So yesterday on Arsenal’s Snapchat Francis Coquelin revealed he’d been training at centre-half and that he’d been, apparently’, ‘bossing it’.
Word reaches me from the US tour that Steve Bould and Arsene Wenger had some intense discussions about the Frenchman and they both feel that he can do a good job there for the upcoming season. With Granit Xhaka set to come into the midfield in a new partnership with Aaron Ramsey, Wenger has been wondering what to do with his Coq, and this is now the solution.
We know how much he hates to waste resources and although Coquelin isn’t exactly the tallest player we have, Bould said ‘Boss man, we need to embrace what the Italians did. Franco Baresi was not tall. Fabio Cannavaro was not tall. Yet they were two of the finest central defenders the world ever did see. Also, remember what you did with a certain Kolo Toure, what?!’
It was such a convincing argument from a man who knows that position so well that Wenger has decided to up-skill Coquelin as a centre-half and he’s likely to start the season alongside Gabriel – until such time as Koscielny returns and gets fit, at which point we’ll have a French duo in there for the long haul. You have to say it’s quite brave and a bit risky, but necessity is the mother of invention and we’re in a situation where we have to find solutions in a kind of abstract way.
The other thing I should point out is that I just made that up. I just wanted to write a few words … just a few … which weren’t about how we needed to sign players. Coquelin has probably been playing there because we’ve had some practice matches and none of Gabriel, Koscielny or the injured Per Mertesacker made the trip and we just needed somebody to fill in.
There’s no need to panic. Yet. Not until we see the story on Arsenal.com with the headline, “Coquelin reminds me of David O’Leary and Tony Adams and Frank McLintock and Stathis Tavlaridis”. Then I would recommend setting your head on fire and running around a petrol station before dipping your bonce into a load of plastic bags. It’ll make life easier in the long-run.
Speaking of central defenders, we’re being linked with a German international to replace an ex-German international. The prognosis for Mertesacker is not good, Wenger has already said he’s on the lookout for an experienced option, and it’s being reported we’ve been in touch with Valencia over 24 year old Shkodran Mustafi. He had a spell at Everton as a youngster but never made the breakthrough there, leaving for Sampdoria in Italy after which he moved to Spain.
Valencia need money apparently and have reportedly made him available for €25m, which in today’s market almost sounds like a bargain. ‘Only twenty-five million of your finest pounds to purchase this human being from you, you say? Well sir, you have a deal’.
That’s what someone would say if they were going to buy him. I have no idea if we are going to do that or not. Of course, with our £200m+ in the bank, and massive TV revenues set to flood in for the next few years, we can’t exactly go splashing cash around willy-nilly. Heaven forbid we make a mistake in the transfer market. That would be awful because Ivan Gazidis says so.
The Arsenal Chief Executive has again been speaking about the club and the way it can do business. Last week it was ESPN, this week the New York Times, and once more he’s talking about clubs with whom we can’t compete.
Ugh. If you read the whole piece, it’s typically Gazidis in that it all sounds very reasonable, there’s a lot of common sense in there. And yes, of course there are clubs who have some more money than us, and more prestige – which also matters. But when you look at what he said back in 2013 and compare it to what he’s saying now, there’s a fairly obvious change in tone.
In 2013 he was bullish, talking about how increased revenues from new commercial deals would make us more competitive:
We should be able to compete at a level like a club such as Bayern Munich. This is an extraordinarily ambitious club.
And asked specifically if we might be able to buy someone like Wayne Rooney, he said:
Of course we could do that. We could do more than that. We can look at some options that weren’t really in our financial capability. We also have new revenue streams coming on board and all of these things mean we can do some things which would excite you.
Whether you believed it or not, it was exciting to hear it because it made us sound like a club that really wanted to go places and do things. To improve. To compete domestically and in Europe. Fast forward to now, and this is what he’s saying:
We’re making progress in what is a fiercely competitive world, against competitors that have the capability to spend far more money than we do. We can’t afford to make huge mistakes in the transfer market. We have to be very careful, very selective about how we do things. We can’t afford to outgun competitors that have far more money to splurge on transfer fees than we do.
It’s almost chalk and cheese and it’s very, very irritating. Nobody really cares what other clubs do. Nobody is saying we should just go out and spend money for the sake of spending money, but repeating a message that basically says we can’t compete is hardly inspiring and it feels like the message from on high is one which dampens expectations.
I also really don’t know why there’s any need for him to talk like this so often. What is the purpose? I do not believe it’s anything strategic, to try and play down our capabilities in the market before we try and buy players. It’s almost self-aggrandising, to hold Arsenal up as the model for how football clubs should be run. Looking for pats on the back as we, poor little iddy-biddy Arsenal, try and forge our way in the nasty world against all those big meanies who have a few more quid than us.
What makes it more disconcerting was that after last week’s comments, the club and the manager seemed to be at odds with his message. Wenger immediately countered with a statement that he was ready to spend big, and seemed to suggest that Gazidis wasn’t trying to say otherwise. For a club so tightly run to have mixed messages emerge yet again is a bit worrying. Is everything ok up there?
As for not being able to afford to make a mistake in the transfer market: that is Grade A bullshit of the highest order. Every club makes mistakes. We have made plenty down the years, at times when we had far less money than we do now. So don’t try and spin this kind of nonsense at a time when we’ve never, ever had more money.
Of course you don’t want to make mistakes, you want to get good players for good prices, but the biggest mistake of all would be to let that fear cripple and inhibit you. We could spend a lot of money on a player who flopped like Floppy O’Toole and it wouldn’t bankrupt us. As I said, you don’t want that to happen, but those are the risks of transfers. You could spend a record fee on a brilliant player who snaps his leg in two in his first game.
During the lean years, Arsenal played poor mouth – reasonably so to an extent – and preached this concept of value which has become so ingrained the psyche of fans that there’s widespread reluctance to countenance anything that might be considered risky. Now, with all this money sloshing around, they’re still doing it. It’s farcical really. If there was a Premier League title for talking well, we’d win it every season.
But there isn’t. There’s a Premier League for blokes who kick footballs with their feet, and right now we don’t have a squad good enough to win it. But we have to be careful. We can’t afford to … bollocks. We can afford to, we can afford more than most teams in Europe, we just don’t want to.
Meanwhile, the money sits there, and we can proudly hold aloft the ‘Most Money In The Bank’ trophy alongside the ‘Talking Well’ title and isn’t that great. I think I preferred talking about Coquelin at centre-half.
Tim Stillman is here later with his column, more from me tomorrow.
