Arseblog, the arsenal blog
9:51 am May 25, 2013 posted by arseblog - 62 arses

Saturday balderdash

Saturday balderdash

Morning,

it’s the first Saturday of the off-season and we awake to stories about how Arsenal might buy Wayne Rooney. Pffff, I say. And pssshawww. If Arsenal were going to pay a quarter of a million pounds a week on wages for a footballer – which they’re not, just in case you were confused – I’d want it be spent on somebody who’s actually worth it and not that fat, baldy knacker.

The whole ‘worth it’ thing is another question. Is any footballer really worth that much money every week? Messi or Ronaldo, perhaps, but when you look at what Man City have done to the game, thrusting gimpy mundane mediocrities like Gareth Barry, Adebayor and Na$ri into that bracket then as a general rule they earn far more than their talent suggests.

As for Rooney, this is a man so surrounded by the vultures of the game that he publicly questioned the ambition of Manchester United, the most successful in England over the last 20 years, just so he could get a pay-rise. If he’s willing to act like that towards Ferguson, somebody he ought to have genuinely respected (as well as feared), then he’d take the almighty piss under another manager.

He’s got issues with Moyes (reading some of the excerpts from his toe-curling biography hammers home what a self-obsessed moron he is), he likes to smoke and drink, apparently, and he looks like he’d be the kind of physical specimen that will rapidly morph into Mickey Quinn territory as he gets close to 30. With Rob the Chef feeding him he’d belly-swoggle his way onto the pitch like a corpulent, asthmatic walrus, his pendulous breasts heaving beneath his over-sized Demis Roussos style Arsenal-coloured smock. No, thank you.

Anyway, the idea of Arsenal paying that much money for any player is ludicrous. We might be in better shape financially but this would be like winning the lottery then blowing it all buying a clapped out Rolls Royce just because it belonged to somebody famous.

We cannot spend money like this. While we certainly have more money than in the past, we still need to be smart and lashing £250,000 down the gullet of Wayne Rooney is not smart. Forget the Falcaos and Cavanis too, but there’s no doubt we can afford to buy a better quality of player this time around.

Other than that it’s pretty quiet as you might imagine, but there is the Champions League final later. I am nailing my colours very firmly to the Dortmund mast. Although I have tried, words cannot express my disdain for Bayern Munich for twice letting horrendous things happens in the final. First off, there was 1999 and that treble, and then the year they made the full kit wanker happy, blowing the chance to win the cup in glorious, Robbenesque fashion.

So tonight I hope Klopp and his men get what they deserve, especially after Bayern tore them apart by agreeing the signing of Gotze in the build-up to their semi-final, and it’s an issue that obviously impacts on the game. The player himself has been ruled out, leaving a gaping red hole in the middle of the Dortmund team, but I hope they’ve got enough to cope and to put the repellent Ribery and the rest of them to the sword.

Ideally, Bayern will lose it rather than Dortmund winning it, if you get me, and I hope it happens in the most slapstick, ludicrous, heart-breaking way possible. Ich bin ein Dortmunder. Or something.

Anyway, the sun is shining, I have a large wolf that needs to go out to roam across much land and water, so I’ll leave it there. Back tomorrow.

Arsecast
8:16 am May 24, 2013 posted by arseblog - 186 arses

Clear the loan decks + Arsecast 280

Clear the loan decks + Arsecast 280

Morning all,

I woke up this morning thinking about our loan players for some reason. I can inform you that a Bendtner/Denilson hybrid is not the most pleasant image with which to bestir oneself first thing, but hey, it could be worse. And no, you don’t need me to give you an example.

I was looking back through some of the archives on Arseblog News, and the second story we ever published, back on June 2nd 2011, was one in which TGSTEL expressed his desire to leave the club, saying:

I have decided 100% that I must leave Arsenal. I’ve considered this for a long time and was quite clear when I arrived at my decision. It doesn’t feel particularly strange to not know what my future holds – I’m quite calm and confident that I’ll be fine at a new club.

I wonder, two years down the line, does it feel strange that a career that was promising, has hit the skids so badly. In summer 2011 he and his agentdad spoke all the time about how this club and that club fancied him, but all the pretty things passed him by and he ended up in Sunderland on deadline day. Last summer it was the same, he did quite well at the Euros, catching the eye with a couple of goals and some Paddy Power underpants, but still could find nobody to take him until the final day of August.

His sojourn at Juventus has been an abject failure because of injury and his lifestyle. Getting arrested for driving drunk the wrong way up a one way street must be something approaching rock bottom, and hopefully he’s learned from that. But what happens this summer? Will there be more talk of how he’s got his choice of clubs or a more desperate search for someone to take a punt on him?

I think two things need to happen. Firstly, he has to accept that his stock has fallen so low that in order to play for a club in the Champions League he’s going to have to drop down a level, or two, (footbalistically ©arsene and financially) and prove himself as a footballer again. And secondly, Arsenal need to make it as easy as possible for him to leave this summer. If we have ambitions of getting a fee for him, leave them to one side. Get him, and his wages, off the books, even if it means we let him go for free and give him a carriage clock stuffed with fifty pound notes to do it.

Then start a new page in the Big Book of How To Do Things at Arsenal titled ‘BENDTNER’, and underneath write ‘This must never happen again.’ It can be salutary lesson that rewarding potential is a fine idea in theory but in practice it’s counter-productive, especially with some modern footballers whose focus is on image and earnings rather than reaching their potential and actually achieving things in the game.

He’s a figure of fun, and in one sense it’s a bit of a shame, because underneath it there’s some talent. He scored nearly 50 goals for Arsenal, some of them very good goals indeed, and had a fine spell one season playing up front when you know who was injured yet again. I can understand his frustration at being played wide right, a position which really didn’t suit him, but his career hasn’t so much gone downhill since deciding to ‘leave’ Arsenal, but off a cliff.

For all his issues though, we have to take some responsibility for the fact it’s been impossible to move him and others, like Denilson, out on a permanent basis. Our generous wages have coincided with football clubs, for the most part, needing to tighten their belts, which is why players like Squillaci and Arshavin, quite rightly I should say, decided not to leave sooner. Why would anyone in their right mind go somewhere else and earn a fraction of what they were getting here?

Yet this summer, with contracts running closer to the end, we need to incentivise these guys out the door. All the way out the door too, not just on loan somewhere. Bendtner, Denilson, Chamakh, Park and Santos all have to go. With Squillaci and Arshavin out of contract (earning around £110,000 between them), adding those 5 players to the list would save us, at least, another £150,000 per week, a saving of around £14,000,000 per year.

While on paper they may nominally be listed as ‘assets’, the reality is they’re a drain, even if some of those wages were covered by the loan clubs. When we talk about the financial landscape of Arsenal changing because of new commercial deals, we shouldn’t ignore the fact that we can make some inroads into the problems that exist with how we spend money on wages. We can improve that. It might require us to take a hit in some cases, but it’s short-term pain for long-term gain and it’s our own fault anyway. Caveat emptor, innit.

It’s also worth bearing in mind Arsenal are not unique in having players whose contribution to the team doesn’t come close to what we’ve spent on them, but this is certainly an issue that needs to be addressed this summer.

Right then, time for this week’s Arsecast and I’m joined by Tim from Arse2Mouse to discuss the final day, that game at Newcastle, and how this summer might be the silliest of all silly seasons. There’s also some Arshavin and some stuff which didn’t make the cut over the course of the season.

You can subscribe to the Arsecast on iTunes by clicking here. Or if you want to subscribe directly to the feed URL you can do so too (this is a much better way to do it as you don’t experience the delays from iTunes). To download this week’s Arsecast directly – click here 23mb MP3) or you can listen directly below without leaving this very page.

The Arsecast is also available on our SoundCloud channel and via the Soundcloud app for iPhone and Android.

Have a good Friday, more tomorrow.

Columnists
7:30 pm May 23, 2013 posted by Tim Stillman - 5 arses

And now, the end is … er … here

And now, the end is … er … here

Did you ever see that old Simpsons episode where Bart gets so bored of beating Homer at a boxing computer game that he gives Homer one last chance to defeat him before declaring retirement? A determined Homer goes away, receives some tutelage and hones his gaming skills. When he plays Bart again he gives his son a simulated pounding in the boxing ring, but just as he prepares to administer the knockout punch, Marge pulls the plug and Bart retires undefeated? (If you haven’t, this torturous analogy will have been a waste. If you’re not au fait with the minutiae of specific Simpsons episodes, I suggest your life might have been a waste to this point anyway ).

That’s kind of what St. Totteringham’s Day felt like this year. Spurs had us on the ropes for much of the season. They have a good, tactically astute football manager as opposed to a caricature of a used car salesmen. Much as we did in 2011-12, Spurs had this season’s form player hoisting them up on his shoulders. Whisper it quietly, but Spurs didn’t even really shit their pants and collapse this time. Arsenal, in the meantime, were reeling from a second successive summer where more than one first team regular was sold and were left with a tactically unbalanced squad.

Arsenal had to ditch their attempts to play Wengerball because the chemistry just wasn’t fomenting on a consistent basis. Somebody from the coaching staff obviously read my blog in the wake of the Spurs defeat (Arsene, Bouldy, don’t worry about thanking me publicly, I’ll take a Diamond Club box next season as payment) because they went back to basics and earned a very commendable 26 points out of their last 30 to grab the coveted 4th spot.

Spurs lost Modric last summer, but the development of Bale into a genuinely world class match winner was enough to cover the loss, much in the same way that van Persie’s escalation in 2011-12 was a temporary band aid for Fabregas’ departure. (Modric isn’t in Cesc’s class of course, but the comparison stands). Tottenham will endure a summer of speculation over Bale. Even if Levy and co see out the storm this time, it will continue in every window until he inevitably leaves. Arsenal have held on grimly for the sponsorship and TV monies windfall and are, theoretically at least, looking at a relatively peaceful summer for once. Tottenham, lest we forget, are still trying to fund a stadium move.

As this blog from @AngryofN5 points out, we’re not quite debt free, but we’re also not in the belt tightening austerity years that Tottenham will have to withstand if they’re to go ahead with a stadium move. This is all basically a long winded way of saying that this should have been Tottenham’s big chance to overtake us. The landscape is beginning to shift to a sort of economies of scale situation in our favour. Theoretically, we’re about to get much richer and they’re about to get much poorer. (We have outstripped Spurs resources wise for some years as it is).

There’s been a lot of excitement around Arsenal’s financial muscle this summer and what it should mean. Without wishing to paint your hopes and dreams an unbecoming shade of beige, we still don’t have the spending capability available to Chelsea, Manchester City and Manchester United, the teams that finished ahead of us last season. We are rather hoping that the instability in all of their managerial situations tilts the scales towards us. But essentially, next season, fourth is still “about where we should finish.” Realistically, I think this team will need another year or two together before they can develop into bona fide challengers.

The focus will be to at least make the journey a little more comfortable. That means pulling away from the chasing pack for the top 4 and trying to glimpse the coattails of the forerunners. As @YogisWarrior suggests in this concise season review, much of that gap can be amended by improving our head to head record against the teams around us. Performing better in the domestic cups should also be seen as a priority target. In the past, I’ve defended Arsenal’s relative trophy ‘drought’ on the basis that we were typically being eliminated from knockout tournaments by the likes of Chelsea, Manchester United and Barcelona.

Losing to Bradford and Blackburn in what turned out to be very winnable competitions represents the undoubted lowlight of the season. Our under-performance in the cups meant our schedule was much clearer for league purposes during the run in. Chelsea and Spurs had more onerous commitments than Arsenal in the final 8 weeks of 2012-13. Desired improvement in the cups would remove this advantage next spring, so we would have to balance team selection appropriately. The bottom line is, the depth and quality of our squad must be embellished.

Though the manager has clearly chosen to be cautious with his kitty in previous summers, the pressure and expectation on him to spend is greater than ever. In essence, we’re asking him now to do something he hasn’t really done since the turn of the Millennium. In the summer of 2000, he splashed out for Pires, Lauren, and Wiltord (Edu was eventually added in convoluted circumstances). In 2001, Jeffers, Wright, Campbell, Inamoto and van Bronckhorst arrived. Of course, the stadium move was officially approved in December 2001, which is significant for the timeline in this case.

This year, our coffers are boosted and everyone knows it. Emirates, BT and (probably) Puma essentially supplant what player and property sales have brought in in previous summers. Arsene Wenger showed a proclivity towards brave decisions towards the end of 2012-13 by dropping his captain and his goalkeeper. The situation with Vermaelen has not concluded with the season’s end. The manager still faces a contentious decision there. Assuming Vermaelen isn’t sold, he is going to have to consider what he does with the captaincy.

Unless we receive a big offer, I’m not convinced Vermaelen will leave. Johan Djourou will surely depart, so that’s already one centre half we will have to replace. Bacary Sagna’s future is still the subject of debate. If he goes, I don’t think Arsene will want to spend the bulk of his summer replacing outgoing defenders when this promises to be a summer of consolidation. Even if Vermaelen enjoys a fabulous pre season and forces his way back into the team, his place is surely not certain enough for him to continue with the armband.

At Newcastle on Sunday, when Arteta hobbled off, he didn’t traipse down the tunnel. He stayed in the dugout and seemed to assist the manager with instructions from the technical area. Arteta was the first person Wenger embraced at the final whistle, which suggests that this wasn’t an unsolicited, John Terry style intervention. If the captain’s first job is to be the manager’s conduit to the players, I’d suggest Arteta is better placed to do that whether Vermaelen is playing or not.

Ordinarily, I don’t like debating the destination of the captaincy. I think it’s something British fans obsess over too much, as if the owner of the armband offers an instant panacea to a team’s ills. A good team should have a conglomerate of leaders in any case. But it’s an issue that is there regardless and one that needs to be dealt with. Wenger must curse the fact that he’s compelled to name a skipper. The captaincy has been an albatross and a recurring political headache since Tony Adams retired.

The stadium move in concert the Premier League oligarchies relegated Arsenal from title chasers to a band of clubs pursuing Champions League qualification. In the short term at least. This summer has to represent the time when Arsenal bridges that gap so that they move closer to first and further away from fifth. Ultimately, this is why we made the stadium move in the first place. So that in the long term, we could behave as a superpower without fear of inferiority complex.

In 2007-08, 2009-10 and 2010-11 we were in the championship running for about two thirds of the season before late collapses, precipitated by a shallow squad and mental frailty, were our undoing. This year, the group showed that they have the mental fortitude to finish strongly when they need to. Now they need another sprinkle of quality to extrapolate and sustain that form over a period of ten months. Arsene, it’s over to you. LD.

—

Follow Tim on Twitter – @LittleDutchVA

Arseblog, the arsenal blog
8:08 am May 23, 2013 posted by arseblog - 521 arses

On Vermaelen and his future

On Vermaelen and his future

I had the oddest dream where I was staying at a hotel owned by Steve Bould, but rather than the luxury resort the brochures said, it was actually a front for his melon-rice factory (this is rice with melon mashed into it).

He had all kinds of orphans and unfortunates that he lured in off the street to work in an underground warehouse, and the waitress wouldn’t give me any breakfast because it started at 9.20 and I was in the dining room at 9.15. I ended up eating a packet of ham I found on the counter but it had that kind of rainbow sheen off it and tasted crap.

I think it’s allegorical. Steve Bould made the players produce the melon-rice of defending while Arsene Wenger smiled and appeared on the front of the glossy bumph, perhaps with Hervé Villechaize beside him. I’m going to leave this one here before dated references alienate a large chunk of my readership, but speaking of defence there are stories this morning about Thomas Vermaelen and his future.

I think they’re natural enough, given the way his season unfolded. I’m not sure I believe Manchester United are after him, they have a plethora of centre-halves to choose from and unless Moyes is going to start collecting them like George Graham did it seems unlikely. But questions about what might happen to him seem fairly reasonable.

I think it’s too simplistic to say that dropping him and bringing back Koscielny was the answer to our defensive problems. I think that certainly helped, but there was a lot more to it than that. The team in general was much more switched on defensively but of course it helped that we didn’t have somebody at the centre of the defence making errors and getting caught out of position as regularly as Vermaelen was. And on that, I think he was just doing the job he was being asked to do, to be aggressive and quick and win the ball high up the pitch.

The problem was he wasn’t winning the ball as often as he should, and we found ourselves exploited when play broke down and one of our centre-halves was miles out of position. To be fair to him, Koscielny, as good as he has been over the last couple of months, got caught in exactly the same way against Newcastle on Sunday. There was a moment when he chased an opponent up the pitch, without Arteta to naturally drop back there was a large gap, and only for a slightly over-hit through ball and some quick goalkeeping from Szczesny we might have paid for it.

But there’s little doubt that Vermaelen’s season has been a disappointment. With hindsight it’s easy to say he was the wrong choice for captain, at the time he was van Persie’s ‘deputy’ and the progression seemed natural. The problem is it made it more difficult for Arsene Wenger to address his form, which was iffy right from the start. Indeed it’s easy to forget that Koscielny had a poor first half of the season too and one of the worst decisions Arsene Wenger made was to drop Mertesacker and play the two similar centre-halves together against Chelsea.

I think that game convinced Wenger it had to be the BFG + 1, and it was Vermaelen who got the nod. Maybe it took too long for Wenger to address the Belgianphant in the room, but then it took him too long in general to realise that this team could not play the way he wanted it to, the way that his other teams had played in the past. When the focus switched from going out to win while trying to play creative, flowing football to trying, first and foremost, not to lose, then results improved. Vermaelen was the highest profile casualty of that.

So what now for him? Unless he’s completely and utterly lost the confidence of the manager, then it’d be good to see him stay and fight for his place. Looking at the final whistle picture on Sunday, he looked like someone who was thoroughly behind the team, and he doesn’t strike me as a stupid guy. He knows fine well that his form was poor and when the guy who replaces you comes in and plays as well as Koscielny did then you have to wait for your chance to present itself again.

Wojciech Szczesny got lucky, Fabianski’s injury opened the door for him to return after just a handful of games, but the understanding that Mertesacker and Koscielny formed was as good as anything we’ve seen from an Arsene Wenger team in a long, long time. It means that it’s going to be a challenge for him to get back into the team, but I think it would be good to see a footballer rise to that rather than seek the easy way out with a move. We’ve seen how healthy competition for places can be, it improves players, raises standards of performance and, ideally, keeps them high, and the consequence of that is a better team.

Plus, over the course of a season there’ll be injuries, tiredness and suspension, all things which will open the door, and it’s then down to the player to give the manager a difficult decision to make. Wenger showed with the Vermaelen/Szczesny situations that he’s not averse to making a tough call if he feels it’s for the benefit of the team, so we’ll have to wait and see if the Belgian is up for the fight.

The other consideration, however, is the fact that Arsenal do need a centre-half this summer. Djourou is likely to move away on a permanent basis, Squillaci is gone, and Ignasi Miquel seems to have vanished off the face of the earth. United have a squad with Vidic, Wonky-face, Smalling, Jones and Evans in it, and over the course of a season three centre-halves is not enough. You’re one injury and one suspension away from an unnatural solution, and this season has shown us how important stability in that area of the pitch is.

It might depend on the calibre of player he brings in as to what happens with Vermaelen. If it’s a signing which significantly knocks him down the pecking order then he may well feel his only option is to go somewhere else and play. And if that happens, if he’s leaving because we’ve made our centre-half selection better via the transfer market, then I’m ok with that too. I’m all for what makes the team better for next season, but maybe signing a good centre-half and keeping Vermaelen is the way to go.

Revolutionary, I realise, but hey. Right, that’s about that for this morning, back tomorrow with an Arsecast through which we can relive that wonderful final day of the season.

Until then.