Ever since Cesc Fabregas made his Arsenal first-team debut as a 16-year-old it was obvious that he was a player of exceptional promise. He has since become the one truly indispensable Arsenal player: captain, playmaker and inspiration.

The story is well known of how the Gunners found Fabregas in the Barcelona youth team and rustled him back to London. For this reason, he has long been considered a Barcelona player-in-exile, one awaiting the inevitable call to return home to Catalonia.

Could that call now come sooner than expected? There is speculation that Barcelona are preparing a huge bid to lure him away from London.

Much as I admire Fabregas, as all Gooners do, I believe Arsenal should sell him.

My reasons are economic and aesthetic. Economics first. Arsenal should receive as much as £40million for their captain, at a time when Arsene Wenger continues to operate within strict fiscal constraints. Good business. In addition, Wenger has in his youth team a ready made if raw replacement: Jack Wilshire, 17, a midfield creator of such potential that some think he may even be included in England's final World Cup squad for South Africa 2010.

Now for the aesthetic. Long before Barcelona's Champions League triumph over Manchester United consensus was growing that, under coach Josep Guardiola, something remarkable was happening at the Nou Camp, a purist experiment to compare with the Dutch Total Football adventurism of the early Seventies.

Johann Cruyff; Eric Cantona; Michael Robinson, the Liverpool striker turned articulate pundit on Spanish television; Simon Kuper, sportswriter and expert commentator on Barcelona - all agree that the Catalan club are redefining the art of the possible. And in Andres Iniesta and Xavi they have the outstanding midfielders in Europe.

In many ways, Fabregas, in style, closely resembles both Iniesta and Xavi, which is why he cannot find a place in Spain's starting line-up (Marcos Senna, of Villarreal, occupies the holding role). Yet he has started alongside Xavi and Iniesta, pushed forward in the "hole" behind the central striker, as he was in the final of Euro 2008 following the injury to David Villa.

Catalans like to say that Barca, the team they support with such fervour, are "more than a club"; what they are, rather, as Kuper has written, is "a sort of psychological surrogate for the state they do not have".

For Catalans, fandom is an expression of romantic nationalism: the love of club is coterminous with the love of Catalonia itself, a proud, once-persecuted nation and still without a state in the Spanish kingdom. No one who loves football, least of all Gooners, should begrudge Fabregas his right of return.

How thrilling it would be to see him in the same team as fellow Catalans Xavi and Iniesta. The very pre-eminence of these three pass masters suggests that guile and technique may yet triumph ultimately over speed and muscularity in the modern game.

Why I'm leery of beery Derby day

THE Derby remains one of the greatest of all horse races — one never ceases to marvel at the majesty of the racehorse — but there is nowhere I would less rather be than at Epsom tomorrow.

Since the race was moved to Saturday to attract more spectators one of the great set pieces of the sporting summer has, for the ordinary spectator at least, become little more than an exercise in purposeless suffering.

I was there a couple of years ago and the experience was a bit like being trapped in a vast pub with a horde of drunks — except that some of them were smartly dressed.

Later, as I left the racecourse, I passed through a battlefield of the fallen, the stricken, the comatose. It was as if some strange calamity had befallen this corner of England.

Everyone knows that during the New Labour years our public spaces and our town centres, especially at night, have become degraded, the domain of the binge drinker and the brawler.

Well, they will be drinking and brawling on the Downs tomorrow, and good luck to them, you might say. I'll be watching on television.

This week's reason to be cheerful . . .

Ricky Ponting's pain

It was lovely to see Ricky Ponting prostrate and writhing after being felled by one of his own bowlers in the nets.

Ponting is an irritatingly cocky and pugnacious little fellow but indisputably a great batsman.

He talks of the need “to target” Andrew Strauss, the England captain, as the Aussies did Andrew Flintoff during the 2006-07 Ashes campaign.

But England need to take the fight to Ponting, as Steve Harmison did when he hit the Aussie captain in the face with a bouncer on the first morning of the First Test at Lord's in 2005. It was the start of the most dramatic Ashes series in living memory. More of the same please.