Is this dude taking the piss or is this dude taking the piss ? "Ashley Cole's taking his tapping up appeal all the way to the European courts" Just what we need at the beginning of an already difficult season, why can't the man just let it go ? Its only one weeks wages on his new deal.......
I think its more to prove a point, like when people contest a $130 fine and pay $2500 in legal fees and win. and wasn't he or his legal team arguing at some stage that players should be free to talk to other potential employers or something?
I wonder if Ashley has ever heard the saying let sleeping dogs lie? He wants to win the support of the fans back? And he continues to pursue this? Interesting line of "thinking".....
******** Ashley! Arsenal should have sold him and that chip on his shoulder. Clichy is ready to take over, and we could have used the transfer money to buy a big name in the midfield or at centerback.
Like we used the Vieira money? Arsenal doesn't do what Chelsea does and buy big names just to collect them. Even if we had gotten 30 million GBP, we couldn't have competed with Chelsea on most transfers. As Wenger has said in the past, he doesn't make moves just for the sake of making moves. Also, FYI, both Cole and Mourinho have had their fines cut down to 75,000 GBP. http://soccernet.espn.go.com/headlinenews?id=338815&cc=5901
I think its wrong to jump on Ashley about this now as I doubt it will have any effect on his play and I can understand why he'd be angry enough to try taking this to a court. I think he has a legitimate argument and I think his fine was a bit on the high side...
He's just another in a long line of jumped up pricks with an inflated ego. The rules are set, he chose to break them and he has been punished. Move on Ashley and grow a pair. Who the ******** does he think he is? Bosman mark 2? His idiotic legal rambling will only damage the game and is a petty middle finger to all of the footballing authorities. I honestly expected Chelsea to attempt something idiotic like this, not your lot. /end rant
No it's not even remotely the same. He was caught, along with his agent, talking to Chelsea. Totally bang to rights. If anything they should have increased his fine for wasting their time with an appeal. I said at the time we should have sold the ungrateful little cvnt and I stick by that. £15m-£20m in the bank and Clichy at left-back would suit me just fine.
I agree to a point, but then if we take into account Vieira's unsettling of the squd over his wanting to go, how do we know Ash's contact with Chelski isn't doing the same. I agree he is the best left back in the world at the moment. But with Clichy there and still improving, I am not sure that the need to keep players who have fallen out of love with Arsenal is still there. I know there are going to quite a few who this year will not sing Cole's name. In Austria a couple of friends had shirts being signed and asked Cole not to sign them.........
I too hope he stays. He's a great player, and an Arsenal fan, and he's not appealing against Arsenal. Having said that, he's being a complete twat at present, and if he hadn't have come thru the Arsenal ranks I'd say bin him too. Whether this is down to advice he's getting or whether he's doing off his own feelings is immaterial, he needs to give it up. The quotes about restriction of trade which seem to be the path they're following are just a joke given the benefits that he gets for being a footballer. As an aside, if the rumours about Essien going on strike if he doesn't get his move to Chelsea are true make him a player I'd never want to sign...
yeah, but this is starting to really annoy me, i mean ashley is one of my favourite players at the club. so, i hope he just puts all this crap with chelsea behind him, at the moment it looks like wishful thinking but i'm just hoping....
Before all this crap with Chelski i would of been clamouring for him to be Captain, as would have many fans. But when you do that, you break the bond between fan and player. I wonder what some Liverpool supporters think over Gerrard actually? It would be interesting to find out......... If he does put it behind him and does come out and play his best - great. But then he has to shut up about this fine and pay the damm thing. He can't have it both ways. The rules are there for a reason, it's not like he didn't know he was breaking them. Whether he agree's with them or not doesn't matter. The rules are there, he broke them - pay the fine and then try and win back the supporters instead of dragging this into the season. Whether he means it or not it will have an effect on the squad as the media will constantly focus on it.
Exactly what I was going to say. If you disagree with a rule, it doesn't give you permission to violate it. There are better routes to take. BTW When I log on and see thread titles like this is sorta freaks me out. LOL
Nothing to add to the Ash discussion other the repeat the obvious that nothing good will come of this appeal. However, I'd like to add that your avatar is giving me epileptic seizures, fox.
What the fvck? The idea behind the appeal is to show that those English rules are in violation of the controlling Euro laws and therefore are fvcking irrelevant. If you're so concerned with justice you'd recognize that and use you sh!t-talking "abilties" to slag the fa instead of an Arsenal player. But that would require the troll-mod to refrain from spewing sh!t on the Arsenal boards about one of our players, and that aint gonna happen. It's funny how those of us who are actually pissed about this meeting are able to discuss our traitor civilly, but you just can't miss the opportunity to call one of our players an idiotic prick with no balls when you think we might find it acceptible. And what exactly would be wrong with aspiring to be Bosman Mark 2? Why is it ok for the footballing authorities to stick their middle finger up at labor laws and not ok for workers to assert their rights? What's idiotic or rambling about his legal argument? Speaking of jumped-up pricks with inflated egos, what the fvck does a barely 20-y/o who has nothing better to do in life than post here 20 times a day know about any of this sh!t, anyways? It's not like this scenario is coming out of the blue; it's been whispered of since the inception of the EU and everyone's been waiting with baited breath to see who would be the test case. The fact that it's an Arsenal player is certainly inconvenient to Arsenal fans, but if you think Ash's case is absurd then you must have your head wedged up your a$$. And yes, as an Arsenal fan I am still pissed at Ash for this meeeting (especially considering the timing) and would have no problems with the club selling him. However, arguing against a worker asserting or exploring their rights smacks of fascism, regardless of how well-paid the worker is or any emotional connection one might have to the worker's product.
Right, but there are other rules that supercede those you speak of, and if the fa's rules are in violation of those then the fa needs to change. If he loses his case then he should pay his fines, pay his lawyers and shut up, but there's nothing wrong with exploring one's rights. It's funny; several people have said that this must be upsetting the other players, but if I were a pro footballer I'd be sending Ash a thank-you fruit basket for potentially making my next move easier.
I think what upsets a lot of people is that players are given very lucrative long term contracts that give them incredible job security, whereas I earn a relatively small wage compared to footballers, and I could be made redundent with only a very short period of notice. Ashley's agent talked about 'slavery' in footballers contracts. WTF ? Where are the leg irons/punishment beatings etc. This kind of talking upsets fans. The players should also be sensible enough to realise that if they are allowed to move on whenever they please it makes team building nigh on impossible, and would spoil many supporters enjoyment who identify with fans over a period of years, which is not so easy when they swop teams every 6 months. Yes footballers dont have the freedom of labour movement that I do, but on the other side it enables players like Winston Bogarde to provide for his descendants for quite some time, and I think even he would cough if he tried to use the word 'slavery' in describing his employment
Fox, calm down and cut out the crap. Football is already a special case and is governed by itself in lots of areas. What Cole is attempting to do will bring absolute chaos to our game. It is not workable and will frankly ruin football. That is why I am not happy and would be the same regardless of the actual player or club involved. Why don't you realise how fundamentally bad this situation is for the game we all love?
Oh, get off the socialist, "workers rights" bandwagon, Fox. This is football, not the meat packing plant from Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle". This is a guy who makes more in a week than I would over four years, and that's not counting all the endorsement deals his footballing career has allowed him to pursue. Pursuing free agency when you're out of a contract is one thing, and I agree with that one. Trying to assert that a contract is little more than a piece of paper that you can throw away at your leisure is something else. Contracts are legally binding documents, not toilet paper. I think you're also forgetting that many companies employ non-compete clauses right now. I know that in the television industry it's an extremely common, though controversial, practice. Even if you quit, there's a minimum time period before you can go and work for a competitor. Other companies have that too, with stringent guidelines for reasons you can leave, like a huge promotion, a significant jump in salary, etc. Seeing as how Ash can't be promoted from "Left Back" to "Executive Left Back", I don't think he would meet the requirement, plus he'd be moving to a competitor. And let's not forget what's at the core of this whole thing: it's about the rich attempting to get richer. Ash knows he can pull in six figures a week at Chelsea or Real Madrid. Underneath all of this "workers rights" BS, that's what it all comes down to. To try and romanticize it and make it seem like "Ash vs. the Establishment" is very narrow-minded. The workers' rights people always make the argument that the rich are making too much money, yet now you want to allow a guy already making millions the chance to buy another Ferrari? That makes no sense to me. As far as the EU goes, two points on this. First, the EU rules are set up for the guy in the Volkswagen or Airbus factory who's making $10 an hour, not the footballer making $10 a minute. The second point is that, if you've been reading the papers or Business Week, you know that many EU countries' "Labor First" rules are backfiring on them badly. France's unemployment is over 10% and Germany will probably have a new right-wing chancellor by the end of the year because the labor rules are crippling the German economy, since everyone can now just go to either Eastern Europe or Asia for cheaper labor. So the rules he's trying to exploit might not even be there in a few years because there's so many problems with them at their base. Honestly, this idea that Cole is some kind of Messiah for footballers is disgusting. He's a greedy footballer out for himself, but trying to make it look like he's trying to help everyone else.
