So our thin squad got even thinner yesterday with the news that Philippe Senderos has joined AC Milan on loan for the season with an option for a permanent move.
While some people thought the signing of Silvestre (out injured until mid-September, you know! Hurrah!) added some depth and experience to the squad it turns out he was brought in to replace the big Swiss. Gunnerblog today makes a lot of the points I was going to make about this and is a good read. It’s true that things didn’t work out as well as we hoped for Philippe, and perhaps the move is the best thing for him, if not necessarily for Arsenal.
The two mistakes against Liverpool seem to have finished his Arsenal career but as bad as they were I’ve always felt other players have been given much more leeway to make errors than Senderos. Perhaps it was his somewhat clumsy style that went against him but there you go. When you lose a big section of the fan base it becomes almost impossible to win them back. Nobody sees the good stuff, only the mistakes you make.
People talk about how he was tormented by Drogba yet fail to acknowledge that Drogba, in that period, went up and down the country raping centre-halves week in, week out. Not just 21 year olds still learning the game, but experienced international players. How many times did John Terry fuck up and score own goals when he was that age? Plenty. He got left on his arse by Freddie Ljungberg in the cup final and Freddie, for all his quality back then, wasn’t really known for his brute strength.
As Gunnerblog points out it was the arrival of Gallas that really made life difficult for Senderos. That summer Sol Campbell had just left, Senderos and Toure were given the 6 and 5 shirts respectively, and I suspect the plan was for them to start the season and rekindle the partnership that had brought us to the Champions League final in Paris. To this day I maintain that had Senderos and Flamini not picked up those injuries and started that game we’d have won. Instead Arsene had to choose two horrible cunts and we lost.
In the Wenger biography by Xavier Rivoire he reveals that Wenger consulted Tony Adams about making Senderos captain of the club before he gave it to Thierry Henry. That’s the kind of regard the young man was held in. And I think had he and Toure started that season as first choice then they we’d be seeing a different Senderos today. I don’t think it’s any coincidence at all that the best form we’ve seen from Kolo and indeed from Gallas has come when they’ve been playing alongside Senderos. He is the kind of centre-half that allows them to do what they’re best at. He will try and win the ball early, he attacks the high ball, and allows them to mop up behind. Tomorrow night watch Gallas and see what he does when kick outs come into our half. See the difference.
Now we have four identikit centre-halves, maybe only Djourou (who I’d like to see more of) provides that bit of aggressive defending, of proper central defending, while the others utterly fail to compliment each other. That Senderos has gone to AC Milan speaks volumes for me. They’re a club that knows a thing or two about defending. He hasn’t gone to Wigan or Birmingham or Stoke City. He’s gone to AC Milan and perhaps there he can get the kind of coaching that will make him the centre-half we all wanted him to be when he arrived at the club.
For me the bottom line is this – Phil’s departure does not make the squad any better. I don’t see that Silvestre is really an improvement as he doesn’t address the problems we have in the middle of the defence. He’s another Kolo, another Gallas. I fully accept that Senderos made some mistakes but I think the amount of stick he got for them was over the top. He had the potential to get better, Silvestre only has the potential to get older. If you really want to be negative about it you could say that in Flamini, Hleb and Senderos, Cesc has just lost his three best mates at the club. I know professionals are supposed to be above all that but it must have some effect on the young man.
Anyway, I hope the move to Italy goes well for him, I sincerely hope he gets his career back on track and I can’t help feeling that we’re making life, already tough, even more difficult for ourselves. Someone yesterday described to me what’s happened to our squad in the last couple of years as ‘asset stripping’. It’s hard to argue with that. This summer we’ve lost Gilberto, Flamini, Hleb, Senderos, Hoyte, Lehmann and brought in Nasri, Silvestre, Ramsey and some injured bloke who has never played a game of professional football in his life. It’s amazing, really.
Last night I had a dream that I was talking to Arsene Wenger pre-match (just after he’d sacked the Juventus coach driver for opening the doors of the team bus too quickly. Beats me, too) and we spoke about the squad and I told him how fans were feeling. He asked me who I would sign if I was him and I gave him some names and the 5pm kick-off was delayed because we were talking for so long. In the end an apocalyptic battle between robots and turtles broke out and I never found out whether he was going to do anything or not.
I think this whole thing might be preying on my mind a little.
