It’s the holiday from hell

There’s a story around Arsenal that, when one of the old foreign players was first told of the demanding Christmas fixture list, he genuinely thought it was a wind-up.

Not wanting to get himself into another situation like cursing on TV because his team-mates had informed him it was a polite greeting, the player was going to stay at home rather than head in for a late December training session. He eventually had to be told that, no, this is serious.

As Lee Dixon says, the players from abroad “couldn’t quite understand it”.