fans like Nic are also ace.
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fans like Nic are also ace.
until the end of the summer to see who he might buy.
Then the next season has already started by that point so then Wenger gets more time to 'see how the new team works' 'gels' etc.
Then repeat or say this team needs a few seasons to get used to each other.
nt
In his case that is...
:hehe:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/13 73322/Saddams-son-tortured-defeated-footballers.html
UDAY HUSSEIN lived up to his reputation as football's worst loser last week when three Iraqi soccer stars were imprisoned and tortured as punishment for the national side's ignominious exit from the Asian Cup.
The soccer-mad son of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, also sacked the whole of the national football federation - sparing, not surprisingly, only himself as its chief. Uday, 36, a bullying playboy who oversees sport in the country as head of the Iraqi Olympic Committee, is infamous for unleashing his violent rages on the country's forlorn footballers. He once ordered that the entire national team be whipped on the soles of their feet after losing a crucial World Cup qualifying game.
His latest outburst followed Iraq's 4-1 quarter-final defeat in Beirut on October 24 at the hands of Japan, the eventual Asian Cup winners. The goalkeeper Hashim Hassan, defender Abdul Jaber and striker Qahtan Chither were singled out as the main culprits for the thrashing.
A senior Iraqi defector, now based in London, has told The Telegraph that on the team's return to Baghdad last week, the hapless trio were taken straight to Uday's power base, the lavish Olympic Committee headquarters. Uday's offices are housed in a nine-storey former hotel set amid several acres of attractive gardens and lakes, which contrast sharply with the grimy impoverished air of the capital after a decade of sanctions.
A prison is located in the building's basement where Hashim, Abdul and Qahtan were beaten and whipped for three days by Uday's bodyguards before being released. By previous standards, however, the three could consider themselves lucky. While footballers who are deemed to have underperformed elsewhere in the world only face being dropped from the squad, sporting retribution in Iraq is a much more serious affair.
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Sharar Haydar Mohamad fled Iraq in 1998 after he and several team-mates were tortured in the country's most infamous prison at Al Radwaniya, near Baghdad. He described being dragged through a gravel pit and immersed in a sewage tank. Another defector said that players were forced to kick a concrete football at the jail after failing to reach the 1994 World Cup finals.
Uday's younger brother Qusay, the country's security and intelligence chief, has replaced him as Saddam's chosen heir. Even the brutal Iraqi dictator baulked at his oldest son's violent fits of rage which are said to have worsened since a 1996 assassination attempt paralysed him from the waist down.
Uday has never been able to accept the team's decline since international sanctions were imposed on the country. Before the Gulf war, Iraq was one of the Middle East's strongest footballing nations, winning the Arab Cup three times, the Gulf Cup twice and the Asian Games once during the Eighties.
Former regime officials who have defected to the West say that Saddam's oldest son believes that the threat of torture will scare players into better performances. Iraq's record in recent years suggests that his motivational tactics leave much to be desired.