Keeping the Wolves hungry

I'll keep this brief as why waffle on when one doesn't need to? Firstly the injury news is broadly good for tomorrow's game, Song and Djourou sound like they're fit, RVP is back (on antibiotics currently according to his twitter), so this all means that our only significant absentees are Vermaelen (3 weeks minimum), Diaby (suspended/injured!), Nasri (maybe 1-2weeks more hamstring) and Rosicky (injured).

In my opinion three points is vital and I'd put out a strong first choice eleven, completely ignoring Barcelona on Wednesday. We have over four days to prepare between the two games and you simply cannot risk dropping points against Wolves, with Manu facing City this weekend, we have a chance of gaining some ground.

Wolves come off the back of a fine win against Manu and they will not come to make things easy for us. Chris Foy is the ref and he's certainly no Dowd, thank God, his record of officiating our games is pretty favourable relatively speaking.

The excellent Untold Arsenal site is well worth a read, their detailed analysis of the inconsistency of refereeing in the Premier League is worth a read on its own, the BBC picked up on their proper journalism the other day, sad that our professional colleagues in the media can't do more original work like this themselves, unfortunately many journalists simply don't have the mathematical or scientific backgrounds to understand some of these issues as well as they should be able to.

On the topic of referees, to me it is clear we have a big problem, not just in the UK, but in the whole of world football. FIFA's hierarchy is corrupt and they have done nothing to improve officiating in recent years, their refusal to bring in technology is nothing but complete madness.

In the UK there is certainly plenty of wiggle room for dodgy dealings. The way in which match officials are selected each week for PL games is far from transparent, meaning that we cannot be complacent that something not unlike Serie A's match fixing scandal isn't going on right under our very noses at this moment. The way in which referees are assessed is also far from transparent, arguably a far more open system of appraisal would be far less open to corruption in many many ways.

Certainly refereeing is not the only area in football under the media spotlight at the moment, the current parliamentary inquiry into football governance has been exposing some rather interesting morsels of information this week. Of particular note Lord Triesman's comments about the power of the Premier League were well worth a read. The Premier League's interests do not necessarily marry up with the long term interests of the game in general.