Aliou and Edouard are in the EPL, while Djibril is the Next Big Thing for France and is still at Auxerre. Auxerre, by the way, are famous for their youth academy, which puts most other teams in Europe to shame. Young talent is the name of the game. In addition to Cisse, there's Phillipe Mexes, the 21-year-old defender who is almost certainly spending his last season in France before a big-money move abroad.
TV prospects If ESPN continues with its CL programming philosophy from last season, we're pretty much hosed as far as seeing any of the Arsenal first group stage matches. According to soccertv (and yes, I know some of you think the guy's full of Sp*rs but I've found him to be pretty accurate), ESPN is more likely to show matches involving Spanish and Italian teams - apparently, those matches get the best ratings in the U.S. So expect a lot of Group G (Deportivo and AC Milan) and not a lot of our group. I wouldn't be surprised if they threw in a couple of ManUre matches, as well. I'll predict right now that not one of our first group stage matches will be shown on the ESPN networks.
Dwinkler is right, we'll gets hosed by ESPN. Plus, ESPN decided not to show the Tues fixture some weeks and that cuts our opportunities even more. Ian, its all you baby! One saving grace may be the ESPN hot team list from a few months back. If enough of us emailed them we may have made a point to show the CL games.
http://www.arsenal.com/sportsappcon...e&type=com.sportapps.news.NewsItem&id=2997149 Le Boss on the draw...
Auxerre, Dortmund and PSV Eindhoven? Hmm, tough but not completely undoable. Dortmund and PSV are both solid teams and Auxerre has some pretty good young Frenchmen. It won't be easy but it can be done I suppose. And if anyone can mastermind a successful negotiation of a tricky group it's Mr. Wenger. The players aren't the only one's who've learned from the trials and trevails of our previous European excursions (read: heartbreaks). The gaffer himself has grown more savvy with them.
The players will obviously be more experienced in Europe this year. After going out in the second phase last year, they'll want to at least make the knock-out stages again. We have to remember that experience iseverything at this level. It took Man Yoo several seasons of competition before they foinally won it and we need to learn our lessons.