Bobby joined us in the summer of 2000 and struggled initially to win us over. He looked a bit lightweight in his first season. But once he found his feet in the English game (even if staying on them still occasionally proved to be a problem) his passing and goalscoring became crucial to the style of play of Arsene Wenger's second great Arsenal side. In his second year at the club, Pires suffered a bad injury towards the end of the season, but still finished up setting a record for Premiership assists and winning the Football Writers Player of the Year award.

Even with Bobby on the right and Freddie Ljungberg on the left, Arsenal's critics talked about over-reliance on Thierry Henry's goalscoring. But the truth is that Pires, from midfield, regularly made it into the Premiership's top 10 goalscorers including an astonishing 3rd place with 19 goals in the unbeaten 2003-04 season. He was also Arsenal's second highest scorer on many occasions. But he also learned how to tackle back (if not quite as well as Freddie), a skill he used to great effect in robbing Patrick Vieira of the ball to set up our win over Juventus last season.

Pires won the Premiership twice with Arsenal - both of them special years (a double in 2001-02, an unbeaten season in 03-04) and the FA Cup three times. The official site has put up a page paying tribute to Bobby's astounding record against Tottenham in particular: 8 goals in 12 games and never on the losing side. Since his first game at the Lane in 2000, Bobby never failed to score in the away derby match.

Today it had finally been confirmed that he's joined the yellow submarines, our Champs League semi-final victims, on a 2 year deal. Pires was out of contract at Arsenal, and clearly decided that a 1 year deal at Arsenal wasn't good enough. While I wish he'd stayed anyway, I guess on reflection that his situation was a bit different to that of Dennis Bergkamp. As an out-of-contract player he can get a good pay-out from this move, but if he'd stayed another year and not got to play very much, it might have been harder for him to secure such a lucrative deal. This may have been his last chance for a Bosman payday, so it's reasonable that he decided to take it. Even if moving to such a relatively small club (no offence) seems to spell a premature end to his career at the very highest level. I hope that he can prove me wrong about that, and we'll see him lifting the UEFA Cup with them next spring (they've got to get through the InterToto to qualify for it first though).