A day at the Emirates with Robert Pires and Gianfranco Zola, but not Luis Boa-Morte

The end of the season usually brings with it the same desperate feeling that once again your team has failed to hit the heights of mediocrity, having spent the majority of the previous nine months languishing towards the bottom. At least it does for me.

However, thanks to Indesit (my extractor fan is made by them) and We Are Social this season had a much softer and pleasant conclusion.

From the plush comfort of the Diamond Club executive bar, I watched a series of competition winners battle it out in the guise of Arsenal, PSG, Shakhtar Donetsk and AC Milan on a cold Tuesday afternoon dominated by a hail storm.

This proved to be an entertaining and even amusing sideshow – largely thanks to the exploits of Arsenal’s keeper for the day – but the main event was talking to Robert Pires.

Sat behind a table display which he compulsively toyed with, he happily chatted in surprisingly broken English about his time with Arsenal to a table of starry-eyed Gunners fans.

He briefly touched upon his time in the Midlands with Villa, but the best he could say was that the club had “wonderful training facilities”, but despite the lack of detail in his answers and his agent helping him through the spiky and sometimes barbed questions, his audience swooned.

The man’s gentle manner and apparent shyness lent him an endearing personality as he affectionately reminisced.

Not to be outdone, Gianfranco Zola was also there and I was delighted to see that I was taller than the little wizard. Also present was Daniel Massaro, Jean Pierre-Papin and Faustino Asprilla, who a fellow blogger oddly mistook for Luis Boa-Morte.

I’m not sure the latter gets invited to many corporate events.

However, it was Pires that captivated, even if he did score this wonder goal against my boyhood team.