Morning folks, it’s difficult to know what to write about this morning. Subjects I’m pretty much choosing to ignore are:
Michael Ballack – Firstly because he’s a big, woolly headed Chelsea prick, but secondly because what he’s had to say about Arsene Wenger is hard to defend. Don’t want to go there.
Cesc Fabregas – You know, we come through the fearsome foursome with a good number of points and the Barcelona stories are background noise. Now, because we’ve played poorly, they’re in your face going “Nya Nya Nya Nya Nya Nyaaaaaah”. The Spanish press are upping the ante with stories about him house-hunting in Barcelona. That old reliable. Cesc is captain of the club, is our top scorer this season, our best player and has comitted himself time and again to us. Until the summer nothing’s going to change any of that so I’m not getting involved (not today at least).
Gael Clichy and Theo Walcott – yes, we have to dig in. Yes, we must concentrate and believe. It’s just difficult to pay any attention to guys who are talking and saying the right things off the pitch but unable, at this moment in time, to back it up with performances on it.
So what does that leave us with? Not much really. We’ve got the Liverpool game tomorrow night and we simply have to see a reaction from the players. The possession has to be turned into goals, the defending has to be at least adequate and the tippy-tappy needs to create three points tomorrow night. Whatever vague hopes we have of catching United and Chelsea will be gone if they win their games tomorrow night and we fail to win ours. It will February 10th and our domestic season, bar the scrap for third and the automatic Champions League place, will be over.
From a position that promised so much that would be depressing. Nevertheless, that is the worst case scenario and after a string of disappointing results it’s easy to look at things that way. This season has been strange, a win for us, United and/or Chelsea failing to win their games and everything looks a little bit better. And that’s what we’ve got to hope for.
Of course it doesn’t address our failings and the decisions the manager has made. I’m not going to keep beating that drum, but in the summer Arsene was quoted as saying something along the lines of ‘If this season isn’t a success, we’ll have to rethink and rebuild’. I suppose it’ll all come down to what he considers success. And the fans. Pre-season would we have taken third? Perhaps, but third after where we were will disappoint many.
My feeling is that he is caught between in a rock and a hard place in some respects. What’s fairly obvious is that a team with the average age of ours cannot cope with teams more experienced. Leaving aside the quality issue, because in many ways that’s tied to experience, we have an average age of 23. We have a group of players around 19-23/24 years of age with a smattering of experience. Some of those players are going to be hitting their prime around 25-26, when they have fully developed. Not all of them will but it’s reasonable to assume they’ll have the best years of their career from 26-30/32.
It means the manager still has to wait a long time for some of them, yet he’s put so much groundwork into them. Buy someone and it hinders their development, sell them off and they take what they’ve learned with us and go and have their best years somewhere else. In the meantime he has to hope he can stay relatively competitive to stave off pressure from fans who want trophies. There is a bigger picture, of course, but I’ve always said it’s difficult to ask football fans to see it. The joy and pain of football is in the here and now.
Football’s finances are up the spout. The game is too reliant on TV money, clubs have overspent on transfers and wages, attendances are falling due to ticket prices that no longer represent anything approaching value for money, and you have to imagine that Portsmouth won’t be last Premier League club to suffer winding-up orders and the like (and we’d better hope they muddle through the season because I read last week if they go under we lose the 6 points we’ve won against them). Arsenal have managed their finances prudently, have always preached self-sufficiency, and it is difficult approach to have taken, I’m sure.
However, there’s got to be a balance between successful financial management and success on the pitch. Arsenal have a reliance on corportate income. How long can we continue to sell costly boxes to watch a team of nearly men? Will lack of trophies affect attendances? It sounds poor to say it but ultimately it will. Bottom line is successful team = full stadium. So while I think every fan understands the need to live within our means as we don’t have the river of Russian cash that Chelsea have or the Middle-Eastern billions of Man City, I think there’s a sense that we’re unduly tight with what we do have. We’ve seen players sold for huge amounts of money yet seen little of that money invested in the squad bar giving long term contracts with pay rises to players who have done little to merit them. Arsene was unwilling to buy a striker in January because he knew he was bringing in Chamakh on a free in the summer, in my opinion.
Nobody, bar the most Championship Manager addicted fan, expects Arsene Wenger to go out and spend what we don’t have, only what we can afford, and either we can’t afford to spend anything (figures don’t back this up however), or we’re too reluctant to spend at all. None of us are football managers. None of us have won trophies. Yet many of us share the opinion that the squad has needed improvement in certain areas over the last couple of seasons. Many of us felt that we needed a striker in January, perhaps also a keeper. Do the results suggest that opinion was correct? If so, how can we see it and Arsene, who knows more about football than any of us, not address it? I realise it’s not as simple as going to the shops and buying a player but it’s not as if Arsene doesn’t have the time, the resources, the scouts, the backroom staff, the Chief Executive to do the negotiating, the knowledge and, most importantly, the money.
Anyway, I’m rambling without really knowing where this is going. And perhaps going on about what he should have done when there’s no chance of doing anything now is pointless. In fact, it is pointless. All we can do now is concentrate on the next game, then the next one. And the one after that. The game against the Mugsmashers tomorrow is so important, and not just because I’m going to watch it in the Mugsmasher’s gaff.
Arsene meets the press today, we’ll get team news for tomorrow and fingers crossed we might have Eduardo back in the squad. He’s struggled but at least he is a striker and gives us another option, even if it’s just from the bench. What he does about the other problem positions remains to be seen but I’ll wait till I hear what he has to say today before I give my opinion on that.
In the meantime I’m going to pull the covers back over my head and wait for tomorrow.
