One day Ben Arfa will leave Newcastle. Toon fans will hope that he does so having scored an unbelievable solo goal in the final of a cup competition to bring some much-wanted silverware back to the North East, and that it's not at the end of this season (though the former context would be welcome without the departure,) but his talent is too great for him not to attract more and more interest. And while he will now be linked to the top clubs in England for the rest of the season as newspapers seek to generate stories and feed off the scraps of that now much-quoted interview, Ben Arfa has it in his power to hold out for only the biggest of ponds to swim in. Yes, he has talked about Paris St Germain, and they would qualify having turned a traditionally open league into a monopoly almost overnight thanks to the injection of oil money, but he should also add Real Madrid, Barcelona, Manchester United and Bayern Munich to that list. Ben Arfa should be challenging for and winning European cups, and if he didn't supposedly have such an attitude he probably would be already, instead of plying his trade at an "up and coming club" or a "sleeping giant" or whatever you want to call Newcastle these days. And he is better than Liverpool are at the minute, plain and simple.