Gary Thwaites
The new season is almost upon us and, at the time of writing, RvP looks likely to join United (Ed’s note – obviously this was submitted earlier in the week) and the ever-gracious Barça squad are openly tapping up Song through whichever Spanish sports hack happens to be hanging around the Nou Camp shower-room on any given day. I suspect that the former will go, and the latter will stay. How I wish it were the other way around. Such is our lot as Arsenal fans I suppose. We managed to offload Hleb to Barça few years back, so we would be very lucky to pull off the same scam again with Song. Why they want him is a mystery to me. He would fit into their tikka-takka system about as well as a hippo with a glandular disorder would fit into Mo Farah’s running shorts.
As for our soon-to-be ex-skipper, he will rightly be vilified by the faithful if he returns to Ashburton in a United shirt, but who can blame him for doubting our ambition. As promising as signings such as Cazorla, Podolski and Giroud are, we continue to sell our best players for £20 million plus, whilst replacing them for far less than that. It is all depressingly familiar but, like most football fans, a new season puts me in a reflective mood. The season-ticket renewal fee has been paid, no matter how begrudgingly, and I live in hope if not expectation. With that in mind, here is my five-point wish list for the next ten months or so…..
Steve Bould is allowed to do more at the training ground than put out the cones, and more on the touchline than practise his Pat Rice whistle. We have conceded more league goals, year on year, in each of the last four seasons, culminating in the appalling 49 shipped last year. This is not just an issue of personnel, although I would still like to see us bring in a left-back and better cover at right-back and goalkeeper. The issue is tactical. Just look at the 8-2 drubbing we received at Old Trafford last year. Plenty of teams go there with far worse defenders than even our injury-depleted squad could muster that day and don’t get shellacked in the manner that we did. It is not hard to understand why.
Most teams cut their cloth according to their circumstances. Whether it was a matter of tactical naivety or arrogance, I can think of no other manager who would send out a team with Traore, Djourou and Jenkinson in its back four with instructions to go for all-out attack against a rampant United team on top form. To start the game with such a reckless strategy was misguided, to say the least. To continue with it after we had come so horribly unstuck in the opening exchanges, even before the goals started flowing, was the football equivalent of dripping hot wax on your man-parts and begging for more. Our humiliation that day shattered our confidence and went a long way to derailing our season before it had even begun. Arsène is notorious for never working on the defence in training and refusing to listen to anyone else’s opinion. We can only hope the appointment of Bould signals an end to both self-defeating habits.
We start punching our weight in the transfer market. Every year, we are lauded as one of the richest and most profitable clubs in the world. We have not one but two major shareholders who are billionaires several times over, and we boast a 60,000-seat stadium charging the highest ticket prices in the world. However, on Wikipedia’s list of the 25 most expensive transfers (hey, its as good a source as any), Real Madrid feature five times, Barcelona, Man U, Chelsea and PSG three times each and Man City twice (although if the list was extended to 50, I suspect that they would feature a lot more often). We do not feature at all. The cheapest player on the list cost just under double our current transfer-record. When we were moved on from our beloved Highbury, we were explicitly promised that it was necessary in order to compete at the very top of the transfer market. It has been six years now, the debt is well under control and, perhaps by luck more than judgment, we haven’t had to endure a season without the Champions League’s pot of gold. Financial Fair Play is a busted flush, as PSG’s recent antics surely prove, if indeed that was ever in doubt.
I am not asking that we spend £100m every summer, just that we occasionally try to compete with the top clubs to buy players from the very top drawer, instead of just selling our top players to them. Van Persie told the club he wanted to do one at the start of the summer, so why didn’t we try for Ibrahimovic instead of, or as well as, Giroud. Last year, we could have had Mata, but settled for Gervinho. I could go on. It is time to start spending the cash that the club squeezes out of us fans at every opportunity. How much moustache-wax does Silent Stan need? If he doesn’t want to play the game, he should sell the club to Usmanov and let him have at it. It’s not like Abramovich has done Chelsea any harm.
We keep a tighter control of players’ contracts. In fairness, it looks like the club has finally started to resolve the first part of this two-part problem, in that we have said we will stop giving the likes of Bendtner, Chamakh, and Denilson (all still Arsenal players at the time of writing) long lucrative contracts. It is no surprise that we can’t find clubs to match their reputed £50k-plus a week salaries and, therefore, they remain on our books draining our resources week on week. I have no objection to awarding the loyalty of important squad-players, but not at the expense of being able to offer the star players what they can get elsewhere.
I know that we cannot match City’s grand salary giveaway, but why can’t we compete with the likes of debt-riddled Man United? The other part of this problem is that, when we have a player who can demand the bigger bucks, we wait until the last year of his contract before we start negotiating. I am sure that we intentionally do so in order to save the expense of paying higher salaries for as long as possible, but surely the board can now see how that backfires. We force players into a situation that naturally gets them to think about their options and invites suitors from home and abroad. Had we offered Nasri a contract a year earlier, I suspect he would still be in an Arsenal shirt now. Ugly, classless, mouthy git he may have turned out to be, but who would have noticed if he was still one of us?
The club stops treating us like idiots. Put simply, stop lying to us. Stop announcing full houses when there are thousands of empty seats. Stop pretending the ridiculous away-kits have anything to do with our heritage. Stop pretending that we are reducing ticket-prices to Category C games for any other reason than we know we will struggle to sell them otherwise. Stop pretending, as we did until after the season-ticket renewals had gone through, that we are still negotiating a new contract with our captain when he has told us long ago that he will not sign it. Just stop. We are grown-ups, for the large part. We know how the world works. Sure, there are lots of fans, at home and abroad, who can be talked down to because they have no sense of the wider long-term issues facing the club and who can therefore be placated by the propaganda machine, but those fans will come and go. The die-hards, the ones who used to turn up to watch us on damp half-empty terraces in the mid-eighties, the ones who remember that there was life before Wenger and know there will be life after him, the ones who have followed the club and will continue to do so their whole lives, those are the fans who deserve more than the constant stream of marketing-speak bulls**t that appears to be the only way the club feels able to communicate these days.
And finally, please, for the love of god, win a trophy. Any trophy. I’d bite your hand off if you offered me the Carling Cup now. Fourth place is not a trophy. A balance sheet in the black is not a trophy. I’ve been going to games for over 30 years, and the best days, those I look back on most fondly years later, all ended with a piece of silver at the end of it. More important than even the one of joy at winning, we must get this albatross from around our neck. Success breeds success, and failure begets failure. We seem to lose a different star player every year, all citing our lack of ambition. We have become the team that everyone respects, but nobody fears. Eight short years ago, we were the best team I have ever seen play in this country, and right up there with the best I have ever seen anywhere in the world. There was no need to dismantle that squad so quickly, but that ship has sailed. It is time to start a new dynasty now, before the position becomes irrecoverable.
I leave you with a note of optimism. We still have a long way to go, but I am more hopeful for this season than I have been in a while. Eight out of our last nine signings have been over 25. None of our domestic competitors have significantly strengthened their teams, yet. If we get off to a decent start and build some momentum, I doubt we will win the league, but a comfortable top-four finish instead of a last-minute scramble, a domestic cup and a decent run in Europe (maybe all the way to a Wembley final, with a kind draw) are all well within our grasp. At this time of the season, we can hope, we can even believe, that the corner has been turned and that this is the year that we get our great club back on track. So, hope for the best, my fellow Gooners, just perhaps don’t expect too much.
