Well there’s good news, and some quite bad news… 18 October, 2007

I’ll start with the good news I suppose. The shareholder’s AGM was held today and there has been an agreement to extend the ‘lock-down’ agreement. When Kroenke starting buying up shares in the summer the board took note and decided that if they all agreed to ‘lock-down’ and not sell they Stan wouldn’t have been able to take over the club because of the large percentage of the club the board own. This agreement was only a short-term thing and was due to expire in April. However, at today’s AGM they’ve decided to extend this to October 2012.

This is great news. An extra 5 years to hold off Usmanov and there’s nothing stopping them extending this ‘lock-down’. There’s also some extra clauses added to the agreement which chairman, Peter Hill-Wood explains here:

“Under the new agreement, the Board members have agreed not to dispose of any of their interests in the Club before 18 April 2009, other than to certain permitted persons such as close family. After that date, for the remainder of the term of the agreement, they can only sell their shares to another person if the other parties to the agreement do not wish to buy them. The agreement is for five years (until 18 October 2012), although it can be terminated early by the parties on its third anniversary (18 October 2010).”

So that’s the good news. This is the bad news.

Robin Van Persie is fucking injured. I don’t believe it. The news of Senderos’ injury I brought to you the other day (with all respect to Phil) isn’t really that bad and we can cope without him especially with Gallas’ return. However Robin is our best striker and is on top form at the moment.

The injury happened in Holland’s qualifier for Euro 2008 against Slovenia; Robin fell very awkwardly on his knee after an hour of play which you can see a photo of here. This is possibly the worst injury we could get at this time with a lot of important games coming up. If Fabregas got injured we at least have good back up but we haven’t really got that many strikers. Eduardo and Adebayor are the most likely pairing now, but Bendtner will be drooling at this opportunity.

As with Senderos’ case, there’s still nothing on Arsenal.com. The players are all returning home now and I’m sure once our own medical team has assessed the players there’ll be an announcement on how serious these injuries are. If you want to look at Robin’s injury optimistically, think back to Hleb’s incident against West Ham. It was a similar sort of knock, which looked quite bad, but he was back straight away starting the next game.

Here’s a round-up of all the internationals.

Fingers crossed on Robin, I’m sure we’ll here more soon. Until then.