News from the round ball game.
Its in The Sun and that’s about as official as it gets in the UK, the Queen is an Arsenal fan and has been for over 50 years, just like the former Queen Mother who was also a mad Gooner and a big admirer of legendary player Denis Compton who played for Arsenal in the 30s, 40s and 50s and was also one of the greatest English cricketers.
Good to know she appreciates quality football and she must have got a kick out of hosting a reception for the Arsenal team at Buckingham …
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Its the big North London derby at White Hart Lane tomorrow lunchtime between Tottenham and Arsenal. Absolutely no love loss with these two clubs and sets of fans, hopefullly there’s only minor skirmishes. If trouble did kickoff I doubt Roger The Nouveau Football Fan (below) would be much help. Here’s hoping for an Arsenal win, I’m going 3-2 now that we’ve started scoring again.
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News coming in this evening that Arsenal vice-chairman David Dein has left the club with immediate effect, which I think is a bit of a disaster for the club and could have a longer term impact.
As well as being vice-chairman, he’s one of the major shareholders in Arsenal, the man in charge of the day to day running of the club, was also vice-chairman of the Football Association until 2006 and is the current chairman of the G14, the group of Europe’s most powerful clubs. David Dein had enormous influence and contacts in all the big decision making processes across European football and that put Arsenal in a strong position.
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Chelsea are at home tomorrow to Tottenham in a big London derby that is important to both teams. The club seems to have gone all politicially correct and lost their sense of humour though, because they’ve been warning their fans on the Chelsea website against making ‘anti-semitic’ chants against Tottenham fans.
For anyone not familiar with the London football scene, Tottenham are a club in North London with a long history of attracting part of their fan base from the Jewish community,
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London has four of the world’s top 25 most valuable football clubs according to a new report form Forbes magazine. Manchester United and Real Madrid are numbers 1 and 2 but even as a fan I was surprised that Arsenal rated as the third most valuable team in the world with a value of $915million.
If they are worth that they missed a trick when building the Emirates stadium, because its been a 60,000 sellout for every match this season and they could easily have filled an 80,000 seat stadium and made almost a million pounds extra a game.
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The BBC had a sporting first yesterday when they used a female commentator for the Premiership football match between Fulham and Blackburn. Jacqui Oatley was the lady who got the call and the press today have been saying what a good job she did and anybody who disagrees is a knuckle dragging sexist.
The highlights of the game she did were on the BBC’s Match of the Day evening show and while anyone is better to listen to than MOTD’s John Motson, to me something seemed a little wrong. The columnists in the papers say she’s highly qualified and knows her stuff, she can tell you the birthday of every player in the World Cup since 1930,
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Julio Baptista, Arsenal’s Brazilian player on loan for the season from Real Madrid, seems to be reading from the Jose Antonio Reyes script of blaming the lifestyle in England and the weather for his own lousy form.
Baptista’s nickname is The Beast and he’s a big old boy but he doesn’t have the ability to match his size. Real Madrid realised that and let him come to Arsenal after he couldn’t win a starting spot in a poor Real team. With Arsenal he’s only started eight Premiership games and it would have been less if Henry and Van Persie weren’t injured.
He’s been telling The Times how bad teams in the north of England are and how ‘the weather over here is killing me.
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The Football Association has announced that Brazil will be England’s first opponents at the new Wembley Stadium in a game on Friday 1 June. Its almost seven years since England played a game there when they lost to Germany 1-0 and the old Wembley wasn’t a great advantage for them when they played Brazil either, England only won 2 of 9 matches against them since Brazil first played in England in 1956.
The game would have been a sellout who ever England played but tickets will now be even more valuable because of the large number of Brazilians living in London. Brazil have played twice at the Emirates Stadium in the last seven months and both games sold out quickly.
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After the break for two of the most dismal England games in memory, the Premiership and the rest of football get back to normal. There are five Premiership games in London this weekend, on Saturday Charlton play Wigan, Fulham play Portsmouth, bottom of the Premiership Watford have a London derby with champions Chelsea, struggling West Ham are at home to Middlesbrough and on Sunday Tottenham are at home to Reading.
On Saturday there are also two games in the Championship in London, Crystal Palace v Sheffield Wednesday and Queens Park Rangers, who are desparate for points, are at home to West Brom,
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As an Arsenal fan what’s the best you can hope for when your deadly North London rival Tottenham play nouveau riche West London wannabes Chelsea in the FA Cup quarterfinal. You’d like them both to get thrashed but as that’s not possible a Tottenham defeat at home is probably the prefered choice.
We got that last night but with the added bonus of a Tottenham fan running on the pitch at fulltime and taking a big swing at Chelsea fatboy Frank Lampard. A shame he didn’t make a clean connection,
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