The Hampshire Gooner
As this week saw the first of many possible leavers exit the club this summer, I thought it would be a good time to add some realism to what has been going on at our club over the recent weeks and months.
Some people seem to think that it is all doom and gloom at our club these days and by the time the season kicks off, we will hardly have any players left pulling on the red and white jersey. Some papers would have you believe that there has been a revolving door installed at the club’s training ground and that some players want out as soon as they arrive at Arsenal on day one. Some fans are even insisting that we will be involved in some sort of relegation battle come next spring.
Let us get real for a moment or two here. We are not going to collapse as a club suddenly just because one or two players decide to leave. Ask yourself a couple of questions to put it all into perspective. Question one - What have any of the players currently looking to leave the club actually won whilst being at the club? Question two - Have we not lost more important players than these in the past without the ship sinking?
Gael Clichy has left the club and joined Man City. We got a minimum of £7m for a player that had one season left on his contract and did not want to sign another one as he knew he could get more money elsewhere than Arsenal were prepared to offer him. He has made too many mistakes as a left back and had very poor positional sense for a defender. Will we miss him? Not really.
If Samir chooses to leave the club, will it really be because he wants to see us make a few more top signings or will it be more down to the fact that other clubs might pay him the six figure weekly salary with the fat signing-on fee that he craves? Is he any different to our good old friend, Mr. Adebayor? I think not. What has Samir won at Arsenal? Nothing. Where was he for the final five months of last season? Nowhere. Will we miss him? Not if we buy an adequate replacement.
If Cesc does decide to call time on his Arsenal career then what should we do as a club? Get the best price possible for him and move on just as we did when we lost the likes of Henry, Vieira and Pires. We will need to spend wisely to get anything like a worthwhile replacement in for Cesc, but with Ramsey already in the squad and money to spend, Cesc leaving isn’t really the end of the world. Let us not forget that last season he wasn’t really at the races anyway and we still managed to be in with a shout of the title up until early April.
I can see a summer transfer kitty of a minimum of £60m being made available after these players leave for pastures new and I for one actually find this quite an exciting and refreshing prospect. Why should we be afraid to lose players that have won us nothing over the past six seasons? We will at last be forced as a club to spend some proper money. You can be sure of that. And I feel confident that one or two of the bigger names on the potential target list might be lured this way with that sort of kitty to spend on them. For me, if we could pull off a signing or two in the mould of an Eden Hazard and or a Leighton Baines then this will more than make up for the disappointments of losing Samir and co. It is this calibre of signing that we should be aiming for as a club this summer to freshen things up a little and to give some optimism back to the fans.
It is one thing trying to bring in the likes of Gervinho, Samba and Oxlade-Chamberlain, but in the real world these signings will not be enough to appease the fans after a lacklustre ending to last season and the real possibility of losing one or two of our bigger names this summer. We need to make our intentions as a club clear, so we are not seen as simply a nursery for players to come to and enhance their reputations before leaving for the real big boys a season or two later. We cannot allow this situation to develop any further as in recent years the quality of player wanting to leave seems to have gotten higher and higher.
In the earlier years of AW’s reign at the club, it seemed as if no one who had been at Arsenal wanted to leave. It felt like a family unit at our club for most of the players at that time. After a few seasons of enhancing their reputations further, the likes of Vieira were linked with summer moves to bigger clubs. These moves never took place at that time though and you were reasonably assured that all of the big names would still be at the club come August every year. In recent times this trend has changed as our on field achievements have nose-dived. It now seems an age since the likes of Vieira, Pires and Henry left the club. What we have seen over recent seasons is the likes of Hleb, Flamini and Adebayor declare their desire to move on to bigger and better things. Are these players in the class of Vieira, Henry or Pires? The clear answer is no and let us be honest, we only let Vieira, Henry and Pires leave when it was right for us as a club to do so. We had seen the best years of all of those players at our club and then sold them on for decent amounts of money (Pires aside) when they were in the latter years of their careers.
When you get to a stage where mediocre players are declaring a desire to ply their trade elsewhere then you have to start asking questions as to why this is starting to happen. Should a player of Clichy’s abilities really be in a position to decide for himself that Arsenal are no longer meeting his own needs as a footballer whether that is on a financial basis or otherwise? I personally would like to think not. A player of this quality should feel fortunate to be pulling on the jersey every week as in years gone he wouldn’t have been deemed good enough to do so and that is a fact. Gael only got his chance to be a regular when Ashley Cole left all those years ago and in all honesty he has hardly proved himself to be Mr. Consistent, has he? My answer to him is good riddance.
What we shouldn’t do is rely on Kieran Gibbs as his replacement as he is unproven and injury prone (not a good combination in my eyes). We should instead set an example and go and out and buy a better replacement than Clichy in Leighton Baines of Everton. We need to blow them out of the water with an offer they can’t refuse and show some ambition with the balls to go with it. We have got the money coming into the kitty, so why not use it on proven talent that will instantly improve our side?
If we bought Baines, Hazard, Gervinho and Samba or Cahill, then this would show an intention to genuinely compete with the best. Whereas if we stick to the last two or three names on that list I feel it would be a big step back compared to last season’s squad and we proved to be not good enough then, so how could any of us then get excited about the upcoming new season?
The time to procrastinate has been and gone. Now is the time for us to start showing the ambition that got us to the point of needing a new stadium in the first place. We need to do this now and not in January when we are struggling to gain a top four spot for next season. We will have the money, we will have the stadium and we will have the Champions League spot to attract the big names to us for the upcoming season. More importantly in my eyes, we are coming off the back of some real criticism of the way that the club is being run for the first time in a long while which makes the need for change even greater. Arsenal are beginning to wake up and take notice of how frustrated some elements of the support have grown with how things have gone over the past three seasons or so. It is this fact, in my opinion, that makes the chances of quality new signings happening this close season greater than summers in the recent past.
I feel the club will show ambition and we will see some major signings over the next month or so. For if we do not and Samir and Cesc leave us as now appears likely, the unease and frustration within the fan base will only grow and grow and get more vocal with it. The club we all support surely cannot want that to happen as it will make certain people’s positions at the club virtually untenable.
Therefore let us be patient and see what happens over the next month or so before we start pulling our hair out. I feel confident that by then we will be looking quite a bit stronger than the media would have you believe. That is for certain.
