Gary Thwaites
While clearing some space on my laptop recently, I came across a piece that I wrote for the Online Gooner in August 2012, setting out a 5 point wish list for the upcoming season (still available here). As four year cycles have a special place in football, now seems a good time to reflect on whether any of my wishes were granted and, more importantly, whether we have moved forward as a team and as a club in the intervening years. Taking each 2012 wish in turn…
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.
The point I was trying to make here was, of course, that our defence had been shambolic at times during the previous season and appeared entirely without proper coaching. I hoped that Bouldy’s appointment signalled the end to Wenger’s seemingly laissez-faire attitude to the dark arts of defending.
Let’s look at the stats first. I remarked back then that we had conceded more goals in the league, year on year, in each of the previous four seasons, shipping 49 in 2011/2012. That has improved. We have conceded “just” 36 goals in each of the last 2 seasons, following 41 the year before and 37 the year before that. Better, yes, but almost a goal a game is still hardly fantastic. The personnel available at the back has certainly improved with the signing of Cech and Monreal, the emergence of Bellerin and the blossoming of Koscielny into one of the best centre halves in the game. Le Coq and Elneny also now provide genuine cover in front of the back four, which had been missing for some time.
Wish fulfilled then? Well, not quite. Better isn’t always good enough we are still exposed as tactically naïve at the back too often and at too great a cost. Take our 3-3 draw at West Ham last season, for many the final straw that broke the back of our title aspirations (albeit for me that was taking one point in nine after beating Leicester at home). Faced with the one-trick-carthorse Andy Caroll, surely no other manager would have played Ospina and Gabriel instead of Cech and Mertesacker, particularly with Giroud on the bench. You all know what happened next and if Bouldy does have a voice in the coaching set-up, then either he wasn’t heard that day or he hasn’t transferred his natural talent for defending from the pitch to the dugout.
We start punching our weight in the transfer market.
Let’s have another quick look at some stats. At the time of writing the last piece I noted that on Wikipedia’s list of the 25 most expensive transfers (as I said then, it is as good a source as any), Real Madrid featured 5 times, Barcelona, Man U, Chelsea and PSG 3 times each and Man City twice, with the cheapest player costing just under double our then transfer record.
At the time of writing now, we have 1 player a list that is still dominated by the aforementioned clubs, although to be fair you have to accept that Alexis was a proper signing and that his place at joint 36th owes more to the insanity of the transfer market than it does our lack of ambition. Hulk, Sterling, David Luiz, Teixeira and Martial are all above him on the list.
So far this window we have made a promising early signing, flirted with but ultimately missed out on a big name up front and then bought an unknown 20 year old from a minor league. Sound depressingly familiar to you? Me too. Man U have set the pace this summer and I’d be surprised if City and Chelsea do not keep up. Liverpool are looking renewed and Spurs, sadly, haven’t had a fire sale and retain the squad which came close to finishing above us last year. That’s already 6 teams challenging for the top 4 and I haven’t even mentioned the defending champions.
We now live in a world in which Crystal Palace can bid £30m plus for an average centre forward. Every club in the league is cash rich and has aspirations of grandeur following Leicester’s remarkable romp to the title. Last year might well have looked like an easy title to win, but this year looks like it could be very different. We may well be trying harder in the transfer market than we were four years ago, but it still isn’t hard enough. The extent to which that is down to the manager or the board is an argument for others to have in the comments section.
We keep a tighter control of players’ contracts
This was a two-part wish. I wanted us to stop overpaying for mediocrity and to stop waiting until the final year of the top players’ contracts before offering new terms. On the first point, I have one word… Walcott. On the second, it is difficult to judge. Koscielny has been allowed to run down his contract to the final year, but perhaps we had little choice. Increasingly older players all over Europe are offered improved terms but elect to wait until they are free agents to really cash in. They are all so rich now that they don’t need the security of a longer contract. It is all just numbers on their accountants’ spreadsheets.
It will be interesting to see how the club deals with Ozil and Alexis now that both are entering the penultimate year of their deals. In the past we have been happy to let star players go to the final year of their contracts before trying to negotiate new terms or, if that fails, moving them on (think RvP). We accepted that could knock, say, 10-20% of their value, but back then our players weren’t worth as much. Alexis could fetch well north of £50 million if we sold him now. Losing 20% off that sort of figure starts to look like real money. I read recently that Juve are apparently preparing a significant bid for him and I do worry that we may be entering another period as a selling club. We shall see, but for the time being while I certainly don’t feel like this wish has been granted, I no longer think that there is a great deal the club can do about it.
The club stops treating us like idiots
I have to admit that I went on a bit of a rant here, furious as I was that it had just come out that RvP had told the club months earlier that he wasn’t going to sign a new contract and the club had supressed the news until after season ticket renewals had gong through. In fairness to the club, they have at least stopped announcing full houses when we could all see thousands of empty seats. They just stopped announcing the attendances during games altogether.
In signing the new Puma deal, which guarantees three new kits a season, the club also stopped any pretence of giving us new kits to honour our heritage, another complaint of mine at the time. In fact, the club has pretty much given up any pretence of giving a shit about its fans at all. Stan has maintained his silence for so long there is no reasonable expectation that he will ever break it. In almost 40 years of attending matches I cannot recall organised protests inside the ground like we had last year, but the club’s response was apathetic, at best.
So, I guess this wish has been granted. The club no longer treats us like idiots. It just treats us like assholes instead. Not exactly the kind of progress I was looking for.
And finally, please, for the love of god, win a trophy
Okay, we won two FA Cups. The first final may have taken years off my life, but I enjoyed the second perhaps more than any of the other dozen or so cup finals I have been lucky enough to attend with Arsenal. Wish granted.
In summary, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. We’ve made progress in some areas, but not enough. I do think we are a better team than we were in 2012, but then the competition has also improved. We may have finished closer to the title last year than we have done for a while (in terms of league position) but we were still very far away from winning it (in terms of absolutely everything else). We also seem to be drifting ever further away from the prospect of winning the Champions League, despite starting to buy players who individually have the talent to justify such lofty ambitions.
