The Hampshire Gooner
There are many reasons why we find ourselves currently sitting a full 15 points off the summit of the Premier League table. Some of those reasons involve a mixed bag of bad luck due to poor refereeing-decisions and an ever growing injury-list (mainly to defenders). I personally feel that it is always better in these situations to look at the factors we can control as a club rather than those that we can’t.
Everyone and his dog could see that the defence was all over the place against Swansea. As a club, they may have only entered the top tier as recently as last summer, but they were the team who looked like scoring pretty much on every occasion that they got near our box. The reasons for this being so are pretty much out of our control, as - for me - these reasons are injuries to key men at the back. Sagna, Vermaelen and a combination of Gibbs/Santos all being out at the same time is simply too much to cope with. We can’t do a lot about this, other than give up on seemingly injury-prone players, but who in their right mind would advocate selling Vermaelen as things stand? He does seem to me to be every bit as injury-prone as Gibbs.
The main reason, in my eyes, that we are currently perched a whopping ten points behind the ‘mighty’ Spurs is further down the field of play. It is widely accepted that we play a system with four attacking players in it. The main choices so far this season have seen these four places fall on a regular basis to van Persie, Gervinho, Walcott and Ramsey. It goes without saying that, when fit, there is no problem with van Persie, and pretty much any club on the planet would love to have him at their disposal right now. But when we look at the other three players on our attacking rostrum, I see a lot of problems at the very top level.
Gervinho I haven’t quite given up on as yet, and the reason for this, despite many poor displays, is quite a simple one. It is his first season in the English game. Just take a look at how much Koscielny has improved in his second term as a player at the club, and then you start to see how and why it would be too early to write off our Ivorian man with a spam.
The two remaining forward-thinking players are a slightly different case. Walcott, for me, has been given enough time to develop his game beyond the level we currently see week-in, week-out. His career at the club started off as him being seen as a sprinter with little in the way of a football brain. Five years on, and I don’t really see where this has changed. We saw a little more hope last season at times, and I did feel before a ball was kicked this time round that this could have been Theo’s year, but, in my opinion, he has regressed to what we saw pre-2010 from him. At the very top level of the game, where you need a high number of players that are of the required calibre to bring home the trophies come May, Theo is not the answer. At best, he should be an impact-sub, someone who could come on in the final 20 minutes of a game and run at a tiring left-back time and time again to see if he can help to break the deadlock. Starting with a player of Theo’s class week-in, week-out is not something that is going to see us trouble the reception room waiting-list at Islington Town Hall very often in my opinion.
Moving on to Mr Ramsey, some of us have given Aaron more time than most, and the reasons for this are obvious. We needed as fans to have patience with this one more than others after his horrific injury. It was Eduardo re-visited, and the situation was mighty unfortunate to say the least. To his enormous credit, Aaron has recovered to such a degree that he now captains his country whenever he pulls on a Welsh national shirt. The problem for me is that this gives the player more kudos points than what it is actually worth. Let us get one thing straight: Wales are a very poor national side, ranked right down there with the San Marinos of this world. So let us not get too sucked in by Aaron’s captaining a side at such a young age, and look at the facts for what they are.
Ramsey has been back in the Arsenal fold for long enough now to make some sort of informed decision on him as an Arsenal player. After Cesc was sold in the summer, I wrote an article at the time that stated that, if we decided not to buy in a replacement, and relied heavily on Ramsey to create the chances from the middle of the park, this would be a mistake, in my opinion. Since writing these words, this is exactly what has happened, as could have been predicted, given our miserly approach to player-transfers in recent seasons. Over half-way through Aaron’s first season pulling the strings in the midfield for us, and we find ourselves looking likely to miss out on a Champions League place for the first time in 15 years. In my opinion, Aaron is a good player, but not one that should be relied upon to open up tight defences every week for us. At the very top level, he is found wanting more times than not from what I can see. There are far too many fancy tricks that simply don’t come off anywhere near often enough to make them worthy of repeating with such regularity. I have simply lost count of the number of times in recent weeks that a Ramsey back heel has been intercepted by the opposition, and, at the very top level, this just isn’t good enough.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not for one second trying to say that Theo and Aaron are poor players. They are both good players, and in their own rights have a lot to offer as footballers, but I have to say that judging them both at the very top level leaves something to be desired on both accounts. Do you win trophies with these players occupying two of your four attacking positions every week? I think not.
I guess it is an indication of the gradual decline in quality that we as Arsenal fans have seen over the past decade or so, as I for one am sure that neither Theo nor Aaron would have been regular starters for us in recent years. As the assets have slowly but surely been stripped away, the level of quality that we as a club are prepared to accept has fallen to slightly lower levels. Not poor by any means, but lower than what was previously accepted. This gradual decline has seen us slip below Chelsea and Man City in the Premier League pecking-order. We as fans have accepted this, as those two clubs seem to live in a very different financial world to that of the club we support.
The interesting turning point for me is how we fans will then take to adding the name Tottenham Hotspur to the list of clubs that we seem to be falling below in the current pecking-order. As things stand, it looks pretty unrealistic for us to entertain the idea of ending the season above our North London rivals in the League standings. I can easily foresee an end-result to this season of our having to watch (as they have done this season, it must be said!) as they qualify for next season’s Champions League and we have to settle for the Europa League at best.
Do we then as a collection of fans sit by and watch another club accelerate ahead of us, or is this the one name that will make most fans finally sit up and ask what has actually gone on at our club in recent seasons? Is it simply down to a lack of available funds, or an overriding lack of something else altogether? Ambition?
I read in a recent blog on another Arsenal-related website that, if we do not manage to qualify for next term’s Champions League, we will not have any chance at all of retaining the services of Mr van Persie. This seems to be the scenario and how most people would call it as things stand. Let me therefore remind everyone reading this of what happened in North London last summer.
Arsenal had qualified for this season’s Champions League with something to spare. Cesc Fabregas wanted to leave the club to rejoin his boyhood team, Barcelona. Cesc was then sold to Barcelona for a reported fee of around £30m. At the same time, across the other half of North London, Spurs had a problem which closely resembled our situation with Cesc. Their own midfield playmaker, Luka Modric, was not happy, as Spurs had failed to qualify for this season’s Champions League and Chelsea had come knocking for him, offering similar money for him that Barcelona had offered us for Cesc. The Spurs chairman, to his credit, stood firm and point-blank prevented the transfer from taking place. Luka stayed at Spurs, even though he quite clearly wanted to leave for the King’s Road and Roman’s millions.
Look where Spurs are now, and also, more importantly, look at where we are now. Would we as a club make van Persie stay on even if we do fail to make the Champions League for next season, or would we simply choose to use the funds recouped from the sale of van Persie to cover the shortfall of not being in next season’s Champions League?
A lack of available funds or an overriding lack of something else altogether?
