Amsterdam Tournament Winners

Arsenal were crowned Amsterdam Tournament champions yesterday after a 1-1 draw with a strong Seville side. And with came the end of the preseason preparations and the beginning of the new season for real. How bloody exciting is it? It’s FC Twente on Wednesday and I am expecting a convincing victory. There can be no room for mistakes because if we do slip up and miss out on Champions League football then that will really mess up the club financially speaking.

Transfer news first and there was rumours going around that Arsenal had agreed a fee of around £3million with Middlesbrough for Justin Hoyte. However, Wenger said yesterday that there were no official bids for Hoyte but there is a little bit of interest from one or two clubs.

Arsene Wenger has also said that he is too busy to look for a new midfielder at the moment. That is understandable seeing as we play FC Twente on Wednesday and then newly promoted West Brom on Saturday. However, I seriously hope Wenger brings in another central midfielder and another centre half wouldn’t be too bad either. And speaking of signing a new central midfielder, we’ve been linked with Swiss international Gokhan Inler. I don’t know much about him seeing as I didn’t watch much of the Switzerland games during Euro 2008.

Moving on, and now I’d like to talk about one of the most frustrating things I’ve ever heard come from Wenger’s mouth.

“We missed Nasri tonight who has a little knock. We missed Diaby and we missed Song who’s at the Olympics. I don’t know if our midfield tonight was ideal but it’s certainly not far from the midfield we’ll play on Wednesday night.

“I’m not concerned about that. But I would have been very concerned tonight if we had one or two injuries in midfield. We can’t afford that at the moment with Nasri and Diaby out. It’s very positive for us that we have no injuries tonight.”

So, first of all, he didn’t know whether or not his midfield was ideal last night and, secondly, regardless of how the players played together he’s going to stick with that same midfield throughout the season? That’s absolute bollocks.

Thirdly, why can’t we afford any injuries in the midfield? Because we don’t have enough bloody players that’s why, Arsene. If he was really concerned about some of his midfield players picking up injuries (and they will throughout the season) then he would bring a few more ‘bodies’ in! Is Wenger just going to turn his head the other way and hope to go a whole season without injuries? That’s what it looks like to me anyway. Wenger knows - well to be honest it seems like he doesn’t have a clue what to do at the moment.

More tomorrow.