"Edu is a great player and he's free in June and if we can we will sign him then.Wenger, who will also start with the goalkeeper Jens Lehmann, also admitted that he passed up the chance to buy Chelsea's Czech goalkeeper Petr Cech. "I focus on saying come on Arsenal, let's play good football and try to win games," he said. "If one hundred per cent security was just to have a secure defence and not concede goals, everybody would do it."Wenger has not yet decided on what measures to take with his midfielder Jermaine Pennant, who was charged at the weekend for drink-driving, but the Arsenal manager will not abandon the 22-year-old who has committed the offence twice in the last year. Pennant's proposed loan move to Birmingham City is now on hold.Wenger said: "He deserves to be punished but he needs help as well. I don't think he is a drinker but I also don't believe that you can go out on the night before your team plays and say you are a responsible player."The midfielder Edu now looks like he will be staying at Arsenal this month after Valencia's coach, Claudio Ranieri, revealed that his club were not prepared to match the asking price for the Brazilian. "We can be very positive," he added.Although Wenger would not enlarge upon the weaknesses he had spotted in Chelsea, he continues to refuse to give up on the Premiership. Yesterday Wenger said mischievously that he noticed during Wednesday's Carling Cup semi-final certain points about the Premiership leaders that he described as "very interesting to analyse".
He has one eye on the momentous visit of Manchester United to Highbury on Tuesday and, with that in mind, Ars? Wenger announced that he would unleash Thierry Henry and Patrick Vieira on Wolverhampton Wanderers today to make sure his Arsenal team were ready for the challenge that awaits them. After a week of considering the problem of keeping his players fresh for the most eagerly-awaited match of the Premiership season, Wenger decided that his biggest challenge was not resting his players, but keeping them sharp.There will be no role for Dennis Bergkamp, and possibly not Robert Pires either, in the FA Cup today but the match will provide some brief respite from the problem of catching Chelsea. For opposing managers fond of the hard stuff, I'm sure that could be disconcerting too.b.viner independent.co.uk. As Coventry City and then Southampton manager the wee fellow's choice of beverage before the match and afterwards was never anything racier than a cup of tea. To return to Big Ron, it is said that he liked to invite the opposing manager into his office for a glass of pink champagne before rather than after the match, just to show how laid-back and unworried he was feeling I can believe it His prot? Gordon Strachan, on the other hand, is teetotal.
The trouble is that once it's been done, you run the risk of looking both unoriginal and sycophantic. Besides, it doesn't always guarantee the subject's cooperation. The day I provoked the ire of Botham, with a question that infuriated him, I had earlier handed him a decent bottle of Puligny-Montrachet in a transparent attempt to get on his good side. Afterwards, I felt like asking for it back.Now, whether the quality of Mourinho's wine helped to ease Fergie's pain at losing his first semi-final as Manchester United manager, I don't know.Possibly not if the Chelsea manager, whose 42nd birthday it was, had casually pointed out that he was in nappies when the Barca Velha was bottled. Certainly, the convention of managers sharing a drink at matches can sometimes be deployed tactically.
