ENGLISH PREMIER LEAGUE NEWS ROUND-UP:ARSENE WENGER is worried Robin van Persie and Theo Walcott will choose not to extend their contracts at Arsenal if the club fail to qualify for next season's Champions League.
Arsenal are in talks with both forwards with a view to extending their deals, which have 18 months left to run. But Wenger is aware the players’ thinking could be affected if the team do not finish in the top four. They are fifth going into today’s game against West Ham, five points behind Aston Villa.
“Top players want to be at the top so it is something to think about,” the Arsenal manager said of his concerns over Van Persie and Walcott. “But we have invested a lot of time in them and I believe it means a lot to them to play for Arsenal.”
He hopes the same will soon be true of Andrei Arshavin. Wenger is confident of securing the services of the Russia playmaker by Monday’s closure of the transfer window, though he admitted the saga could feature another twist.
Arshavin is determined to leave and is believed to have dropped his wage demands by €1 million a year to enable Arsenal to pay the €16 million lump-sum transfer fee sought by Zenit St Petersburg.
“It is difficult to predict what will happen,” Wenger said. “We have no agreement with anyone for a transfer and we have not applied for a work permit for any player. But we hope we can still get a deal done while respecting our budget. In stories like this there can always be late developments, even right up until the last day of the transfer window.”
Though he said Arsenal are discreetly exploring other options, Wenger felt sufficiently upbeat about the prospects of landing Arshavin that he described the effect the Russian could have on the rest of Arsenal’s season.
“He is a guy who can pass people in the final third, so he can open doors individually and collectively. Every big club needs a player who can do something special and we are without three creative players at the moment – Fabregas, Rosicky and Walcott – and that is not easy when you are always playing against teams who have 10 players defending.”
Wenger is not expecting that approach from West Ham. They have four wins and a draw from their past five league matches and he said Gianfranco Zola’s side are “perhaps the best team in the Premier League at the moment”.
As for Villa’s manager Martin O’Neill, it will be March before he even begins to consider entertaining talk of a title challenge, but last night he did acknowledge that his flourishing side have, at the very least, become an irritant to the established top four. The Villa manager likened his team to a “wasp” as he considered today’s meeting with Wigan, when a fifth successive league victory would guarantee second place in the table for 24 hours at least.
The Northern Irishman admitted he is enjoying having a genuine reason to follow the fortunes of the leading clubs, but dismissed the notion Villa’s results are also troubling their rivals.
“What has been refreshing in recent games is to actually be looking at the results of (the big four) and feeling that you are up there, in that position,” O’Neill said. “I’m looking at them but they’re not looking at us. I just think that we’re like a wasp.
“We’ve got momentum going,” continued O’Neill, who also admitted there are parallels to be drawn with the Nottingham Forest side he played in, under Brian Clough, which unexpectedly won the league title in 1978.
“We’ve won a lot of games. We’ve won nine out of 12 away from home and I think that speaks volumes for the character of the team. If you’re winning away from home that tells you that we’re not crumbling under pressure.
“But for us to consider ourselves as contenders – unless we win the next five games on the trot, I couldn’t consider us. If we won the next five games I would have to say that the league is down to 10 games and it would mean that we would still be there.”
GuardianService
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