Squad announced amidst ridiculous tabloid fury

So our first team squad for the coming season has been announced. It's both smaller and larger than others around if that makes any sense. It's smaller in the sense that we only have a squad of 20 over-21 year old players, but it's larger than most in the sense that we have a fantastic depth of U-21 talent which includes the likes of Walcott, Wilshere, Gibbs, JET, Vela, Szczesny and Ramsey.

These new rules have been known about for many months, so any knee jerk comments have misrepresented this very fact. Gordon Taylor, a man who always looks after his own selfish interests, has something to say, the stupid and ignorant Phil Jiggins (maybe he's still angry about having a sh*t name) had this to say:

"Arsenal and Manchester City helped turn the Premier League's brave new dawn into a farce last night.....Strict new rules designed to restrict foreign players in English football — and encourage homegrown talent — were shown up to be meaningless."

Phil is even wider of the mark than Kaba Diawara. Firstly how can the rules be 'strict' and at the same time meaningless? Surely a bit of a contradiction their Phil. Quite why it is Man City and Arsenal who have been singled out I do not know, in fact Chelsea and Manu are sailing as close to the wind as anyone because they are almost at their limit of foreign players who are over the 21 age limit.

If Phil had done a bit of reading and wasn't just writing to appeal to Britain's lowest common denominator, ie the Sun reader with a reading age of 10 and a hatred of anything that isn't branded with a union jack, then he may be able to acknowledge that Arsenal have done more than virtually any other English club in developing young talent in recent years and without Arsene Wenger's input English football would still be languishing in the dark ages. The reason why we now have such depth is that we have invested so much money and time in developing our youngsters over a sustained period.

It is ridiculous that even now, while we continue to produce top talent for the full England squad (Gibbs/Wilshere), we are being singled out unfairly. In fact our youth setup has seen a beacon in recent years, we have produced numerous excellent English players who have gone on to forge solid careers in the top leagues, we have even produced the best groundsman in the world who was poached by Real Madrid. It's just plain embarrassing what passes for journalism in some quarters, some people just don't like Arsenal and can't bear to admit this, they would prefer to run dishonest articles that masquerade as objective criticism when it clearly is not.