Beef Bagel

The Ajax arena was awash with its usual compliment of the mayonnaise insane, the utterly stoned and new wave hooligans last weekend to watch their team turn a 1-2 deficit against Groningen into a 3-2 victory. However, there was a small posse of some English based scouts, notebooks in hands and evaluation etched on their faces to watch two particular youngsters. The true blue orange lads in question were. Klaas-Jan Huntelaar (great name) and Ryan Babel (a less interesting name). Here are their heads…

 

…attractive lad…

…more Wenger’s type and holding what must be the world’s largest shirt.

Babel’s the youngun’ at a tender 19, whilst Huntelaar’s the one with the experience at 23. Both are strikers and both around 6′1″, weighing in at roughly 75kgs a piece.

Babel was part the unsuccessful Dutch national squad at Germany 2006 whereas the excluded Huntelaar led the U21’s to World Cup victory with himself as top scorer. The Bagel saw some of this football late night on Channel 5. It was shit hot. If only the big boys’ World Cup could have come up with games of the calibre of the ones I saw, such as Holland vs. Italy and Holland vs. France. These were true European classics with all sides playing football, the like of which their seniors can only dream and yes, Huntelaar scored some crackers.

By no means take this as a slur on Babel, who bagged two of the goals in the scouted Eredivese game and is number one on Arsene Wenger’s Christmas wish list. Either of these players would be fine, fine additions to our squad and although we hold the double Dutch trump cards of Jol and Davids, we’ll be lucky to get any play with the Champions League four hot on their trails and Newcastle getting involved purely to be seen to be doing something. But then many a good player has fallen for that club way up in tundra before. They never realised England went so far north.

It may well be that these two lads go nowhere at all since Holland head coach and living legend Marco Van Basten has suggested that they stay in the Netherlands for another couple of years. With his finger on the selection button, this feels rather like an offer they can’t refuse but you never know how much Ajax may want that juicy, juicy cash. We’ll see.

What this does mean, is that with more hot players under the transfer microscope, it does begin to become a buyers market, whereby all players cannot be snaffled by the top clubs. They can’t all play for Arsenal and as horrible as it sounds, they may have to settle for us. Let’s hope by January we’ve improved our league position some and that we’re still in the UEFA cup. Might as well make ourselves look as attractive as possible. You never now what we’ll be taking home at the end of the night. Just hope there’s no beer goggles involved.

Ten to two, anything’ll do.

The Bagel. 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 17th, 2006 at 2:01 pm and is filed under Transfer News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.