Morning all, hope the world briga you wonder on this saturday.

So I’m sure you, as well as I, are trying to fathom the thinking behind the decision to allow Andrey Arshavin to depart Arsenal on loan to Zenit St Petersburg on loan until the end of the season. As I have previously said, I have been no fan of Arshavin this season, but this decision by the club merely adds to the bafflement many of us Gooners have for the senior management today. I agree, Arshavin’s time was probably up, but surely that was on the basis that a replacement is found. Did I miss the memo that said that not only were the club not going to replace the world class players at the club last summer, but they were also going to farm out the experienced players at the club as well?

Don’t get me wrong, getting a player who has no heart for the club off the wage bill is fine, but to do it at a time when there is no opportunity to replace is unfathomable to me. Are the board/senior management playing some form of ‘fan Jenga’ where they keep pulling things like this from underneath us until we all fall down and stop watching? Arshavin was having little impact on the first team. I accept that. But by sending him out on loan it is physically one senior body that is not available for us to choose from. What happens if we lose The Ox and Gervhino in the next two weeks? You can hardly say its a long shot given our injury luck since, well, 2004. To me this is another example of mis-management and those that say “why would Arsenal do this without getting something in return” are forgetting the abysmal summer transfer period we have. This club has the propensity to cock up transfer-wise. I just hope this latest decision doesn’t show it again.

Transfer mentalism aside, the boss also had his standard pre-match presser to the salivating hacks, waiting and drooling over every word, waiting for him to say a single syllable out of place so they could twist it for their own purposes. What the boss had to say was of course fairly standard. But it included some interesting snippets.

Of course he didn’t show any kind of weakness in front of the journos, and said (in a slightly nasal tone) that the Milan game ‘happened’ and the players wanted to perform but for some reason didn’t. He also spoke of the virtue of sticking by the players and not to feel sorry for ourselves because that would be ‘criminal’. He also called on the players to show the mental attitude to play for the club and to ‘go for it’.

Le Boss also mentioned that Koscienly and Gibbs face late fitness tests, and I think the results of which will go a long way to determining the likelihood of a victory at the Emirates.

Again, like I said yesterday, more on the game itself tomorrow. In the mean time, there are a few games in the league that may yet have an impact on tomorrow’s result. Most notably the Chelski game. I don’t expect that Bolton will offer much of a resistance against the Chavs but we can always hope for a last minute mazey dribble from Ryo Myachi to pull something out of the bag for the Trotters and help his parent club on the tough trek to fourth. I doubt I’ll keep track of the games today as none interest me in the slightest, so let’s hope we can speak to an opportunity to gain breathing space between ourselves and the West London scummers, rather than the possibility of playing catch up.

Anyway, have a good day and lets look forward to tomorrow.