What happened between William Gallas and Samir Nasri in
2008...
William Gallas is likely to have played his last game
for Arsenal after he was stripped of the club captaincy and dropped
from the squad to play Manchester City for criticising his
team-mates in an interview while on international duty with France
this week.
The 31-year-old defender was also fined £180,000, two weeks'
wages, by Arsène Wenger when he reported for what he thought would
be clear-the-air talks with his manager.
In the interview that cost him the captaincy and put a question
mark over his future at the club, Gallas claimed that two Arsenal
players - believed to be Robin van Persie and Theo Walcott - fought
in the dressing-room at half-time during the 4-4 draw with
Tottenham Hotspur last month and that team morale at the club has
suffered this season because of the bad attitude and behaviour of
one unnamed player.
Gallas arrived at Arsenal's training ground in Hertfordshire
yesterday expecting to be let off with a slap on the wrist or a
fine but Wenger decided to act. Gallas tried to explain that his
comments had been taken out of context and that their real meaning
had been lost in translation but Wenger believed that he could no
longer rely on a player who had broken the unwritten rule that what
goes on in the dressing-room stays there.
Wenger called time on Gallas's 15-month spell as captain after
it emerged that he had also complained about the behaviour of a
France team-mate, believed to be Samir Nasri, the Arsenal midfield
player, in his autobiography, which was published in France this
week. In the book, he describes tensions in France's squad during
Euro 2008 caused by a young midfield player he refers to as “S”.
French newspapers reported last night that “S” was Nasri. Gallas
describes a confrontation with “S” on the training pitch in
Switzerland. “Are you speaking to me? Who do you take yourself for?
You're only 20 [which Nasri was at the time]... I am not your
friend,” Gallas says he told the player. The player responded: “I'm
not your friend, either,”
Former France team doctor Jean-Pierre Paclet has
defended Chelsea striker Nicolas Anelka's role in Les Bleus' World
Cup meltdown and blamed Arsenal's Samir Nasri for causing problems
in the team in recent years.
Nasri was not included in the squad for the World Cup, but
Paclet alleges that the 23-year-old was a source of a disquiet
which dates back further than June after upsetting captain Patrice
Evra and senior professionals Thierry Henry, William Gallas and
former Marseille team-mate Franck Ribery.
''Here was a kid with a dozen caps looking down on players with
a hundred. Scarcely believable,'' Paclet claimed in extracts from
his book L'Implosion. ''His behaviour gets on the nerves
of almost everybody and he has the gift of really annoying Henry,
Gallas and Patrice Evra.
''Most of all, the relationship between Nasri and Ribery was
very tense, from the time they were together at Marseille. They
were more like kids in a playground rather than professionals on a
pitch.
''Ribery would cause general laughter if, say, he put salt in my
coffee. If he did it to Nasri, there would be no sense of humour
from him.''