Gossip continues as Euros unwind

It is a pretty good rule that you can trust footballers' agents about as far as you can throw them, and given that most of them are greasy overweight leaches that isn't very far in metric terms. As always major tournaments are used as an opportunity for agents to pimp their players in the window of the world's big clubs. What is in the papers in not always the truth, as Dick Advocaat points out rather dryly. The rumours of Clichy leaving turned out to be yet more baseless tabloid guff, two great bits of business so far have been signing up Clichy and Sagna on long term deals.

There's been some decent football at the Euros this year, but in my humble opinion the quality of football on show is some way short of the top European club competitions. For example Tuncay of Turkey has looked pretty handy at times with his side through to the semis, but we all know from his performances at Boro that he's not a player who would be up to playing for Arsenal. I reckon we should be slightly wary of reading too much into the performances of other players at the Euros on this basis.

Arsene will not rush to sign anyone solely on the basis of a couple of decent performances at the Euros, that doesn't mean to say he won't sign any of the outstanding performers, it just means that if he does he would have rated them pretty highly before the competition had started. The transfer gossip continues and it does appear that there is rather a lot of smoke about, so the likelihood of a fire appears high. While some people are getting rather excited about certain players, is Arshavin really that good?

ps having watched Holland Russia tonight Arshavin does appear to be that good. Holland were rather dissappointing, admittedly this was largely down to Russia's excellence, however they were several players short of being a great Dutch side.