“Pascal Cygan, come on down and pick up your pair of Iron Balls. Cygan stepped into our match against PSV in midweek when Martin Keown got injured in the 10th minute. He played beautifully and we never missed a beat. Then in a fiery match at Leeds he got in the spirit by (allegedly) stamping on Lee Bowyer when they got into an entanglement.

No softie, this guy. I expect that he and Sol will end up becoming a fantastic partnership.

The Urban Legend that inspired this feature:

Every sailing ship had to have a cannon for protection. Cannons of the time required round, iron cannonballs. The master wanted to store the cannonballs such that they could be of instant use when needed, yet not roll around the gun deck. The solution was to stack them up in a square-based pyramid next to the cannon. The top level of the stack had one ball, the next level down had four, the next had nine, the next had sixteen, and so on. Four levels would provide a stack of 30 cannonballs. The only real problem was how to keep the bottom level from sliding out from under the weight of the higher levels. To do this, they devised a small brass plate (“”brass monkey”") with one rounded indentation for each cannonball in the bottom layer. Brass was used because the cannonballs wouldn’t rust to the “”brass monkey”", but would rust to an iron one. When the temperature falls, brass contracts in size faster than iron. As it got cold on the gun decks, the indentations in the brass monkey would get smaller than the iron cannonballs they were holding. If the temperature got cold enough, the bottom layer would pop out of the indentations spilling the entire pyramid over the deck. Thus it was, quite literally, “”cold enough to freeze the balls off a “”brass monkey.”"

So Arsenal players who shrink in the face of pressure receive a Brass Monkey. Those who show grit and heart receive a set of Iron Balls.

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