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Welcome in to the latest edition of ESPNFC. I'm Dan Thomas joined by Craig Burley and Shaka here.

Islam Eze's proposed move to Arsenal.

Still very much the big headline around the Premier League at the moment.

Of course, this is a deal that Tottenham thought.

They had done, however, Arsle in the last 24 hours of come in and hijacked it and it looks

like the English international will be heading to the Emirates.

For more on this, James Olli joins us.

James, obviously we thought that ESE might play today.

There were suggestions, of course, Crystal Palace in this conference playoff game that

a deal was done between Spurs and palace that he would play in

this match obviously that didn't happen today no it didn't it's been it's been quite a dramatic

day or so um i think spurs have made all the running on this right until uh yesterday afternoon

really when arsenal decided to to make their move for as a and the thing is they kind of knew they always had up their sleeve the fact that he is a boyhood Arsenal fan that he always had this dream to one day play for Arsenal.

Spurs of course had got to the point where they'd agreed a fee with Palace, they'd agreed with Eze that he would come.

Eze was quite happy to come despite the fact that he was a boyhood fan, he felt as though that was the big move that was available to him. But then a combination of things, really sort of the final piece of the jigsaw, really, being the injury to Kai Havert. We don't know exactly how bad that is, but it's bad enough for Arsenal to reassess their position in the market. But that was enough to be the catalyst for them to go and say to Palace, right, what if Spurs negotiated? We'll match that, and we know the player wants to come to us. So once they made the decision to go for it, it was quite quick, and it moved, yeah, and it moved very, very fast. This begs the question, though, James. Why didn't Arsenal just get this done earlier on in the window? If they had the funds there, they knew that ESE could be available, we know what he would bring to the table. Why is it taking them this long? Why is it taking it to this point? Okay, so there's a couple of reasons for that. Firstly there was a 68 million pound release clause in

Eze's contract that expired earlier this month and nobody, Arsenal and Spurs included, felt

he was quite worth that. So they thought, well, let's let that expire and then see where

we are later in the window. The second point was that their interest was partly contingent

on the fear that Ethan Wanieri would not sign a new contract and they felt that their interest was partly contingent on the fear that Ethan

Juanieri would not sign a new contract and they felt that if he was going to run his deal

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