Last season Campbell suffered intolerable abuse when he went back to White Hart Lane where the sides shared a 1-1 draw, with Arsenal winning 2-1 when they played at Highbury.”When you play Tottenham, it is prestige and rivalry, the same excitement but a bit different,” Wenger said.His Spurs counterpart, Glenn Hoddle, said now is as good a time as any for his team to be facing their rivals. “The game against Arsenal is always massive, whenever it comes up, whatever form you’re in. Form goes out of the window to a certain degree.”There is a lot of pride at stake. We’ve come off a draw and two losses and are having a bit of a blip We have got to turn it around. There is no better way to turn it around than winning against Arsenal. They are not in the greatest of shape, having won only one game in the last six or seven.”.

Newcastle are also involved in a project no self-respecting Premier League club is currently without: commercial expansion into China and the Far East. “A year of notable progress both on and off the pitch,” Shepherd said in Newcastle’s annual report. A Newcastle spokesman said most AGMs are held in Newcastle but this one is being held in London “for the benefit of institutional shareholders and to stimulate interest in Newcastle’s shares”. However, the 9.30 London start is likely to mean that few Geordie fans and small shareholders will be there to query some curious nuggets in the report’s small print.Shepherd himself enjoyed a year of “notable progress” in his own pay packet: his basic salary swelled from £75,000 the previous year to £330,000, an increase of 440 per cent.

He was also paid a bonus of £250,000, awarded by the board – which he chaired With other benefits, his overall package totalled £591,639. A spokesman for Newcastle said this could be justified because it was “on a par” with senior directors at Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal. This is sadly true, but Shepherd is also an executive director of Shepherd Offshore, the company he owns and runs with his brother, Bruce, which, according to the latest accounts, paid him £389,000.The Shepherds, who own 21 per cent of Newcastle mostly through their company, made a further £900,000 out of Newcastle as their share of a £4.5m dividend which has been declared, controversially because Newcastle made a loss. Nearly £2m of this dividend will be paid to the Hall family, who still own 43.6 per cent of Newcastle, held by Sir John and the target of many Geordie fans’ odium, his son, Douglas.