The Hampshire Gooner
So RvP leaves via the exit door and another one bites the dust, so to speak. The list of quality players that have left the club in recent times gets longer and longer with every passing summer. Who will it be next time round? Well I guess a strong clue will be in whoever is made the new club captain. Adios TV5 in summer 2013, then.
The reported fee doing the rounds of £24m, including add-ons, for RvP aged 29 with his injury record is a hard one for the club to turn down considering he was within twelve months of walking away for nothing. Can you blame the top brass at the club for cashing in? Well, the answer is a clear ‘yes’ in my mind.
We have signed Podolski, Giroud and Cazorla to sweeten the blow of yet another captain leaving us this summer. But surely the real question we fans should be asking is why did we not sign anyone of this quality last summer when Cesc and Samir were clearly eager to leave? At that time, RvP could have been persuaded by some top-notch signings to sign a new contact extension with us. We needed to put down a clear marker of intent to the likes of RvP within that squad last summer, and what we actually did was bring in the likes of Ju Yung Park, hardly a moment of pure inspiration if ever I saw one. It is easy to forget these facts and think that we have done well this time round to get in replacements before RvP left the club, but, in all seriousness, would we be having to sell him to United now if we had shown more urgency last summer?
To the so called gooners who now wish RvP a timely injury to start off his new career, I would honestly say that, as fans, we need to be better than that. What is the point of wishing a player bad luck when he has already left the club? If RvP gets injured, are Hernandez or Welbeck never going to score the same chances that RvP would have been provided with? To all of you who also choose to boo the likes of Ashley Cole, Samir Nasri and now RvP when they return to our stadium, will you ever really get the reality of the situation we are in? The true people we should have been booing all this time are the suits upstairs who run our club and make the kind of decisions on a daily basis that lead to this quality of player wanting out of our club.
I for one do not blame RVP one jot for leaving. Do I care that he has signed for Manchester United? No, not really; in reality, he is merely moving on up the food-chain. There is no way on earth the same thing would happen the other way round, so we have to admit as football fans that he is joining a bigger club, one that is more likely than us to be lifting the trophies that matter next May. It is that simple, even though it hurts us as fans to accept it.
Does the fact that the player has decided to join Manchester United at this time alter his playing record with our club? No, it does not; the games played and the goals scored will forever be written into the history books and, for me, RvP will go down as yet another top-quality player who was let down by the overall lack of quality around him at the time of his career with us.
We have made some very promising signings as a club this summer, possibly twelve months too late for our captain to have possibly extended his stay with us, but I guess you do have to take the positives out of the situation. We have already replaced the man leaving town this time round and can clearly look forward to a promising season where, if we can make one or two more signings before the window closes, we could surprise a few people.
