The Athletic

Hello, I'm Dan Bardell and I'm Flolo Hughes.

And welcome to the Athletic Football podcast.

It's Wednesday, which means we'll be picking out some of the best work available on the Athletic right now and putting the authors under the spotlight. This week, we're going to highlight a really good article entitled A Footballer's Guide to Christmas Parties, The Fines, 50 Cuffs, Foreign Trips and Fancy Dress. It's a lot of Fs there. It's been brilliantly put together by our wolves correspondent Tim Spears with help from the former wall swinger Matt Jarvis and Tim will join us to dish the dirt shortly. Yeah, looking forward to catching up with Tim. It was a really, really funny and interesting piece. But before we do say hello to Tim, some breaking news flow as we're recording.

Arsenal have stripped a Bamiang of the captaincy,

and I've said that he will not take part in the game against West Ham this week.

Yeah, it's a really interesting one because none of us will ever know what's really happened,

I don't think.

I think David Ornstein is probably the only person who will ever really know as close to the truth as possible. He knows everything David Ornstein. He has a ridiculous network of contacts. But I'm sure that, you know, there's lots of things that we will never know what truly happened. And it's probably also a build up of various things. I don't think from what we understand from the situation looks like he went to go visit his mom and he was a little bit late getting back from that trip because of COVID protocols.

It adds sort of complications.

It seems like it can't just be that and maybe it's a buildup of other issues.

But yeah, a really interesting one.

And I think why

our teteer is trying to be so strict is because of what's happened in the past at

arsenal and I think he's really trying to stamp his authority because he knows that with

the position that they're in with the chaos that the club has been through over the last few years.

He really wants to establish himself as the man, the man in charge, the man with the power,

and that no one is above him.

And I think it's a really fine balance to strike because you've got your star player who you gave the

captain armband to sweeten up and it's something that lots of clubs do. And what do you do

now? Where do you go from now? They had a good result against Southampton at the weekend, but they've

got West Ham on Wednesday night, a lot of Christmas fixtures. Is this going to be something that he's

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