The Cesc Fabregas Show, Signings
I just watched Sky/Nike’s “The Cesc Fabregas Show”. Oh. My. God. What a horrible piece of crap. It was embarassing for Arsenal fans to watch, embarassing for Cesc to participate in and just bad bad television. Some of the lowlights include Cesc’s mummy pretending to be a Sky Sports reporter, a pathetically unfunny Paul Kaye pretending to an American and pretending to be funny, a rigged competition between Cesc and some kid trying to turn pro and the less said about the hosts the better. Some of the slightly more interesting bits included meeting Cesc’s parents, Arsene Wenger (as always) and a slightly funny skit involving Cesc, Matt Lucas and Senderos. But basically it was one hour of sycophantic crap trying to portray Cesc as the greatest human being in living history, with unfunny bits in between the parts where you cringe and want to kill yourself. Whomever (or is that whoever) thought up the idea and talked Cesc into doing it should be shot to death repeatedly.
But other than that, the show was alright.
As for signings, we haven’t signed anyone yet. Well we have signed some 17 year French kid (who would have guessed!), and I guess Carlos Vela counts as a signing too. The Vela “signing” may smack of “meh” from Arsenal fans, but really, if we hadn’t been linked with him for about 2 years and if we just signed him like any other player, I think there would have been a lot of excitement … it’s like the Walcott signing all over again, except this kid has a lot more first team experience. I for one am excited about any signings, even the 17 year old French kid.
To happen next week may be one more 20 year old (or 22 year old, depending on what you read) French guy, and another French guy who has a un-French sounding name and whose name is an anagram of “Ass Rim Rain”, and who will most likely replace Hleb. Perhaps there may even be a fourth French guy who currently plays for Lyon and has the very English name of Ben. Big Ben, that shall be his nickname if he ever comes to play for a London club, and I hope we’re that club.
But the point I wanted to make is that we shouldn’t analyse and be too critical of the players we’ve been linked to. For one, most of these links are tenuous, which is another word for “fake”. And second, just because we sign some 17 year old French kid that nobody has ever heard off, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t a good singing. Conversely, just because we sign some big name star doesn’t mean he will become the best player in the league next season. Nobody predicted the Eduardo signing, and nobody wanted the Sagna signing, yet these two were the best signings we’ve had in a while. All I’m saying is let’s give players a chance (and a chance for rumours to die) before we start criticizing this and that … it’s very annoying to see people argue in a forum thread about which of the two players we should sign, when in reality, we probably won’t sign any of them. It’s just ridiculous, and unfortunately, there’s still about 2 and a half months worth of it.
So until we sign Ass Rim Rain and he scores a hat-trick on his debut, I think we should leave judgement until then and be happy in the fact that we at least seem to be reinforcing, and hope that the signings we make will make us stronger for next season.