arsene could do worse than forcing them to spend their Thursdays watching the cringingly pointless sporting charade which is the UEFA Cup, a competition which seems to generate an unseemly variety of poor-quality introductory title sequences and which has attracted television presenters of the calibre of John Barnes. Normally the issue with ambitious ex-pros is whether they can make the jump from TV to the dugout, with TV perenially perceived as the easier job by far. Barnes regularly makes a nonsense of this, turning in televisual performances so ugly that they make Celtic’s 3-0 defeat to Inverness Caledonian Thistle under Barnes look like a great result. Arsenal FC must never be associated with such broadcasting ineptitude.

Villa are ailing. It’s time to start showing our class, and fast. It is also very important that while showing our class we remember to do certain things, such as the scoring of goals and the winning of games and the accruing of points.

If anyone has any suggestions about how to go about ’showing our class’ please stick them in the comments. The best will be sagwaroffed to Arsene Wenger using the very latest technology.