Eduardo’s laughing & Hleb’s injured 22 November, 2007

Well the top news story around here is England crashing out of the Euro 2008 qualifiers last night to Croatia. Being English I am disappointed but we were so terrible you can only laugh. Hopefully this setback will sort the team out and maybe we’ll realise we’re not as good as all the hype. The only play we had involved was Eduardo Da Silva who had a great game and provided a great assist for their 2nd.

He showed confidence, composure and skill and looked a very exiting prospect. He’s still taking his time to settle in at Arsenal, which is fair enough, but after last night we all know what he’s made of.

Spud’s clown Paul Robinson was dropped and not even on the bench and Carson came in who has looked good recently. However he had a shocking 1st half, the fist goal has to be completely his to blame I’m afraid. He made up for it with some great saves in the second half though. England went 2-0 down inside 15 minutes in a game which they had to at least draw; Israel handed England a massive life line by beating Russia but we were so crap we couldn’t complete our part of it.

Beckham cam on at half time and played well, he set up our second after Defoe won a penalty for our first. So we had somehow made it back to 2-2 and we were going to the Euro Championships. All we had to do was no concede. And we did. I could only laugh when the goal went in and I knew we’d completely blown it now.

Steve McLaren was sacked early this morning, not soon enough to be honest. Next Birmingham manager? I’ve never liked McLaren; he’s been crap from the start and played a major, major part in England not qualifying. Thank god the internationals are over now…

That’s the big news over here at the moment so I thought I better cover it, but the breaking news to Gooners is that Hleb picked up an injury when Belarus played Holland last night. He was taken off at half time with a knock but we’re not sure how bad it is. His manager said afterwards that he could be out for a couple of weeks but I’ve got no links for you or anything. I’m sure once he’s been examined at London Colney we’ll get some official news.

Hleb’s quite good at recovering from injuries so hopefully we’ll have him back for the busy winter. This does mean we’ve got quite a few players out for Saturday. Hleb, Flamini, Fabregas and possibly Diaby could all be out, but at the same time they could all be available, as we don’t know how bad their knocks over the internationals have been. Van Persie and Senderos are back in full training now, I don’t know if they’ll be 100% ready yet but I’m sure we’ll find out all the news in tomorrows press conference.

Today’s the last day to enter the t-shirt competition. Get your entries in before midnight and you could be in with a chance of winning. And please don’t enter twice, it’s easy to pick out the dirty cheaters that have and the duplicate entries have just been deleted so it’s fair and square. I’ll be announcing the winner tomorrow so stay tuned.

Until then.