Bucharest Preview

Alright Champion's League again today, and we play in Bucharest. It's gonna be a short post today as I'm quite busy, but it'll work.

And get this, the Bucharest manager will be sacked if he loses this game to Arsenal. This will only be his third game in charge and the other two were both victories, but the owner apparently doesn't think much of him and says he'll get the boot with a loss.

So now some injury news right quick. Jens Lehmann is still out so Almunia will retain his place, and probably will even when Mad Jens is fit, but we'll see. Alexander Hleb is rated as 50/50 by Wenger after that tackle by Mark Noble at the weekend. Adebayor, Diaby, Flamini, and Van Persie all also face late fitness tests to see if they'll be able to go. This could present us with a bit of a striker problem, but I think the lineup will look like this:

Almunia
Sagna-Toure-Senderos-Clichy
Eboue-Fabregas-Gilberto-Walcott
Adebayor-Bendtner

I decided that I would give Bendtner the start here as I doubt both Adebayor and RvP will pass fitness tests well enough for Wenger to risk them against Bucharest.

In other news Alisher Usmanov says he is not planning taking over Arsenal and simply wants to make football bigger in Russia. He's clearly full of it as he wouldn't say he's planning a "blocking stake" if he was just in it to make football bigger. He says there is no problem with "Russian (mafia) money coming in to the "World's biggest football club."" He is no fan and he just wants to make some money off of our club. Arseblog reported that Usmanov tried to buy into Liverpool before it was sold, so yeah he's not looking like a huge Arsenal fan anymore huh?

As for transfer rumors, we have one today. Jussi Jaaskelainen has been linked with us since contract negotiations with Bolton seem to have broken down completely. He's out of contract after this year and can talk to clubs on January 1st. He's a pretty good keeper but I'm undecided if we should try to make a move for him.

My final score prediction for the match tonight is 2-0 to the Arsenal.

Also I'd like to announce the ArseNole prediction contest. Just go to Arsenole.com, leave a comment and predict the score for the match tonight. One guess per person can be made any time before the match starts. For every match you predict correctly I will give you a point. The person with the most points will win an Arsenal prize! I will update the standings on the website after this match.

Later Gooners