David Oudot
There I was, sitting at home on Friday after a long week at work, when all of a sudden a WhatsApp message group between me and some old uni friends started going mental. According to Tim and Rob, Arsenal were on the brink of signing Jamie Vardy. Jamie bloody Vardy. And that was backed up by Whippet, Gadge, and Awics. I immediately laughed at them and told them they were having a bubble. There is no way on God’s green earth that Wenger’s Arsenal would invest in a 29 year old, who’s non-league born and bred, whose career record shows him as being incredibly inconsistent from season-to-season, and who only last summer admitted to throwing drunken racial slurs around in a casino at 3am during pre-season training. That makes no sense.
Then Sky Sports backed that up.
Then John Cross did the same.
And then every other newspaper and even the BBC printed the story.
And then Leicester are “unavailable for comment”.
It’s happening. It’s actually happening. Arsenal are signing one of the top scorers from last season’s Premier League season. Wow. A club that’s notoriously tighter than a nun’s nasty is about to spend £20m+ on a player for the second time in a week. Game on!
But is it a red herring? Is it a mistake? It’s peculiar to say the very least but the fact is that Vardy is not the solution to our problem of only having one player who can really play in the lone centre forward role Wenger persists with in his 4-2-3-1.
The initial reaction from Sky Sports was to ambush Giroud after his brace against Scotland on Saturday evening and ask him what his thoughts are, believing that he will be usurped by JV9. I really don’t think that that is going to happen as they’re different players and Jamie will be played in a different position.
When we bought Danny Welbeck form ManYoo, everyone thought that he would be replacing Olivier but it has turned out that Danny is essentially playing in the role that Wenger had in mind for Luis Suarez – a centre forward playing out wide in the attacking three, and cutting inside to shoot. After his opening three month probation period at the Club of being used up front, Wenger decided that Danny was not the same player as Giroud and could hold the ball up, flick it on for others etc., so was thrown out wide. True, his first long-term injury essentially took him out of the centre-forward for 9 months, but even since he came back fit he is played as one of the three behind the front man unless Giroud is so out of form he needs a rest. But what was one of Wenger’s pre-planned substitutions in every game? OG12 comes on and played as the centre forward, with Welbeck either coming off or being thrown out wide.
With Danny being ruled out for 9 months again (well, 9 months in Arsenal terms... So that’ll be the whole of next season), it seems to me that Vardy is just a replacement for him and essentially Suarez mk iii. Rather sad that the original choice for that position is now one of the Barcelona team that tore us apart in the CL last season, our next choice the year after is an injury-prone ManYoo reject, and two years later we turn to Leicester and pay £20m+ for a guy who only got 5 goals in all competitions in 2014-15. I know we have Alexis playing in that role as well as our first choice, but this is 21st century football and you need a squad with more than one player for each position. Seeing as we already have Walcott and Oxlade-Chamberlain on long-term contracts (rumours that one and/or t’other may be out this summer but they’re here at the moment) who generally start out wide on the right we may be overegging that pudding whilst still only having one person for the centre forward role. Having said that, Sanogo IS coming back to the Club after his three-goal spell at Charlton…
I appreciate that that initial reaction to it may seem snobbish and immediately dismissing Jamie due to the inconsistent nature of his career, and him being a non-leaguer until his mid-20s. Like all of you I immediately think of Ian Wright and him not turning pro until he was 22, and us not signing him until he was 28, and he was a centre forward, but whilst I would absolutely love it if Jamie replicated him but we would have to alter our formation/system to play to Jamie’s strengths. And as he didn’t do that for Alexis, I would be very surprised if Wenger wanted to do that for Vardy.
But the thing that really confuses me is that we’re going in for a deal like this as it makes no sense in terms of the way Arsenal find players and do transfers, as was declared publically by our £1.366m/year CEO, Ivan Gazidis, in his Q&A on Friday evening. To quote…
“We have scouts all around the world that work full time and part time and we have a scouting database that we have been building over time.”
“So we’ve got an enormous amount of people, lots of different sets of eyes looking at that, data analysts who are looking at this not just here, but all across the world. They put it together to come up with player recommendations.”
“Spending cleverly and well and efficiently, on players that are available and spending well, those things are more and more important. It’s less and less easy to just use money to dominate the league.”
I’d be surprised if our Club was looking at Vardy before January of this year, and with him being 29 and having no sell-on value, this deal contradicts the Club’s traditional stance. This isn’t the thought, process, and calculations the likes of you and I go through when buying a new car or house. This is an impulse purchase on a Saturday lunchtime shopping trip with the missus in Primark/H&M/John Lewis/Ikea (delete as appropriate).
It’s curious as to why we’d spend that much money on a player with the controversial background of Jamie and that at the end of whatever contract he signs here it’ll be a free transfer or a cut-price sell-on (probably back to Leicester, regardless of what division they’re in). If ever a player shows any element of being an arse on or off the pitch, Wenger gets rid of them (Song, Nasri, Adebayor etc.). With Jamie’s fun and games with the East Asian chap and a fridge filled with Corona at his place as the Leicester players celebrated their winning the title, will that really fit in with the Arsenal players who have a Xmas do of mineral water and an early night? Having said that, with Wilshere allowed to go to Strawberry Moon and Las Vegas and drink/smoke whatever he fancies then maybe JV9 will be his new BFF.
But the money is the thing with this Club. During his Q&A, Ivan also remarked “Spending cleverly and well and efficiently, on players that are available and spending well, those things are more and more important. It’s less and less easy to just use money to dominate the league”, so spending this sum on a man knocking on the door of his thirties seemingly contradicts that, doesn’t it? If you’re of that age then unless you’re on a free, cheap, or on loan (i.e. Suker, Silvestre, Kallstrom), then Wenger won’t consider it.
On Arseblog on Saturday, Andrew Mangan made a suggestion that perhaps it’s Wenger doing a Fergie. In 2012 it has turned out that Fergie had decided it was his last year in management before retiring so the long term money issue wasn’t his problem, and he needed goals desperately. He spent £24m on van Persie who was about to turn 29 and here we’re doing pretty much the same thing… but for all the reasons mentioned above our shop is Primark whereas Fergie went to Harrod’s. But if this is showing that this is Arsene’s last season running this Club then so be it. If you were Noel Edmonds I would say “Deal” and shake your hand.
Arsenal finally reaching into the £220m+ cash we have sitting in the Bank is a massive step forward and with us in the first week of June I’m hoping that we have only just begun a major shop this summer. But the signing of Vardy doesn’t address the key and obvious problem we showed last season in that we do not have a goal-scoring centre forward, and will be squad-strengthening at best. Sure, if we altered our formation to a proper 4-3-3 or the 4-4-2 that got Vardy 24 goals last season then maybe there would be something in this, but with the other signing of Xhaka to fit smoothly into the 4-2-3-1 I can’t see us changing our formation or style.
