Given the way he whined after Wednesday's Champions League final, the assumption was that French international Thierry Henry and Arsenal were divorcing. Instead he's coming back:
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| LUCA BRUNO/ASSOCIATED PRESS |
| Wenger and Henry: Sticking together. |
“I am staying to play longer for the club that I love,” the 28-year-old Henry said at a news conference at the Gunners’ training ground. “I won’t lie, at one point it (leaving) did cross my mind but I’m a guy who thinks with his heart. My heart told me to stay.”
“Arsene, the club, the fans, I couldn’t let them down,” he said sitting next to manager Arsene Wenger.
Henry is set to earn as much as 130,000 pounds ($274,060 Canadian) a week, according to British papers. That would likely make him one of England’s two highest-paid players, along with Michael Ballack, who joined Chelsea on Monday from Bayern Munich.
Ballack's unveiling on Monday was full of the same kind of hooey - even more so, actually, including this howler from the German: "There are no guarantees I will be in the team."
This Henry deal is not quite the same - unlike Ballack, he's not merely following the scent of money. He's staying put for the money (and comfort level, and next year's Champions League playdowns, Arsenal having squeaked in to that one that one thanks to a fortuitous lasagna virus). Despite all the earlier speculation, this deal always seemed the strong favourite: With Arsenal set to move into their new money-spinning stadium and their team value skyrocketing, it's a marriage made in a bank vault.
As for the World Cup, we'll see Henry and Ballack there. For a little while, anyway. But no matter how their teams perform, they'd be hard pressed to be any worse than this abomination (link from Deadspin, of course).
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