Evening,

today I’ve had a little time to do some digging on the main issue at the moment, Adebayor’s impending move up north to Manchester Citeh. Today his work permit was granted and as we said yesterday, he has already passed his medical.

If the few loose ends are tied up (believed to be Ade’s demands for 170k a week), he may well be unveiled on Friday.

Whilst doing a little browsing I came across this article, it features quotes from Arsene Wenger at the tail end of his most famous season, 2007-08.

Wenger clearly makes the point that Adebayor would be a ‘nobody’ without his work ethic that brought him so much success and seemed to transform him from Ade-akinbye-or into one of the most sought after forwards in Europe. As his reputation and wage packet grew, his ego simply exploded. Suddenly he was bigger than the team, nothing was his fault, it was the fans. It was the newspapers fault that his quotes ended up on the back page of the paper saying he wanted to move to AC Milan where Beyonce was waiting for him.

Adebayor cares about one person, Adebayor. He doesn’t care about Arsenal, City, his national team or what people think of him. He thinks about his special ’25′ car seats and his wage packet.

As his ego has grown, his work rate has slowed to a lazy gander, not even the Champions League semi-final could get him moving, not even an improved contract could get him running about a bit more. He had officially made it in his mind.

Wenger’s reason for getting shot of one of the Emmanuel’s was revealed a long time ago and during his most successful spell, as I pointed out earlier.

He warned:

“I believe he has to keep a good working attitude. We have seen players before, when they start getting the recognition, they ease off in their team work, and very quickly they die.”

This all sounds rather familiar, he won his fans because of his endless hounding of defenders, even when he was missing total and utter sitters against Portsmouth and the likes.

“I believe if Ade keeps his work ethic, there is still 20 per cent more to come from him. Does he want it enough – to get this extra 20 per cent out? Well that is where his future lies. If you lose that desire, you quickly become a nobody.”

Ade was the deadlocked workaholic, then he hit the big time…..in his opinion. Since then it has been downhill, the need to run had evaporated. He was the big man, he should have everything laid on a platter for him.

It seems that when he thinks he is the main man he plays his worst, he has never been particularly good for Togo, at Monaco even Wenger admitted that he didn’t work as hard as he did at the start of his Arsenal career:

“He was never prolific at Monaco, but he has worked hard for it at Arsenal and it highlights that our offensive game favours the strikers. You will never starve as a striker at Arsenal – you get the quality balls to work with. Ade will be the first to agree with that.”

At Man City he will be thought of as one of the big men, he looks set to be on higher wages than Robinho, Tevez, Ireland and Santa Cruz. He will be paid more than anyone else in the Premiership and its certainly likely that he will be the fourth highest paid player in the world after Ronaldo, Kaka and maybe Beckham.

This isn’t the 3 million Adebayor, this is the 25 million, 170k a week earning Adebayor at a team he thinks he is the big man.

Its a car crash waiting to happen for a player who promised so, so much. In the words of Wenger: Does he want it enough – to get this extra 20 per cent out?

Whilst this circus continues I would again like to mention that my thoughts are with John Hartson and his family after more horrible revelations about his battle with cancer have been made public. Nobody deserves such rotten luck.

More tomorrow.