Arsenal Bid For Barca Midfielder & Hold Talks With Former Chelsea Man

A couple of interesting bits of transfer news to bring you today with reports claiming we’ve made a cheeky bid for Barcelona midfielder/defender Javier Mascherano and have held talks with former Chelsea attacker Saloman Kalou over a move to the Emirates. Lets start with Mascherano link and talkSPORT are suggesting that we have made a surprise bid for the Argentinean defensive midfielder. There is very little substance to the story other than to say we’ve made an offer. There is no detail of how much the bid was supposed to be for or whether Barca were receptive to it, but judging by how limited their defensive options are at present I’m guessing they politely told us where to go. Mascherano of course has experience in the Premier League after playing for West Ham and Liverpool, but even if the Catalans were open to selling him I’m not sure the 29-year-old would be up for the move. I suppose he doesn’t get regular games so he could be tempted, but I really don’t see anything in this one. Plus, we’ve just signed Flamini on a free and he’s a little bit like Mascherano, only cheaper and not as good! Next and the Daily Mail are claiming we’ve held talks with Lille over former Chelsea attacker Kalou, who’s available this summer for around £2.6m. The 28-year-old only joined the French outfit last summer but they want to sell him already and he’s been linked with the likes of Liverpool, Cardiff and West Brom but none were able to agree terms. Kalou is understood to be demanding £60,000-a- week and the newspaper claims we’re mulling over whether to go ahead with the deal or hold out in the hope we can land a bigger name. I’m sorry, but if Kalou is the ‘top, top, top’ quality player Arsene Wenger has been banging on about, I give up. Sure he’s is a decent enough player but he’s a Chelsea reject and we should be aspiring to be better that the likes of Chelsea, which won’t happen if we’re signing players of the caliber of Kalou. Hopefully this is idle paper-talk as I’d be seriously underwhelmed if we ended up signing the Ivorian. I’d rather have kept Gervinho. Less than 3 days to go. Tick, tock Arsene……