Good morning to all. A very quick summary of Friday for you.
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And there we go. Thank you for reading. Have a nice day.
It’s a little crazy to think that we’re suffering from the tedium of Interlull and missing football when next month we’ll probably wish we had some kind of break due to the relentless schedule.
All football, ALL the time.
I guess this one feels a little worse because of all the postponements. We should have had more football last month, but in just over 6 weeks we’re going to have to steel ourselves for the Mother of all Interlulls when the world cup season ends. What the hell are we going to do?
Yes, there will be football when the World Cup itself starts, but there will be no Arsenal. And as the tournament progresses, the amount of football decreases. From three games a day to one game every three or four days, and then what are we supposed to do to pass the time?
Count how many montages of gleaming skyscrapers and David Beckham we get through television coverage. Here is David Beckham on a motorcycle, showing off the beautiful streets of Doha. Here’s David Beckham on the beach in aviator sunglasses, his tattoos digitally removed to ensure we see his oiled-up abs.
Suddenly, the sound of Kenny Loggins’s Playing with the Boys blasting through our TV speakers, Becks is joined by three other high-profile ex-pros for a totally straight game of volleyball.
“Come on!” Beckham yells and the fun begins.
Back in the studio, Roy Keane deplores such activity as a frivolity of the modern world, insisting that in his day they would never have played volleyball and instead engaged in totally, utterly, definitely heterosexual Greek wrestling.
“Wrestling! Wrestlin’!’, imitates Ian Wright with an Irish accent. At first it looks like Keane is going to elbow him in the side of the head, but he can’t help but laugh.
“For God’s sake, Wrighty!” he says. However, he makes a mental note to send a ‘Thanks, but no thanks’ to Beckham’s invitation to a Manchester United reunion barbecue taking place on a private beach later that week.
On the BBC, Gareth Southgate defends his decision to take 19 defenders to the World Cup, and even then there is no room for the fit Ben White, who was passed over to facilitate Des Walker’s surprise withdrawal.
“I have to make decisions as a football coach,” he explains, “because I am a football coach and football coaches have to make decisions. Some of them are easy decisions, some of them are hard decisions, and some of the decisions are neither easy nor hard, but they still have to be made. In this case, you could say that some of the players I chose belong to each category, but I think it would be unfair of me to say which are which.”
I leave that to Henry Winter at The Times, who gets the information from a confidential source in the countryside of England who officially states: “As a confidential source, I have to leak information. Some of that information is easy to filter, some of it is not that easy to filter, and some of that information is neither easy nor difficult to filter.”
“SOUTHGATE THE DRIP,” screams The Sun’s headline as they put two and two together a few weeks later.
Everything is ahead of us friends.
Well, I’ll leave it there for this morning. There’s a new Arsecast for you, chatting with Matt Spiro about William Saliba, as well as Flo Balogun and Nuno Tavares, who are on loan in France this season. We also have some Interlull Ass-waffle with Andrew Allen.
All the links you need to subscribe and listen are below. Have a great Friday.
