Eboue and Hoyte can fight it out

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When someone told me Emmanuel Eboue had resigned, I thought – well, wow. I’d never heard of a player resigning before, and maybe, I reasoned, he had realised that with his diving and playacting his position at Arsenal had become untenable. “I’m handing my notice in”, he probably told Arsène, before being summoned by HR for an exit interview. Perhaps he had asked for too much money or a better job title – Senior Right-Back or Executive Right-Back – and had been rebuffed.

And then I read the text again.

So it’s a new long-term deal for Eboue from Ivory, and jesting aside, that’s a good bit of business to tie up for Arsenal. He has more talent than he has flaws, and every club with ambitions of winning things needs cover at left and right back. Whether he is the main man or the main cover depends on his and Justin Hoyte’s progress. It could go either way. Healthy stuff.

There does seem to be an urgency in tying some of our young and important players down on long-term deals before anything else takes place. Bendtner has just signed on for five years, Adebayor’s rumoured to be doing a similar thing, Hoyte’s just done it too and I’m sure they won’t be the last.

It’s a good tactic. This summer, more than any before it, will probably see a lot of money rinsing around in the Premier League washing machine with a limited amount of things to wash.

There are at least six clubs with potentially large amounts of foreign money to burn, from the usual suspect with pockets full of restless roubles, to the clubs with new owners looking to ‘invest’, those with new managers and those with new telly money to get rid of. There’s at least one further club likely to be taken over shortly too to add to that list – Man City – and if it’s Thai’d up we can expect new owner “Frank” Shinawatra to spend there too. He’s likely to want to do it his way [sorry].

The wildest prediction for Arsenal departees is eleven – any advances on that?

Jim

Arsenal since about 1979. Thick, thin and all that.