arsenal fans of the world unite, by tomhills1 on Jun 28, 2007 22:01:00 GMT 1, as i know there a quite a few of us on here i would be interested to guage opinion now that the sham that was henry's departure has died down somewhat. others opinions also more than welcome, obviously.

now for me, henry wanted to leave last summer but somekind of guilt or mis-guided loyalty prevented him. then he proceeded to fall into the vieira syndrome of wishing he had gone and wasted a year of both his and our lives.

for him to spout this whole nonsense of 'david dein left so that's my lot'. what complete bullshit. david dein pulls the strings in transfer negotiations, for players identified by the most diverse scouting system in europe, headed up by keith rowley and orchestrated chiefly by one arsene wenger. team talks, tactics, training sessions? pat rice and arsene. i fail to see the loss of dein as anything other that unfortunate. plus we all know once danny fizsman becomes a tax-exile in switzerland next spring he will sell to stan kroenke and dein will back as chief exec.

the crux of the issue is we are talking about a player who for a long time has been thinking he is bigger than the club. someone who is becoming more vocal in his belief that he should decide if, when and how many signings we should make. a player that has increasingly looked to make excuses and take less and less responsibility for his short-comings. mostly a player that has started to believe the hype.

now i'm not saying i wanted him to leave, far from it, but there are a couple of major problems that surround the move. firstly, if you are so excited to be going to barca that you are 'giggling like a schoolboy' when you sign, that you drop your agent because he advised against your move and then proceed to play out the pushed out victim via the media, then i lose all respect for you. secondly, the message this sends out to the rest of the world is not good. they see us selling our best player for the same price as west ham offered for darren bent, no offence but come on.

finally, anyone connected to arsenal will heed the old saying 'arsene knows'. he would not have sold a player who is 30 before the new season starts, who now is starting to get major injuries and who is at the least a distracting influence at the club, if he didn't know what he was doing.

there is no doubting we need to buy a couple of strikers, what with aliadiere gone too, but our best results last season came without henry. i will miss him, i'm grateful for some special memories and i wish him all the best in catalunia but life goes on, and it will be nice to have all the speculation over with.

p.s. anyone remember what happened to these players once they left mr wenger and north london; marc overmars, nicklas anelka, patrick vieira, emmanuel petit, robert pires, edu, ray parlour, ian wright, ashley cole? can't say we've missed a single one of them, the only slight case you could make is silvinho and gio van bronkhorst. they both did ok but we were left with ashley cole, who was good back then.

have faith.