Twente/Twenty-Five

By: Abby | August 1st, 2008

While it’s low on the list of annoyances at failing at the last moment last season, coming in third means that we have to play Champions League qualifiers, unlike those high-spenders across town. And today the draw was made for them. There were several potential banana skins among the unseeded teams that all the seeded teams wanted to avoid, and fortunately, we mostly did it.

Our partners? FC Twente, of the Netherlands. Which means that we’re not against the teams that I really wanted to avoid- Atletico Madrid, Galatasaray, and any of the teams in either Russia or Ukraine, places that we never travel well to (and have difficult teams as well). Twente aren’t the easiest team in the draw, but they aren’t the most difficult. Even at the early stage of the season, we should have enough to take them.

FC Twente has had two fine seasons, coming fourth in 2006-2007 and 2007-2008. While in the 2006-2007 season they lost their playoff to AZ Alkmaar, last season they beat Ajax for their slot. Manager Fred Rutten won the Rinus Michels Award, given to the best coach in the Eredivise every year, which is a pretty neat thing. Unfortunately for FC Twente (but probably fortunately for us), Rutten took off for Germany after that playoff. He’s now at the ambitious Schalke 04. Not only that, he took captain and Dutch international Orlando Engelaar with him.

His replacement? None other than former England manager and fan of umbrellas Steve McClaren. You can’t help but feel a little bad for him- I’m sure he hoped that Champions League football with Twente would restore his reputation a little, after his disastrous England campaign. Instead, he gets us, and he has a dreadful record against Arsenal. He says he expected an English team- that would be what fate dealt him. But oh well, I can’t be sentimental when Arsenal in the Champions League is concerned.

And while the Champions League draw would normally be the only story on the day it’s made, today Arsenal fans have something else to discuss. Namely, one Emmanuel Adebayor, who will apparently be staying at Arsenal. Not only staying, but signing a new contract as well. So after all that nastiness, it looks like we’re not in the middle of a full-blown exodus after all.

It’s hard to say what to think about Adebayor. Mostly because it’s hard to say what’s true or what’s false about the stories around him. The way the media runs it’s hard to tell what was said by Adebayor himself, his agent, or even the clubs that were trying to pry him away (while I do tend to like Barcelona, the big Spanish clubs do use the press that way, quite a lot). A lot of things were said, quite a lot unpleasant. Reports of insane wage demands and general diva-like behavior has definitely been dividing fans, and the tendency of the striker to both make statements and then immediately contradict himself didn’t win him any friends either.

Reports say that his eventual wage increase will take him to about £70,000 a week, not anything near the £100,000-some he was apparently demanding during the transfer wrangling, and even below the £80,000 he was apparently originally wanting. It’s more than the wage he had, but not quite so much as to be ridiculous. Ade-ba-yooooor

The question will be, is Adebayor’s head going to still be at Arsenal, or will he be unsettled and upset that we didn’t let him leave? His voluminous quotes (he talks a lot) suggest that he’s at least trying to combat that idea- saying that “I’m feeling very good here and at the moment my heart is with Arsenal” and reiterating the idea that Arsene Wenger is like a father to him. Time will tell whether he means it or not. Footballers say a lot of things. The big moves he wanted didn’t really materialize, but does that mean he’s really content with Arsenal? I suppose that we’ll see if he starts scoring goals or not when the season starts.

A few goals would also go a long way to win back some of the fans he alienated through this whole affair. Fans such as, oh, nearly all of them. There’s also the worry that he’s not going to have another season like the last one- can he really be a 30-goals-a-season striker more than once?

However, I think that it’s really important that we’re keeping Ade. Not only is he a young striker that’s ever-improving, who knows the Premier League and has everything (strength, speed, skill) to improve in it, but it also sends out something of a message. The ‘big clubs’ of Europe can’t push us around- we decide when our players leave, not Barcelona, Milan, Spartak Moscow, or whatever. There’s been a perception that our players are up for grabs, and here’s at least one thing to say for that.

It also cuts the ‘exodus’ that has been the talk of the English press to two players (well, four if you count Jens and Gilberto, but us losing aging players is a non-story), and while one of those (Flamini) is a real loss, we hopefully have a solid replacement for Hleb in Nasri. While we still probably need one addition, we’re not really in a bad place.

I suppose we’ll see, won’t we?