07 May 2018 10:55:02
Happy retirement Per - lovely reception and a lovely touch by Wenger to put him on the bench and bring him on. What a reception the BFG got - loved it and I must admit I am a fan of the BFG! Hope he helps our youngsters read, understand and appreciate the game as well as our great club. We would all give an arm to play for Arsenal yet some get paid 100s of thousands a week to do so. I get the impression Per knows this.

1.) 07 May 2018
07 May 2018 15:13:55
Our club captain who came out and said he didn’t want to play football again after carling cup loss👏👏 and still picked up his wages I hope this mentality stops now Wenger gone he was signed past his best to start with.

2.) 07 May 2018
07 May 2018 15:14:20
Nice article in the independent to remind us of the type of man we have retained in our backroom staff so our values remain

A giant on and off the pitch


Some days he will empty his bowels half a dozen times before kick-off. After an evening game, he will often struggle to sleep until 5am. For Mertesacker, professional football has been a treadmill of sickness and anxiety, sleepless nights and aching limbs.

So why did he put himself through it all? For one reason alone: the unmatchable drug of winning, the greatest legal high known to man. A player whose own father, a bank manager and amateur football coach, once told him would never make it as a professional ended up lifting the FA Cup at Wembley, the World Cup in Brazil and winning more than 100 international caps. Not bad for a defender whose unseemly gait and lumbering pace often evokes Tommy Docherty’s much-quoted assessment of Alf Ramsey, that he had seen milk turn faster.

He did it the simple way, but never the easiest. “Win your headers, win your duels, play the simple pass, ” he said in a video message to his younger self for the Arsenal website. Above all, play for the team. Mertesacker may not have been the world’s greatest centre-half, but no dressing room was weaker for his presence. During the last World Cup, his national team-mates pinpointed an angry television interview after a scrappy 2-1 win over Algeria - an outburst Mertesacker admitted was partly calculated - as the moment when they felt strong and united enough to triumph.

According to Rafa Honigstein’s book Das Reboot, when the interview was replayed in cinemas as part of the Germany’s World Cup film, it was greeted with wild applause. Yet the very next game, Mertesacker was demoted to the bench as Joachim Low sought greater mobility at the back. In the brutal lunchtime heat of Rio de Janeiro, Mertesacker appointed himself water-distributor, throwing bottles to his team-mates from the sidelines.


Yet Mertesacker was never under any illusions that being good at football made you a better person. And so perhaps the most impressive thing about him was the parallel life he built for himself, one in which he was determined to be worldly, compassionate and generous. “How you perform on a football pitch, ” he said, “doesn’t tell anyone anything about what you are like as a human being. ”

And so while he was trying to find his peak as an athlete, Mertesacker was also trying to become a model citizen. Perhaps he always had it in him, from the moment he refused national service on the basis of his pacifism (as well as his height, which he argued made him too big to fit in a tank or a submarine) . Instead, he spent 18 months working in a mental hospital with the severely disabled, an experience that never truly left him. Only a couple of months ago, when a group of Arsenal fans with Downs Syndrome were invited to the Emirates for the Watford game, it was Mertesacker who gave up his time to receive them, sign autographs and pose for photographs.

3.) 07 May 2018
07 May 2018 15:54:14
Why am I struggling to find any cohesion between these words and what I've seen with my own eyes.
Sorry but sometimes it's better to tell a full story and admit the less glorious bits if you want the other bits to be taken seriously.
To this day I've never heard a single word of explanation or apology for some of the stuff that was hard to believe we were seeing from Mertesacker.
If you want people to get over them bits then surely you have to adress them rather just pretend they didn't happen and try to sweep them under yhe carpet.

4.) 07 May 2018
07 May 2018 16:37:13
I would expect that behaviour from anyone of our players or any professional footballer who have had the world at there feet earning bucket loads, I found it quite embarrassing there yesterday and whilst he and Wenger deserved a good send off once again the fans get nothing from the club not even a free programme! Let’s not ferget this is our worst season in 22 years and who is going manager us of any real Calibur without a huge contract and open check book hope I’m wrong but that’s not Arsenal’s way 🙈.