One of the great joys of the close season – right up there with the fixture list coming out and the pre-season games up Austrian mountains – is the inevitable new shirt launch. It’s come early this year, it seems. I’m not quite sure how it suddenly became OK to launch a new away shirt each season, but that’s what seems to be happening and it looks as if next season we’ll be in pinstriped blue polo shirts. It’s not gone down well on Twitter this evening but I don’t mind it at all. OK, so it’s blue – there’s no getting round that – but we’ve been down the blue road before (remember the lightning stripe?) and it could be a lot worse in my humble op. Not that it means anything to me personally – I have a policy of only buying replica shirts when we get to a cup final/win a title, so clearly I’ve kept my money in my wallet these last few years.

That means I’ve saved myself £160 on new Arsenal shirts these last four years.

Every cloud has a silver lining.

Le Boss

I’ve pretty much missed the blogging boat with this Wenger story – it’s been well covered across the blogs and in the broadsheets so I won’t trawl over it blow by blow – but there’s no denying it’s been quite a week for Wenger. Sunday is now guaranteed to be a fabulous Wenger love-in and I’m all for it.

I’m looking forward to the game, as always, and I’ll be particularly interested to see if Adebayor joins the lap of honour. I mean, he really ought to – but there’s no denying it’s a tricky situation for him now. If it’s his goodbye – it feels like it could be – then we should say thanks for an excellent season last year. Maybe skirt round the fact that this one hasn’t been so hot…

Perhaps he should flank himself with Usmanov on one side and Teddy Sheringham on the other. That ought to deflect things nicely.