Thwack! Here comes my season ticket renewal

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Morning all, and here I am again. I spent the weekend in Dublin and am only just recovering from the jetlag. At least I think it was jetlag. I did manage to catch up with the arseblogger while I was there, albeit briefly, and the pub ended up being full of excited Utd fans (one of whom did some impromtu Dad Dancing). Excited Utd fans and us, that is. Anyway, fair play to them – I think we’d all like a bit of that excitement next year.

Ye gods we’ll be paying for it though. I had my season ticket renewal through, and it seems to have gone up around 5%. “But we haven’t raised prices for 3 seasons”, Arsenal will say in their defence. True enough, they haven’t. It’s just that when petrol is shooting up, food is shooting up, gas is shooting up and electricity is shooting up, another 5% on top of an already expensive season ticket adds more misery to my own personal credit crunch. The cheapest season ticket at Arsenal is inching inexorably towards a grand. Will Arsenal be sold out next season as it was this one? Probably. But if the economic climate worsens, the season after might be different at these prices.

Anyway, what of the football? Well, silly old Alex Hleb is making himself look like a right plonker by letting his agent say things like

“Alex is tired of the noisy and chaotic life in London and feels like living in calmer surroundings”.

Oh come on, for the love of God. So go and live in the countryside, they’re very friendly there. There are no anti-Belarussian vigilante groups in rural Hertfordshire to my knowledge.

Whatever – I am losing sympathy. It’s like his agent realised the ‘Webster’ transfer wasn’t going to happen to blurted out the first thing that came into his head. Whatever next? “Alex Hleb has forgotten his PE kit”? “Alex Hleb has a cold”. “Alex Hleb does not like driving on the left”? “Alex Hleb cannot master Pounds Sterling”? I rate Hleb as a player and on that basis I say we should keep him – but not if he doesn’t want to stay.

Finally, Ben Arthur – the rumours seemed to have legs. Apparently there’s a signing imminent and it might be him. The Independent also suggests the board might invite Wee Jimmy Kroenke onto the board – a remarkable turnaround really, given at one point we didn’t want “his type”. I guess it’s realpolitik – you take him or you take the friendly Uzbek.

That’s me done – ta-ta for now and here’s to a juicy signing soon.

Jim

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