Published: 13 February 2014

ARSENAL by Richard Osley

HE’S a stubborn old puffin, our pal Arsene Wenger.

I mean not just a little bit stubborn, we’re not talking an absolute refusal to stack the dishwasher when it’s not your turn type of stubborn. We’re talking grade A, top-level stubbornness – premium stubbornity.

So, the more people told Arsene Wenger the perfectly sensible advice that he needed to sign a pacy, reliable goalscorer during the transfer window, the more he looked away. The more he put on his Christmas Island grimace, stuck his fingers in his ears and said: “Nah-rah-nahh-nahhn-nah, I can’t hear you, I CAN’T ACTUALLY HEAR YOU, ANY OF YOU.”

It was almost as if his pride would be hurt should he do something every newspaper, every fan, every borehole radio phone-in host had told him to do.

He resolutely refused, leaving his team woefully short of frontline pace and with a hit-and-miss main forward in Olivier Giroud. So, today the Camden New Journal and Islington Tribune launches its “DON'T SIGN A STRIKER, ARSENE” campaign.

Shsshsh. It may be the only way we can get what really want. You’ll be seeing a few campaign posters going up in nearby shop windows and we’ll have a petition for you to sign next week. Remember – and whisper it – the more people who sign up for the “DON'T SIGN A STRIKER, ARSENE” campaign, the more chance we have of getting a Diego Costa or a Cavani as a summer treat. Got it? So, tell your friends, hand out leaflets, shout it from this streets as loud as you can: “DON'T SIGN A STRIKER, ARSENE.” Thank me later.

SPURS by Catherine Etoe

SO Tottenham are riding high but hang on, what’s all this? Anything Spurs have done really badly this season Arsenal are doing as well? Our six-goal drubbing at the Etihad? Hey, Arsenal can pick the ball out of the net six times there too.

That time we let Liverpool put five goals past us? Wahey, right back at ya from the Arsenal boys.

Strewth, at this rate Arsenal’s thoroughbreds will top it all by going down with the trots on the last day of the season, flushing all their hopes of Champions League football down the pan in the process. Woah there, horsey, I hear you say. Arsenal ain’t Spurs and the worst we can finish is third. Well, I wouldn’t be so sure given the form of my Tottenham boys at the minute.

Of course, it could have been so different if Arsenal hadn’t been so cute when they tried to buy Luis Suarez in the summer.

Offering a lifetime supply of toothpaste on top of his release fee probably wasn’t the ideal way to get a club to part with their best player. Durr. It makes you shudder to think how easily Arsenal could have run away with the title if they’d landed Suarez, a man who scores and creates chances for fun. Instead, Suarez still plays for the team that left grown men burying their heads in their mittens on Saturday and Piers Morgan and countless other Gooners self-combusting on Twitter. Yikes! If Arsene Wenger had a pound for every time the words “fury”, “fall apart”, “season in tatters” and “disgrace” appeared in relation to AFC in the Twöötersphere on Saturday, he’d have enough dosh to, erm, buy a proper striker.

Makes you shudder to think.