22 June 2007

Richard Osley, Arsenal Fan: Comments on Captaincy

While I was staying in Islington, I used to like heading up to Angel on Fri. Besides the infrequent meal at Dixy's Fried Chicken & the trip to the street market, Sainsbury's, Iceland & Borders, the weekly issue of the free Islington Tribune, a community weekly newspaper, will be out. I enjoy reading the quarter page column where by Richard & another reporter, a Catherine (can't recall her surname) would comment on the football team they support, name the Gunners & Spurs respectively. They'd take pot shots at each other's team & to me, Richard normally or mostly is better (no, I am not being bias). Anyhow, here are some of his comments?

Camden New Journal - by RICHARD OSLEY - ARSENAL FAN
Published: 21 June 2007


IF Thierry turns his back on Barcelona and Milan and Grimsby (one for old times sake, folks), and decides to stay at Arsenal – I think he should do the decent thing and give up the captaincy.

We can’t have the skipper prevaricating on where he should spend the twilight of his career all summer.

I’d be sad to see Henry go – he is indisputably the world’s greatest player at the moment, the best ever to have graced the Premiership and maybe in the top ten players to have ever played for Arsenal – but you can only push things so far.

I wasn’t saying it while Julio Baptista was taking penalties like he was at Twickenham and Jeremie Aliadiere was pratting around in front of goal last season but maybe its time to think about life beyond Henry.

If he doesn’t go this summer, he’ll go next summer (after Arsenal win the Champions League) or the summer after that. Nobody goes on forever – even if Bergkamp threatened to do so.

So, I say, promote Kolo Toure to club captain.

Can anyone ever imagine Kolo flirting with a move to another club? Can you imagine him stuck in a contract wrangle with the Arsenal moneymen? Getting his agent to brief journalists to ramp up his pay and conditions?

But there is a better reason for it to be Captain Kolo: he clearly hates Chelsea.

His behaviour in the Carling Cup final was clearly a little bit off-key. Apparently, it’s not the done thing to lose your rag and go chasing after as many Chelsea twits as possible with raging fists. It’s not the done thing – but who could blame him?

There was Chelsea, with a squad that took around £980 million to amass, struggling to squeeze past a team of reserves and youngsters, wasting time in the final seconds as they desperately tried to win a tin-pot trophy.

Kolo’s fury that day represented what everybody who isn’t a glory chasing Chelsea fan (the ones that you couldn’t see in the 1990s but seem to be everywhere now) thinks:

Chelsea have no style or history.

A perfect qualification for the Arsenal captaincy, I’d say.

I have no arguments against Richard's comments. In fact, I believe Toure can be a great Gunners captain in the mold of Tony Adams. Having said that, I also believe the Gunners still need Henry (& more importantly, Arsene) while suitable replacements are groomed from the crop of kids Arsenal have.

Till later, live long & prosper.

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