Vermaelen's got a medical

"Next season I will come up against the best strikers in the world. I am not scared by that, I will give all my body can give."

- Tom Vermaelen, spare-parts man

Tom Vermaelen's got a medical today. And in a few hours time, he's probably to become Arsenal's first signing of the season. It's exciting stuff, even if it's tempered by the fact that Vermaelen's not the defensive behemoth we all desperately wanted.

However, Vermaelen's quote, that he's willing to "give all my (his) body can give", raises some interesting possibilities. Has he volunteered to his body to Arsenal FC? Can we now operate on him to extract whatever organs we require? Can we use him in a series of hellish Frankenstein's monster experiments to augment our existing footballers?

If so, that's £12 million(?) well spent.

I'm sure, somewhere along the lines, we'll need to give van Persie and Rosicky a few knee transplants. And Gallas will get a few muscle tears during the season, so he'll get first dibs on Vermaelen's hamstrings. Eboue could do with a brain transplant. Eduardo might as well get a new ankle. And Cesc will need a heart transplant soon, as he keeps looking over to Barcelona to see what his old club is doing.

Who knows? At the end of the season, Vermaelen could be nothing more than a dessicated, dissected corpse lying in the medical rooms, and the Arsenal could be boasting a team of super-fit players, each with a bit of Vermaelen inside them.

That's one way of knitting a squad together.

If this transfer proves successful, think of all those other young, promising players we could buy and then cannibalize for spare parts. We could buy Cannavaro for his tactical brain, and stick it in Toure's head. We could get Loik Cana's homocidal brain and whack it in Denilson. We could take Beckham's right foot (it's all we can afford) and stitch it on Theo's right leg.

Those are just options, of course. I'm sure Wenger's got his own list of players we can hunt down for body parts. Vermaelen's just the start.

You know, for the first time in a long while, I'm excited about the transfer season.