So, the magnificent new stadium is nearly open, and we are getting ready to move to our new home. The club have a spanking new office block close to the stadium, from where they will control everything.

Given this fantastic new start, it was good to see that nothing has changed or improved in the club's commercial and communications departments. We found out on July 3rd that Cesc Fabregas is to wear the number 4 shirt next season, the number that Patrick Vieira wore, and a huge vote of confidence in a 19-year-old - surely a sign that Wenger wants to build the team around him in years to come. We also learned that our new signing, who impressed so much at the World Cup, will wear the number 7 shirt vacated by Pires - suggesting that he will go straight into the first team.

A shame, then, about how Arsenal fans discovered this news. Surely the opportunity was right for a press conference or official club announcement, where Wenger handed Cesc the number 4 shirt, and publicly declared how much faith he has in this fantastic young player. Instead, the news slipped out because the new home shirt became available for pre-order online - and "Fabregas 4" was one of the shirt printing options.

Seems (again) to be a case of the left hand (in this case the communications department) not knowing what the right hand (or the commercial department) is doing! What should be a significant piece of news for us all, is allowed to just slip out and become a complete anticlimax. The club may not view this kind of thing as important, but Arsenal fans surely do - so either the club underestimate the importance of this sort of news for fans, or more likely their eyes were off the ball as ever, and they lost control of the news that comes out.

Finally, around Highbury for the last six months or so, on non-matchdays, the dot matrix boards around the North Bank turnstiles have quite frequently read "July 28 2005". This really annoys me, because it just proves that nobody there gives a toss. It would be so easy for somebody to get rid of a clearly nonsensical (not to mention wrong) message from the public display boards, but for months on end now, nobody has been bothered to do it. They used to be a cut above that kind of thing at Arsenal.