Pre city thoughts

The last post on the Kakuta story and the general topic of the transfer of young players provoked a lot of good banter, thank you one and all. It is clearly one very complex area and it seems that most people agree that blanket bans on the transfer of young players is not a clever way to solve the problem. As always FIFA and UEFA are rushing to bring in new rules and regulations before engaging their small brains, not good for football me thinks. Arsene has had some sensible things to say:

"If you have a child who is a good musician, what is your first reaction? It is to put it into a good music school, not in an average one, so why should that not happen in football?"

Spot on, this is a point I made as well, if you stop the best youngsters getting the best coaching and all round training then you will not be improving football. It is strange that FIFA want to introduce this blanket ban when they openly allow the likes of Madrid, the Milans and Barca to tap up adults who are under contract in clear contravention of rules that already exist. FIFA need to work out which rules they actually want to bother enforcing or are they just more concerned by keeping certain people happy?

The only bad news on top of the Djourou blow is that Andrei Arshavin is out for a week or so after the damn Russians played him when not fully fit. I was just having a quick think about points in the league and winning the title, it is clear that we'll need at least two points in three to be near the action, this means that losing a game means we need to win the next two. Overall our start of six points from three games is decent, especially given the three points away to Everton and the performances so far. It's just annoying we don't have nine as we should have beaten the Mancs, if it wasn't for Mike Dean we might well have had the full compliment.

Not wanting to gaze too far into the distance, we have City away, then Wigan at home, then Fulham away. Realistically we need to pick up a minimum of six points from these three games to keep things rolling along. Gareth Barry is a very handy player, he put in yet another solid performance for England in the week without getting that much recognition, and it will be important that we don't let him dictate things on Saturday, we'll need our midfield and strikers to hassle him and give him no time or space with which to run the show. Ireland is another one to watch, his late runs from midfield can be tricky to defend against. Hopefully Diaby, Denilson and Fabregas will start in the midfield, while I would be keen to see Eduardo get a start, he is looking rather sharp. Come on you Gunners.