october 21st
08.37 – “It’s true that if you look at our goals, they come mainly from one person.” – Arsene Wenger.
True enough, but then you could say that about United with van Nistelrooy, Liverpool and Owen, Newcastle and Shearer. When you’ve got a truly world class striker at your club, chances are he’s going to score most goals. Off the top of my head, I can only think of Madrid – Raul and Ronaldo – as the team with with two truly world class strikers playing together.
Maybe it’s too much to expect another Henry, or a Raul or Ronaldo or Shevchenko. But is it too much to expect Arsenal to have another striker who could score 20 goals a season, consistently, for us? Dennis Bergkamp is a fantastic player, but not a prolific goalscorer by any means. Kanu got a good few in his first full season, but for various reasons has never come close to that tally again. And in my opinion, Henry and the in-form Wiltord go together like Lee Harvey and JFK.
In this Arsenal team, given how well we attack, how many chances we create, I think a striker who’s good in the air would add an extra dimension to our game. Even Robert Pires said this week that teams have us rumbled in Europe. We only have one way to play; quick precision passing. I know it’s a little bit the antithesis of Wenger’s football, but having an aerial option wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing if the lad up top could play a bit too. More Vieri than Hartson, y’know? Seeing as we’ve saved ourselves around £10m on a centre-half now that we’ve got Kolo, wouldn’t it be nice to stick a few quid on a striker? Zlatan? Kluivert? Eto’o? When it comes to football transfers, striker speculation is the most fun. Like if someone came up to you now and said “I’ll trade you Bergkamp, Kanu and Wiltord for a really top class striker” you’d go ‘Yeah Yeah’ without thinking before they handed you Stephane G’uivarch and legged with your 3 players. Anyway, the point is this. If we could get a 20 goal a season striker to play with TH we’d have a better chance of winning stuff. Easy. Somebody just needs to tell Mr Wenger.
Dennis Bergkamp on Kolo (from icons.com, registration required). “Sometimes young players in football are criticised because they have it too easy, make too much money and take things for granted. But Kolo is one of the players who realises for every second of the day that he is very lucky to be doing this job.”
Jermaine Pennant has shown how much he wants to make it at Arsenal by declaring he wants to stay at Leeds for the rest of the season. As his loan deal was extended for another month (thanks a lot for Sunday’s story you TribalFootball muppets), Pennant said “I definitely want to be here for the whole year – the next month will pass too quickly and it might only be for two games anyway. Hopefully, Leeds can keep me all season and then we will see what happens from there.” It’s all ‘I’ and ‘me’ with that lad. Kanu has been given some words of praise from the boss after his Chelsea run out. As well as being a damn fine player, Edu seems to be one of the real nice guys in football. Read what he has to say about the goal that might be Parlour’s.
Kiev later. 10-0 to the Arsenal. Easy. Wiltord with 9.
