Morning all.
A big week lies ahead, pivotal, you might say, both for the club and for Arsene Wenger. Champions League qualification against Udinese will be first on the agenda, then it’s Manchester United at Old Trafford. I’m not looking any further than the game in Italy at this stage. We can worry about the champions as and when it’s necessary.
It’s too early in the week for injury news for the CL game but there will be headaches over selection already. Defensively we’re in a bit of a mess. Arsene said that Koscielny’s injury would certainly keep him out for the next two games so then we have to sweat on the fitness of Djourou. I have no idea if Squillaci is injured or just completely out of favour. I suspect the former, to be honest, so it remains to be seen if he’ll be fit enough.
As well as he did I don’t think playing Ignasi Miquel is the answer for a game of this importance. Depending on who’s available in midfield he could move Song back there but overall it’s far from ideal. Even if we make signings none of them would be eligible for this game anyway. Plenty on this game to come in the next couple of days.
And speaking of signings, pretty much everyone is advising Arsene Wenger to go out and buy some experience. Robert Pires was commentating on the Liverpool game for Canal+ on Saturday, and in a Mirror article which links us with Phil Jagielka, Eden Hazard and Rennes midfielder Yann M’Vila, the dreamy one said:
The time has come for Arsene Wenger to think about investing the money from player sales into players with experience and more of a guarantee. I think other players have spoken with him and told him the same. The set-up has changed now.
Before this, many players wanted to stay at Arsenal for a long time but this has changed now, too. Players leave now at their first chance. Indirectly, Wenger is to blame. Unless new players come in and others stay then the problem will get worse.
I don’t think that they can rival the likes of Manchester City or Chelsea but you can’t win just with young players.
No arguments from me with any of that apart from where he says it’s time for Arsene to think about investing. This is no time for thinking about spending, it’s time for actual spending. I know what he means though. As our non-spending continues the news emerged last night that another of our former targets, Juan Mata, has signed for Chelsea.
Although the manager ruled out a bid for him quite some time ago it still stings a bit to see a player of undoubted quality go to someone else, especially when we probably could have had him. Our interest was genuine, I don’t know what killed it off, but whatever it was it killed it stone dead. It went from talk of us having agreed terms to Wenger refusing to elucidate when asked why it had broken down. I suspect we’ve been gazumped.
The same thing happened with Santi Cazorla this summer. Arsenal put a serious amount of groundwork into doing that deal, were confident it could be done, then along came mega-bucks Malaga and that was that. There were other factors for Cazorla but let’s not kid ourselves that money wasn’t one of the major ones.
All the same, Arsene says new players are coming. What else can he say right now?
We will buy. People feel I’m stubborn, I’m not, I just want to do the best for the team and to buy the right players. If I have shown one thing in the last 15 years, it’s that I have brought good players here. We will bring experienced players. But people just say ‘buy’ but it’s to buy the right player which is difficult.
I fully accept that it’s difficult to buy the right player but waiting until the window is on the verge of closing hardly makes like any easier, does it? That said, it does help focus things. While the manager will rightly be preparing his team for Wednesday’s game, Ivan Gazidis and those behind the scenes need to be working very hard to augment this squad before Sunday’s trip to Old Trafford. Although the deadline is August 31st (next Wednesday), we really need to get new faces on board before that game. It’s one thing scraping a makeshift squad together for Liverpool at home, it’s another thing entirely to expect a group of players that callow to go there and come away without getting a real going over.
The Samir Nasri situation has to be sorted out as well. There’s so much disinformation and nonsense going on with this. One moment he’s hours away from signing for them, the next the deal has broken down over agents fees. We know that Nasri’s agent(s) are, even in the murky world of football agents, right up there with the worst of them. Utterly rapacious, one of them is almost certainly using this situation as part of a personal vendetta against Arsene Wenger, and determined to squeeze every last penny they can out of their client, whether that’s to his benefit as a player or not.
For all the talk – and it’s easy to do that all day long – it struck me on Saturday that from a purely footballing perspective Nasri is a player we really, really should be keeping. He’s spent some formative years with us and yes, his purple patch only lasted 6 months, but it was quite a purple patch. I’m in no way excusing the way he’s clearly agitated for a move but I think it goes back to what Le Bob said above. Players are leaving at the first chance they get, something is fundamentally wrong in our set-up.
As Amy Lawrence said in Friday’s Arsecast, we can’t compete with the super-rich clubs in pure monetary terms, but you can create an atmosphere which would make players think much more seriously about whether they want to leave or not. A good squad, keeping things competitive, demonstrating your ambition by using all the resources available to you, and creating a togetherness on and off the pitch will certainly help stave off some of the advances of those with big wallets. Not always, of course, but as I’ve said before, if we as fans grow frustrated with lack of investment in the team, why would some of the players not feel the same way?
I think it’s fairly obvious that some of them do/did and there really is only one way to sort that out. Add better players to the squad and be proactive about your purchasing. At the moment, whoever we bring in, it seems reactive. That it’s taken the early games of the season to get ourselves in gear when all this could, and should, have been done much earlier in the summer.
I know we’ve said before ‘this is a big week’ for the manager but this one really is. It’s a big week for him and for the club. There needs to be decisive, positive action to get ourselves free from the mud we’re wading through right now. If there is, I’m confident we can get ourselves back on track, get some results and really lift ourselves. The season is still young.
Right. Let’s see how it all plays out. Till tomorrow.
