Squillaci and Schwarzer

"It depends how long the road is. We just walked into the road, you know? If the road is very short we will not be very far. At the moment it will be very premature to announce that Squillaci will join us."

- Arsene Wenger, regarding our transfer negotiations with Sevilla about Sebastien Squillaci

In the past few days, we've been increasingly linked to Sebastien Squillaci, a 30 year old French international central defender, currently playing for Sevilla. The deal's supposed to be either £4m or £6. I suppose we should be happy that we're still looking to sign someone, but still, why are we trying to sign an obscure 30 year old Frenchman with no resale value and questionable fitness and speed?

Wenger seems to have got in the habit of buying 30 year old defenders. And strangely enough, there's no talk of Squillaci killing Nordtveit or Djourou. There's no talk about the introduction of a rolling one-year contract. It's a weird transfer, like the Silvestre to Arsenal deal of a few years ago, sans the nausea and discombobulation of seeing a Man Utd player in an Arsenal shirt.

I'm tempted to just go with the flow, and just take it on faith that if Wenger's impressed with this guy, he'll be good enough for us. But that overlooks that Wenger's been trying to artificially inject experience into the team by buying old French geezers in defence. And it overlooks that Squillaci is towards the end of his career, and he hasn't done much in his career to show that he worthy of playing for a big, big club.

Squillaci to Arsenal sounds like a cut-price deal for a cut-price player.

Another cut-price deal that's been mooted is Schwarzer to the Arsenal. Wenger's trying to hush it up and protect his incumbent, saying;

“At the moment I’m more focused on getting our goalkeepers in the right frame of mind because they were disturbed by all the noises made. We have a big game on Saturday and I think it is very important that our two goalkeepers who are involved focus on that game.”

I totally agree with that. The last thing we need is our two goalkeepers get distracted from the game, and play even worse than they can. Let's get the boys into the right frame of mind (the ball is my friend, I want the ball, the nature environment of the ball is in my hands) and keep our frantic transfer dealings on the quiet.

Let's not announce our progress until we've actually signed someone.

So on the 247th last day of my 20s, I woke up tired, went to work, voted, then bought a pair of pants and a jacket. Had spam on toast for lunch. Thinking about the smaller number of federal candidates compared to state ones. I seem to remember that state elections usually have seven or eight candidates, but the federal one today one had four candidates. I suppose the federal nature of it must weed out all the zany independent candidates.

On the 248th last day of my 20s, I stayed up late and pissed off the GOMD. She's not really that pissed off, because she doesn't care enough about me to really get pissed off. Which, really, is much more depressing than if she's purely angry.