The Hampshire Gooner
Robin van Persie has been at Arsenal for eight seasons and has averaged 16.5 goals per season over that period of time. Is that a statistic to get overly concerned about when the player decides to call time on his career at the club? I would doubt it.
At the end of the day, a lot of people will agree with the sentiment of what RvP said in his statement, but it doesn’t hide the fact that its timing makes his staying at the club for a final season almost an impossibility. In releasing this statement, make no mistake that RvP has thought of himself first and foremost. It might play to the ears of some disgruntled members of the gooner fan-base but it has the tune of selfishness written all over it to me.
Get rid, maximise your return on the man and move on. We have already bought in two possible replacements in Podolski and Giroud, so no-one should be in anyway surprised to see RvP moving on.
I personally feel we would benefit by stripping more players off the wage-bill and not just the obvious ones that have all been mentioned on this very website millions of times before. I personally would like to see us move on Walcott and Vermaelen within the next twelve months as I firmly believe that we will not win any trophies with either man regularly playing in the starting eleven.
A lot of Arsenal fans seem to love Vermaelen, but, for me, he can only be judged as a central defender, and when you take away the odd goal here and there, I don’t feel the overall quality of his defending is anywhere near good enough at the very top level. When you compare him with the likes of Vidic and Kompany, he falls woefully short in my opinion and that is where we need to start judging ourselves if we are to compete against the best.
People say that Theo is inconsistent, which for me is a complete falsehood. He is not inconsistent at all, in my opinion; in fact, he is the complete opposite. Put him up against a poor left-back with little or no positional sense, and he looks very dangerous because of his ability to get in behind the defence. Put him up against any decent left-back, and a well-organised defensive unit, and he is completely nullified every single time. When does Theo ever look good against a decent team? Sell him for as much as possible and give more game time to Oxlade-Chamberlain as soon as possible.
I feel that we could net as much as £55-60m from the sales of the above-named players and will take off around £200,000 a week from the wage bill in the process as well. Combine this with the sales of the ‘deadwood’, and we could have as much as £80m to spend in the transfer market without even spending any net money at all. We have already spent around £25m on the arrivals of Podolski and Giroud, so this could leave us with as much as £55m to spend over the next twelve months or so without breaking the bank whatsoever.
I would very much recommend us using these funds to bring in a creative midfielder of genuine quality, a genuine ball-winning midfielder to replace the error-prone Song, and a solid left-back who is more interested in winning the ball and making challenges than whipping in crosses to invisible forwards and attempting to get on the score sheet.
Who knows? If we do these things well within the next twelve months or so, we might even surprise a few people and start to compete genuinely against the top clubs again on the field of play.
