An awful day for football!

Arsenal FC

8-2 and a red card against Man united - enough said, embarrassing result, heavily disappointed.

It gets better, there is hardly any time in the transfer window left and the only sniff of a signing is some 26 year old South Korean nobody for about 3mil, great! :(

where do we start?.......

Arsenal

Well, i'll get Arsenal out of the way first, still in turmoil, Fabregas has now officially gone, 1 point in our first 2 games, 2 red cards and Wenger facing disciplinary action in the champions league.........brilliant!

Apart from administration or alien abduction, i'm pretty sure it couldn't get worse, so it can only get better. With around 10 days left of the transfer window, we have one last chance to put things right and we do have the cash to do so! Hopefully we get money for Nasri (rather than him go for free at the end of the season), Bendtner goes, Eboue has already gone (yay!), we get through the 2nd leg against Udinese and we manage to salvage a point against United. Thats probably the best we are going to get over the next week then its just a case of bringing in players quick!

George Graham reckons 3 is the right amount and i'd agree, not to many to rock the boat but enough to make the difference and they all have to be world class. Per Mertesacker would be very ideal in the defence and a reasonable price tag of under 10mil! A creative holding midfielder next, Frimpong is doing a good job but we need a first team heavyweight in there, then an out and out striker who just scores goals, no messing about on the ball, just goals! There are loads of striker options but I fear Wenger will just buy another flair player of which we are completely saturated. Another point i'd like to make is why does he not play Arshavin in the middle? he hasn't done anything on the wing and I reckon he would suit a role just behind RVP a treat!

itunes

I've 'dabbled' a bit in itunes before, owning an macbook, there is no option for windows media player so i was stuck with it (ignoring the many alternative players out there!), but I didn't really use it....until now!

My PC is old and weak and pretty much just plays music for me now but WMP went a bit scatty and couldn't read any of my library or anything, it could only play what I dragged in on that session which is not ideal. So I have switched to itunes properly now and been working my way around it. I have to say, despite my initial reluctance's, it isn't bad.

I have a bit of a problem with duplicate tracks and it seems to have made both mp3 and aac copies of all my old wma tracks pretty much tripling all those files so I have spent the morning trying to delete all the aac's and wma's to leave just the mp3's.

The other problem is the fact that I have music spread across 2 drives and with all this duplication it has duplicated some things again (i have no idea why bar the fact they are on a different drive to my itunes folder).

These problems aside (which I would like quick solutions for!) the rest of it has been great. Perhaps the most impressive part I found was the automatic organisation of the itunes folder. Though I want to now bring in all of my music to that folder and I am unsure as to whether it will organise the tracks I drop in again :s

All being well, my relationship with itunes will be a good one. Relationships with Apple products usually are.

Giving Blood

Another 'milestone' this weekend is that I have registered to give blood and signed up for my first session on 25th. Something that I have always thought about doing but just never have but after there was a major problem during a family members' operation earlier this year which caused them to lose almost all of their blood I felt I need to get doing it and though I can't catch up the time I have missed, I can at least get something on the board.

Bye Bye Fabregas

It's official now, Cesc has moved on! He was a fantastic player and certainly one of my icons and I am disappointed that he has gone. However I do understand his reasons and for Arsenal, maybe the worst time to lose our best player will turn out to be the best time as I hope this will now fuel a full and much needed squad reform rather than bolt-ons and long term prospects which Arsenal are now famed for.

Either way, the best of luck to Cesc though I hope he doesn't come back to punish us in the futurewhen we next play Barcelona.

What's going on at Arsenal?!

So Wenger is cutting it fine, for a man who prides himself on being prepared for the future, everything (or nothing) is all too late this season!

Half our players are either on the brink of being sold or injured, including two of our best, Fabregas and Nasri and the other half are having to pick up the slack (the slack we normally have when most are fit and playing). With only one first team player signed and the season has already started, the situation continues to look bleak.

The excuse, 'we haven't found the right players yet', I can't see how that can be. The number one priority over the season had to have been to get the right players and weeks and weeks of searching can't just amount to nothing. This suggests that there are underlying reasons to all this, maybe there isn't the money, maybe Wenger doesn't want to change his personnel, either way its getting a bit suspicious.

With both Fabregas and Nasri both poised to go this weekend, it was always going to be difficult keeping them. I don't doubt that Wenger has done everything in his power to keep them and I admire his morals, one of which is don't keep a player who isn't happy. Now with the season fast approaching and Wenger still wrestling over the prices of two of our talismanic players, I believed that he had stalled these late deals so that they could play against Newcastle yesterday. He hadn't as they didn't play. This is more disappointing as these players weren't sold or injured and yes ok, mentally they would have been effective but I believe their ability and love for this club would have still provided them with enough firepower to put in a performance. Instead we didn't even have players like Eboue, Bendtner, Almunia or Denilson, none of which I am the greatest fan of but at least they would have given us good enough support to overpower Newcastle.

The result, a lacklustre performance in a 0-0 draw with Newcastle who are also in a huge player crisis. This should have been 3 easy points if we want to seriously contend for the league this year but we bareley had any real chances despite the huge possession domination which just indicates that we haven't moved on and improved at all since last season.

With around 58million coming in for Fabregas and Nasri, the fact that Eboue, Bendtner and Almunia were not included which should be more cash, Wenger won't be short of money. The club has already promised that all the money raised from Fabregas is going to be available for transfers which is good news but with Champions league qualifiers against Udinese and Premiership games against Chelsea and Man United fast approaching, there is no time and we cannot field the same strength team against these clubs as we will be destroyed. No Champions league would be a disaster in itself but defeats against the two best clubs in the league too would already ruin the season before it has barely started. Wenger excuse of not yet finding the right players again worries me as it suggests that now he is going to have to panic buy players he doesn't really want. :(

Hopefully the start of something new?!

Ok, so this could be the start of my regular blog. I've never really been into blogging, never saw the point and never felt like I had the time. Now however, I'm getting more into web development and need to use blogs in a variety of ways for the sites that I build. Therefore I need a test. So why not kill 2 birds with one stone?

Well today, Cat (girlfriend) is going for a bridesmaid dress fitting for her step sisters wedding later this year. I am at her hometown house in Chesterfield and generally chilling out. Not the most interesting day to start a blog but there we go!