The club held their AGM yesterday and I managed to keep up with most of the highlights as I followed the Twitter posts from Le Grove. I'm sure there will be plenty of analysis of it on their blog today and it's well worth checking out. There were quite a few points of interest for us fans and I'll talk about a few of them here myself.
Firstly Arsene Wenger spoke about the reasons for our injury record and gave his own perspective on it. He said that overall our injuries are not much more than other teams but that we seem to have more long term injuries. He also said that we have a very competent and able medical staff who analyse and check every training method. The reasons for the amount of injuries, in his opinion, are bad luck. bad tackling or injuries picked up on international duty.
If they are indeed the only reasons for Arsenal's seemingly endless catalogue of injuries, then there is very little we can do but put up with them and get on with it. There is nothing we can do about our luck and there is absolutely the Premier League is going to do about the bad tackling that goes on in almost every game. I know in the last week that Arsenal were guilty of a few bad tackles themselves but in the overall scheme of things Arsenal are far more sinned against than they sin themselves.
That only leaves the injuries that are picked up on international duty and again I just can't see what can be done about them, short of refusing to let players play for their countries. It's a tactic that other teams have used successfully in the past but I can't see our manager stooping to the level of pretending that some of his players are injured to prevent them playing for their countries, in international friendlies in particular.
With those injuries in mind the boss spoke of the injury to Tomas Vermaelen and he said that it will be two or three weeks before we see him playing again. That was a story first run by Le Grove again as they mentioned on Tuesday that they had heard that he might not be back for the rest of this year. An achilles injury can be very troublesome as pointed out by Arseblog when Vermaelen first got injured and it would seem that he was absolutely spot on. The original diagnosis was that we would lose him for up to a week but at this stage he hasn't played a game for Arsenal since August 28th and it looks like we'll be lucky to see him play again before the end of November.
The boss also spoke about Ces Fabregas and he said that he can understand his attraction to the club where he grew up but he's confident that Arsenal will keep him for a few more years. He said that Cesc is a player who deeply loves the club and he wants to win something with the club. He said that Cesc is part of our potential to win but that he doesn't know how long for and I don't think that we can ask for too much more than that.
When you contrast the situation with Cesc to that of Wayne Rooney at "Manure" then you realise just how much Cesc does love Arsenal. Rooney has won it all with his club but he now wants to jump ship because they didn't win a trophy last season and he said he couldn't get the guarantees he wanted about future signings. No manager can assure his players of winning trophies but surely loyalty is a thing that works both ways and "Manure" have shown Rooney a lot more loyalty than he is prepared to show them.
I find it all very funny as I spent the summer listening to "Manure" fans telling me that Cesc was going to leave Arsenal as we couldn't match Barcelona financially or on footballing terms either. I argued that Cesc would only leave when the boss was prepared to let him leave, unless he handed in a transfer request and so it proved to be. There was one "Manure" fan in particular who ridiculed my opinion and I told him that only time would tell who was right. When the transfer window closed and Cesc was still an arsenal player, he would not admit he was wrong but instead he said that Cesc would leave next summer instead.
I hope he's happy now that "Manure's" star player is about to desert a sinking ship and the big question is whether they will reinvest the fee they get for him. With just over 18 months remaining on his contract that fee won't be as high as it might have been and the last time they sold their best player the manager ended up not seeing a penny of the €90 million they received for Ronaldo. If that's the case it will only hasten their demise as they will have lost their star player for the second time in two years.
The boss also spoke of having money available for transfers if he so wishes in January but he also said that he has belief in his squad and he thinks they have the potential to win trophies. He said that he had the money available last summer too but that he was frustrated in his attempts to sign the players that he had set his sights on. If we can stay in the title race up until the new year, the right additions in January might just be what we need to push on and get the monkey, of not winning a trophy in six years, off our backs.
I forget to mention a couple of days ago that Vito Mannone had gone on loan to Hull City and he has now been followed to the Championship by Jay Emmanuel Thomas who has gone out on loan to QPR as far as I know. He's a player with a huge amount of potential and he has being banging in the goals for the reserves this season, as he has eight goals from five appearances. I hope things go well for him at QPR and he returns to Arsenal ready to challenge for a first team place.
Finally for today it appears that the only player that will be available again after injury for Sunday's trip to Man City will be Bakari Sagna and it means that there's a possibility that Emmanuel Eboue will be on the bench again. I think Eboue has done pretty well since he has being filling in for Sagna and he may will keep his place on Sunday. However, Sagna's defensive ability might just swing things in his favour. There is also a very slight possibility of Laurent Koscielny making the squad too but I think we are more likely to see him against Newcastle on Wednesday night.
For those of you who usually read my blog on Oleole, it's still there but I'm considering moving it to Blogger and I'll decide when I see what reaction I can fet on blogger.
See You Tomorrow.
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