belatedly, sam makes a post

oh hello again. it's been quite some time since I last updated and a whirlwind road trip around Southern Italy fell somewhere between now and my last post, but the truth is, I have been home for a few weeks now. I've just been horribly, fabulously lazy. Putzing around Munich doing nothing much outside of drinking beer and walking my dog. It's been relatively quiet on the definitive news front but there have been some developments to take note of.

• the aforementioned prospective Rafinha deal is all set to go ahead, so expect to see that official presentation in a matter of days, at the most. As mentioned by my esteemed colleague Brittany, Rafinha is a right back and this will see our pint-sized kapitän switched back over to the left flank. I always felt as if Lahm linked up better with Ribery than he did with Robben, so this could be a good thing for our offense as well as our defense, even though it's not technically Lahm's preferred position. It also has interesting ramifications for the national team, feel free to talk amongst yourselves about that.


• Neuer, Neuer, where art thou, Neuer? Rummenigge remains confident that Schalke will honor their agreement regarding Neuer's future transfer to Bayern. Bayern players are already practically referring to him as one of their club teammates. After Neuer rejected a clusterfuck of a last ditch attempt at getting him to renew his contract with Schalke (a messy affair which apparently involved Vladimir Putin, what), there's not much they can do except stall, and stalling is what they're doing while they try and find a replacement for him. It seems very much as if Schalke merely wants to drag this out a bit longer just to make it look as if they did everything they could to get Neuer to stay. It's frustrating for Bayern because I believe we want to get this transfer locked down before looking towards confirming further deals in fixing our defense, a defense that has been held together with scotch tape and hope in the past few seasons.


• speaking of further deals, Manchester City wants an absurd amount of money (I believe the figure I read was 18m?) for center back Jerome Boateng. I have a very dear friend who is a lifelong Manchester City fan and his gripes with the current management are many - I have been assured that there is no logical reasoning behind this demand, so we can assume that they're just doing it because they can. Great. I guess all we can do is wait and see.

Last but never, ever least, Franz Beckenbauer has officially retired from all held football related positions, choosing to spend more time with his family. We've all known this was coming for a while now and yet it still feels as if we're not really saying goodbye to him, because could we ever say goodbye to Herr Beckenbauer? He will always be our der kaiser. Thank you for everything, Franz.