The Hampshire Gooner
Well, now that the dust has settled on the poor start to the season we have had to endure and the transfer window has finally closed, what better time to take stock of our new position both on and off the field of play?
When looking at the long list of both the ins and the outs of the playing squad over the summer period, two things stand out to me more clearly than anything else. The first is that we have lost two of our very best players from the squad, when comparing the current first- team squad to the one that started the last campaign. The second is that the ‘replacements’ that have been brought in are not as good, and are what I would class as stop-gap signings - not the real long-term replacements, but players who can come in and do a job in the short term before we eventually bring in higher-calibre signings further down the line.
Overall, I can’t argue with this approach. The delays on both the Cesc transfer to Barcelona and the Samir sale to City meant that we didn’t have an abundance of time to make sure the class replacements we were ideally after would be made into a reality. There is a thought around the club at the moment that the real signings we wanted were M’Bia and Hazard, for a combined fee of around £50m. Unfortunately, in the time we had left to complete these signings, neither materialised and we settled as a club for Arteta and Benayoun as cheaper alternatives to the first options.
As a club, we were in a very poor position with Cesc and Samir for very different reasons. Cesc only wanted to go to one club, who were not going to pay the real top money for his signature because they knew their own position of strength as the only club that he would sign for. There are very well-founded rumours that Real Madrid did in fact offer £45m for Cesc in the early part of the summer. It is also being said that certain members of the board wanted to go down this route, but AW did not want to force Cesc into signing for Madrid when he knew his heart was set on Barcelona. Could Chelsea or City also have paid more than £30m odd for Cesc? The answer is a certain yes.
The Samir situation was different, but similar in the fact that the player wanted out. In my opinion, Samir can now say what he wants, but his true reason for wanting out was a financial one. One year left on his contract with no intention of re-signing, and we held out for around £25m. Good business in my eyes. The guy has almost trebled his wages in one fell swoop. We couldn’t have sold him much earlier on in the summer either, as the fee would have almost certainly have been lower had we simply bent over and let City take him. We had to play hardball with them to get anything like a worthy fee for what is after all a very good player.
At the same time, we should not in my opinion get too downbeat about Samir leaving us for City. It is worth remembering that he did manage to get three times as many assists in one game for City at WHL last weekend than he managed to get for us in the entire League campaign last time round. The real problem for us to sort out as a club is the impossible task of replacing the irreplaceable in Cesc Fabregas.
Even the Barcelona MD admitted the other day that £30m-odd for Cesc was virtual robbery, and we all know he is right with that statement. We had no choice but to sell and, under the circumstances, the club probably did all they could to try to get a half-decent fee for the player, but how do we go about replacing him in the current side?
Let us get one thing straight: you simply do not sell a Cesc Fabregas and go out and buy another ready-made replacement off the shelf. It does not exist, so what you have to do is adapt, re-group and come again further down the line. The signing of Arteta for me in this regard is a very astute one. Mikel Arteta has bags of Premier League experience and can hit the ground running. Someone like an Eden Hazard would have been under immense pressure from Day One to perform the impossible task of being the new Cesc Fabregas. Combined with his young age and lack of Premier League experience, you could have found the young, talented Belgian struggling pretty quickly and coming under too much scrutiny from the press. Who would have then been the cool head within the squad calming him down in that situation? Theo Walcott? With Mikel Arteta, we have an old head, and - in times of panic - that is exactly what you need to steady the ship. Make no mistake: after the 8-2 drubbing we received at OT, the good old ship that is the Arsenal is in dire need of some steadying right now.
Mix in with this the temporary signing of Yossi Benayoun, and you do suddenly have a lot of Premier League experience, and you also have players that can unlock some tight defences with some much-needed probing passing. This is what we need right now. We do not need a player that will take six months to adapt to the English game and another season then to do the much-needed bulking up in the gym in order to hold off many a Stoke defender’s challenges. We need a short-term fix that will lead us to better things, and also we need an older head for when the other signings do get made over the next 12 months or so. We will then have people within the club who can pass on that much sought-after Premier League experience to the newer members of the playing squad.
So the next time you hear someone state the simple fact that Mikel Arteta is nothing better than a poor man’s Cesc Fabregas, ask them who in their opinion isn’t? It is no coincidence that Jack Wilshere was lauding the signings on his twitter account. He is exactly the type of player who will benefit the most from having an older, experienced head around him in the middle of the park over the next couple of seasons. In essence, Jack can learn a whole load more right now from Mikel Arteta than he would have ever learned from Eden Hazard.
We have all been crying out for a tall, dominant centre-half with real experience, and we got exactly that in Per Mertesacker. Over 70 caps for Germany is no mean feat in my opinion, and some of that German ‘never know when we are beaten’ attitude is exactly what the doctor ordered for me. We signed the man for less than £9m and he is only 26 years old. People complain that we should have bought Gary Cahill instead. To me, this is madness. If anything, we should have bought the Bolton man as well and then had three genuine quality centre-halves instead of two. I do fear that, with TV proving to be more than injury-prone, we will now be relying too much on Koscielny all over again. This could well prove to be a big enough stumbling-point to the season for AW to try and make the Cahill signing a reality in the January sales.
I do still expect one or two new faces in January, as one thing is for sure - we will not be sitting pretty in a Champions League place by then. At best, we will be level-pegging with the likes of Liverpool etc and, in reality, we will probably be going into the New Year playing catch-up after the dire start we have had. Hopefully, this situation will provide the impetus to improving the playing squad all over again in January. Who knows? By next summer, we could have a pretty strong-looking squad for the first time in ages if we do manage to add Hazard, M’Bia and Cahill over the next 12 months or so.
We must have made a minimum £10m profit over the summer’s player-trading and, with the expected sales of NB52, Denilson and Vela hopefully to be completed over the next 12 months, the transfer kitty would surely swell enough to help make the above three signings realistic. It is widely reported that we had a war chest of around £40m prior to this summer anyway. Add another £20m plus to that, and we should in theory have the required funds available to buy Hazard, Cahill and M’Bia without going too far into the red. Let’s not forget the £4.5m we all added as well over the summer after ‘that’ ticket price hike.
If we can manage to scramble a top-four place this season and then buy the sort of player who can get us up to the next level, which - in my opinion – means genuinely competing for the top prizes again from next season onwards, then we will have seen a real transitional phase and turn-around in the club’s history. Fail to land the top four spot this season, and let the calibre of signings slip long-term to the level we have seen over the last fortnight or so, and then you are in real trouble with the sort of overheads that we have had to incur as a club since the move of stadium.
Tough times? Well, yes. But it does not have to be all negative. From times of adversity, strength can and often does grow. We as supporters have to get behind the team and realise that certain players are simply not that easy to replace. We have been put into a very difficult position by two top players wanting out at the same time, and it may just be that replacing them takes more than one step. It could be a two-phase situation which we are already half-way through and which will, in all probability, be completed by the end of this season. We need to make sure we are still in a position to complete the second phase next summer by being in the Champions League all over again. It isn’t about our chances of winning the competition next season. It is about being able to attract the calibre of player we need to attract in order for us to get over the loss of Cesc as a club and move forward.
As a final footnote to all of the above, it is worth remembering that with Cesc and Samir in the team, we did not manage to get over the line in any of the major events that we enter each year. Can change really be that much of a bad thing then?
