Ed’s note – Regular correspondent Adrian Wagenaar forwarded me this email he had sent to Jeff Powell at the Daily Mail in reaction to the ‘How long can Arsenal get by without a backer’ snippet at the bottom of this column.

It’s so brief, I’ll repeat it in full here…

How long can Arsenal get by without a backer

Arsenal keep selling dear, buying cheap, crossing fingers and hoping Arsene Wenger can put an end to three years without a trophy. And they still don’t need a super-rich foreign buyer like Manchester United and Chelsea?

Here’s what Adrian sent to Powell in response…

Subject: Your barbed little footnote

Dear Mr Powell

First may I start by saying that I only read The Daily Mail because my wife insists we take the paper. Any semblance of The Mail having a sports section ended when Ian Wooldridge sadly passed away.

Your remarks about Arsenal selling dear and buying cheap need re-phrasing. Arsenal buy players young and sell at them at their peak. This is called “sound business”. Our three years without a trophy is one year less than the four we waited before we won a second double under Wenger in 2002 and then we had our unbeaten season in 2003/04.

Chelsea won the same as Arsenal last season and played some pretty putrid football on the way to achieving nothing. Arsenal are going to have some lean years till the Highbury Square development money comes on stream and some less than lucrative sponsorships come to an end. You would be better off spending your time working out how the Glazers are going to pay off some of the loans that are riding on Man Utd that are due in the next few years as the full enormity of the Glazers takeover starts to bite.

I suspect that your footnote in support of foreign club ownership is more to do with Red and White Holdings (or Fat and Orange as we like to call them).

Please reassure me that you have not joined that growing band of benign sports writers who seem to be part of Red and White’s PR drivel to try and convince Arsenal fans that we need huge cash injections from an overseas benefactor. You have followed football long enough to know that money is not a guarantee for success, Man City for the Premiership? No, of course not.

May I also suggest you investigate the thought process that has seen Liverpool pay £18 million for a player who has probably has only one or two good years left in him, directly contrasting to Arsenal. Liverpool have, mixing your words, bought dear to only ever sell on cheap. The answer ‘Because they might win the league with Keane’ is not allowed because clearly anyone who knows the first thing about football would never utter anything so stupid.

I’ll be watching your column for any further R & W bullsh*t

Yours

Adrian Wagenaar

(Ed’s note – Thanks to Adrian for allowing me to re-produce this, as yet there has been no reply from Jeff Powell. And now my own take on the situation from here on)

It does seem odd that a lot of these ‘Usmanov’s money/David Dein is needed at Arsenal’ stories seem to get published in the Mail, often gratuitously a dropped-in paragraph somewhere in any transfer speculation story regarding the club for no apparent reason.

There’s no doubt that a selected number of journalists had a pretty enjoyable trip to Moscow last year funded by Red and White Holdings so that Usmanov could explain to them that his love for Arsenal went so deep that he couldn’t remember Thierry Henry played for the last ‘double’ side and that Gilberto, Kolo Toure and Gael Clichy apparently did. David Dein had informed journalists earlier of how big a fan the Uzbeki was, demonstrating how much knowledge he had of the man he sold 16% of his beloved Arsenal to.

So what the hell is behind these gratuitous drop-ins of continued praise for Red and White and David Dein in the Mail’s stories this summer? Does David Dein have video footage of the Mail sports editor doing the kind of thing Max Mosley might get up to in his spare time? There’s definitely something going on, as this habitual agenda setting is becoming like the dripping tap of Chinese water torture. And what credibility anyone ever gave to the content of the sports coverage of the Mail is being seriously undermined.