This isn’t the NFL m8.
Great point
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That’d be a great move by Arsenal.
Like a lot of shit football managers he likes shiny new things,
City need Aguero more than they need Sanchez but he doesn’t realise it.
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City didn’t offer Aguero.
I wasn’t talking to you
Fucking hell did I reply to this bravado filled cunt, my apologies @Julio_Geordio, that was aimed at you. Pep didn’t offer Sergio, he offered Sterling, Arsenal asked about Aguero.
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50m bid from City for Sanchez REJECTED!!!
50m for Sanchez is derisory
X[quote=“Fagan_ODowd, post:49, topic:2029, full:true”]
50m for Sanchez is derisory
[/quote]
He’s out of contract at the end of the season. It’s a wonderfully cheeky bid. Wenger will be fucking fuming.
Just like what they tried with Suarez.
Oxlade Chamberlain has turned down Chelsea. He will go to Liverpool if they want him. I’d say they’re just using him as back up if Lemar falls through. Otherwise he runs down his contract at Arsenal
Ya he wants a guaranteed central midfield slot 
that’s class. Would he even make liverpools bench a CM?
He’d make Liverpool bench given there’d be injuries, but Liverpool’s fully fit CM options currently are
Henderson
Can
Coutinho
Lallana
Wijnaldum
Milner
Grujic
I’d say he be about 5th/6th choice there.
Ian Wright: ‘Act the joker and that’s how people treat you. I had to get serious’
Ian Wright has found a new lease of life as a pundit — if only Arsene Wenger could do the same with Arsenal
David Walsh, Chief sports writer
February 25 2018, 12:01am, The Sunday Times
Into the bar near St Pancras station in central London he walks, his smile preceding him. Ian Wright, the old gunner, is 54 now. Doesn’t look it. We had met two weeks before and out of that has come this. I stretch out my right hand, he spreads his arms. So we meet again with an embrace.
His life so far has been like a fountain, from which so much has come. It should never have turned out as it did. He grew up on the Honor Oak council estate in Brockley, south London. Had a childhood where happiness ended once he stepped inside the family home he shared with his mother, stepdad, two brothers and stepsister.
“I should have had a termination,” his mum used to tell him. At the time he was not sure what a termination was but imagined it couldn’t be good. He did know what was meant when she reminded him that “many are called but few are chosen” on days when he had football trials that he hoped would change his life. She thought he was deluded for believing he could be a footballer.
When Nesta Wright drank she could not stop herself being mean-spirited, especially to her youngest son. He never had a relationship with his stepdad, nor with his older brother Nicky or his stepsister Dionne. Six people in the family, four of whom seemed like the enemy.
For a long time his mum was right about the football dream. Letters unanswered and what trials he got were followed by rejection. Too small or too something else.
At 14 he quit school and left home, starting as a plasterer’s navvy on £50 a week and going off to live with a mate on the North Peckham estate. What chance would he have had at that point? Or when he became a father at 18, or at 21 when he was father to Shaun, Bradley and Brett and still working as a labourer?
Then, almost when he had given up, Crystal Palace gave him a trial. Manager Steve Coppell offered him three months to prove he was worth more. It was a long shot. In his six years at Palace he scored more than 100 goals and then at 28 he went to Arsenal where he became their all-time record goalscorer until Thierry Henry surpassed his total. For England he would play 33 times.
The hint that there was more to him than the grim narrative of his childhood suggested can be found on the dedication page of his 2016 autobiography. “For my teacher, Mr Sidney Pigden,” it says. How could a kid who left school at 14 remember a teacher as the most influential person in his life? There is a YouTube video of the time they unexpectedly met at Highbury, more than 20 years after they had last seen each other.
Wright recalls their conversation in this dark bar, capturing perfectly the gentle softness in the teacher’s voice.
“Hello Ian, long time.”
“Mr Pigden, you’re alive.”
“I’m alive he says. How you doing?”
“I can’t believe it. Someone says you was dead.”
While saying “Mr Pigden, you’re alive,” Wright removes his flat cloth cap, pulling it down over his eyes and sobbing uncontrollably. Only once over the years that followed was he able to watch that video.
“Mr Pigden taught me to read and write. He believed in me. And he taught me about football. ‘Why do you always want to blast the ball?’ he’d say. Jimmy Greaves would pass the ball into the net. Look at the goal Ian, see where the most space is and put it there. Some of Greaves’s goals didn’t even hit the back of the net.
“Make it pretty, make it beautiful. This advice stayed with me. Every time I had a chance to score I looked for where the space was. After the second world war Mr Pigden was one of the pilots chosen to do a ceremonial fly-by over Buckingham Palace. He told me he was more proud of my playing for England than he was of being one of the chosen pilots.”
Wright kept in touch after their reunion. He would go with Mrs Dance, who also taught at Turnham Primary, to see him. “Mr Pigden died on December 27 last,” says Wright. “He spent his last years in an old people’s home down near Ladywell. We would pop in to see him but before the end he couldn’t remember anybody.”
Strange the way things go. The video touched a lot of people and Wright, the kid who left school at 14, has become an advocate for teachers. He has gone to schools and spoken of Sid Pigden’s effect on his life, and the warning of another teacher Mr Curzon who said no matter what he did in life he would regret not paying more attention at school. Mr Curzon, he knows now, was right.
It was his passion for the game that enabled him to survive at Crystal Palace. After a few days he went to Peter Prentice, the scout responsible for getting him the chance, and asked if it was OK for him to use the training balls for the afternoon. “You don’t need to ask me,” said Prentice.
For hours on his own, he would practice his finishing. And he would do that throughout his career until Arsène Wenger convinced him the only way he could continue to play into his mid-30s was to train less. With Tony Adams, Lee Dixon, David Seaman, Nigel Winterburn, Steve Bould, Martin Keown, Patrick Vieira and especially Dennis Bergkamp, they were the boys of Arsenal’s summer.
And Wenger became Mr Pigden. Which is the thing that has made the last few years so hard. Wright is a columnist for The Sun and a broadcaster for various outlets. He has to say what he believes. “I spoke with Arsène for a few hours during the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. He is such a fascinating man to talk to. During our conversation he said he accepts whatever criticism I make comes from a place of love.
“Watching him now is like witnessing the ageing Muhammad Ali against Larry Holmes, or watching Brazil’s Ronaldo when he got fat. You are watching the greats in their demise. The problem with Arsène is that there is no one in his corner prepared to throw in the towel.”
After football ended Wright became a TV host, working in light entertainment. For a man without formal education and precious little broadcasting training, he survived remarkably well. He interviewed Denzel Washington, Elton John and many others. Away from football, he felt out of his element and that feeling never left him.
So he made his way back, and through the early years of football punditry and commentary he was encouraged to be funny and lighthearted. He went with it but it made him feel like a court jester. When he complained publicly, the fallout was serious and he was told he would never work for the BBC again.
“There were nine years where I never worked on the BBC. So I done a lot of stuff for beIN Sports, for Al Jazeera and I done radio. And I just started to read more about football. I said to myself the reason you were treated like a jester is because you was acting like a jester. If I wanted to be taken seriously then I had to be serious and that began with reading. Speaking to people, getting more information, finding out more.
“I used to call journalists ‘the press.’ Can’t do that anymore because I’m part of it. I see myself as a pundit with the same need to research as everyone else in the business. With social media all of a sudden everybody is a journalist, everyone has got an opinion.
“But I still need the journalists, the top guys, because they are the ones that validate things. I’m talking about guys like Henry Winter, Jonathan Northcroft, Oliver Holt, Paul Hayward, Shaun Custis, Oliver Kay, Darren Lewis, Martin Samuel, Amy Lawrence, John Cross, Miguel Delaney and I know I’ve done a disservice to a lot of football writers that I read but haven’t mentioned.
“As much as they didn’t play at a high level, I can’t say my passion for football is any more than theirs.”
Wright is back on the BBC now, less funny but more interesting. And he remains an avid Gooner. In 10 minutes he will leave this bar and head for the Emirates to see his team lose to the Swedish giants of Ostersunds in the Europa League. The next morning he will call to say that he couldn’t believe how indifferent so many of Arsenal’s second stringers were to the possibility of playing their way into the first team.
Before he leaves, I ask him if that story about Steve McMahon really is true. Now he is laughing and recalling.
“First time I got called up for England. I am amongst the greats. Bryan Robson, Shilton, Butcher, Barnes, Lineker, Beardsley, Gascoigne, Platt. But I’m losing the ball in training and Steve McMahon’s giving me a hard time.
“’F*****g useless, how do players like you get into the squad?’” Horrible he was, and it got me down. Years later he [McMahon] is playing for Man City and we both slide into a tackle. He had to go off. It’s at Highbury and after the game he’s in the doctor’s room being stitched up. It’s his foreskin that is being stitched.
“He says ‘Wrighty, you caught me in the wrong place,’ but is OK about it. I apologise and wish him well for the rest of the season. After we retire I meet him somewhere and he’s saying that every time he pees or has any form of arousal, he feels a little pain and thinks of me. And I’m thinking, ‘ah man, that’s sweet.’”
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Best of luck to the Arsenal tonight.
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Sure you’d always support the English teams
Fuck arsenal and their supporters who’ve blackguarded a fine gentleman.
Best of luck to Mr Wenger.