In a few hours, Arsenal will start their new campaign for the 2013/2014 season. All the talk is over and the football will begin. The summer shenanigans are over (well, for now) and the long season will soon be underway.
The only thing left to do, is believe:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUcvPZyDphY
So how do you think we’ll do this afternoon?
After weeks of waiting for Arsenal to make a big signing that clearly isn’t coming, Arsenal fans are becoming increasingly frustrated as the transfer window rumbles on. And with the “injury crisis” at Arsenal, I would just be happy with three or four mediocre signings so that we don’t have to resort to using the tea lady in the Champions League qualifiers.
And look, in a way I understand why we haven’t bought anyone in so far. Arsene Wenger, more than any other manager, is extremely loyal to his players. We haven’t bought a midfielder because he believes that it is Aaron Ramsey’s time to make that step up in quality. He has faith in Jack Wilshere going through a season without suffering an injury – it’s the same reason why Abou Diaby has lasted this long at the club. It’s the same as we go through the squad – Olivier Giroud is in his second season now so Arsene believes that he will do even better this time round.
Players who play under him always say how much of an amazing manager he is – and mainly that’s due to him giving players a chance. After all, who else would have given a young kid by the name of Cesc Fabregas such a big role in Arsenal’s first team all those years ago? And you could say that about Aaron Ramsey, Jack Wilshere and Patrick Vieira when he joined.
But with the number of injuries we’re suffering at the moment we go into tomorrow’s game with Aston Villa with a threadbare squad, no new signings and a lot of frustrated Arsenal fans.
But if you think about it, this is what Arsene Wenger wants.
He is an extremely clever man and knows that if we start the season with doom and gloom then he is in a position to become the saviour of Arsenal Football Club. Remember two seasons ago when we got absolutely thrashed by Manchester United 8-2? That was rock bottom but what happened? We made some signings, turned our season around and ended up finishing 3rd. And that 3rd spot was vital that season as Tottenham Hotspur finished 4th but missed out on the Champions League thanks to Didier Drogba and Chelsea.
So it’s happening all over again. Most Arsenal fans are frustrated, down and nervous about the new season. But don’t threat, Arsene Wenger will turn this all around in his favour, make some big signings before the transfer window closes on September 2nd and suddenly he will be the greatest manager who has ever lived!
Why make all of his signings early in the transfer window? That would raise expectation levels and put even more pressure on him and the players? By waiting, he has lowered expectation levels and given Arsenal a great platform to have a great season.
Tomorrow marks the start of the new Premier League season. We all know about all of the players we’ve released in this transfer window and that we’ve only brought in Yaya Sanogo, who will forever be remembered as the only signing we made in the summer of 2013.
Mikel Arteta, one of our most important and experienced players looks to be out for 4 to 6 weeks with a thigh problem. Added to that, Vermaelen, Monreal, Sagna, Ramsey, Diaby, Miyaichi and Sanogo are already on the injury table, Cazorla has a 10,000 flight from Ecuador and Bendtner, Park and Frimpong have minimal involvement in years gone by.
That means that we roughly have twelve “fit” players for the seasons opener against Aston Villa, and two of those are goalkeepers.
To say the squad is threadbare would be a massive understatement.
And if clubs came in for Bendtner, Park and Frimpong then they would have been allowed to leave. So our squad could have been even more “light” on numbers.
So what is going on?
We are well past the point of making a marquee signing to appease the fans. Now Arsenal fans just want some mediocre signings to make up numbers in our increasingly depleted squad.
Most teams aim to have two players per position but we are well below that. Injuries happen all the time and God forbid we had an injury to Koscielny, Mertesacker, Szczesny or Walcott. The concern isn’t so much tomorrow’s game against Aston Villa, it’s the two Champions League qualifiers against Fenerbahce.
You do wonder what Arsene Wenger is thinking. And what does he need to do to get the sack, because completely ignoring a £70 million war chest against the wishes of Ivan Gazidis, Stan Kroenke and the rest of the board is a good way to go about it. I’ve heard from various sources now that Gazidis and Kroenke are keen on Arsenal to stay competitive and have urged Arsene to spend, while the manager has dithered in the transfer market and made some very poor decisions – including dropping interest in Gonzalo Higuain for Luis Suarez. Hindsight is a wonderful thing but it was obvious from the start that Suarez is a mercenary who would jump ship from Arsenal if Real Madrid came in for him.
The strange thing is well is that Arsene hasn’t even done his bare minimum of buying cut price players from the French league. We’ve got Sanogo but no-one else. We haven’t even recruited many young Frenchmen this summer.
Many senior players such as Arteta, Wilshere, Walcott, Podolski and Ramsey have talked about how Arsenal need to spent to compete. But why is Arsene being so stubborn? Has he had enough and wants to get the sack? Has he lost the plot and thinks we can win the league with twelve fit players?
Or has Arsene filled his swimming pool with £50 notes? Who knows what’s going on.
There is a small part of me that still believes that the longest transfer window that ever was will end in a few signings before the hammer comes down on the 2nd of September.
Maybe, just maybe, Arsene is playing a poker game and waiting until the last days of August to swoop in to make the 4/5 new signings we need. Then again, maybe not.
What a wonderful summer it has been for Arsenal fans. At least Saturday will give us a sweet release from the nightmare that is the transfer window. Well, for a couple of hours anyway, as it doesn’t actually end until September.
Any excitement once the season ended has well and truly vanished into a sea of disappointment, resentment and depression. Sure, we should all support the club through think and thin, but after 8 disappointing seasons Ivan Gazidis (a name I cannot say without feeling sick) gave us fans the worst thing he could give supporters – a thing called hope.
Maybe it was just posturing, showing off, or possibly even real intent, but for whatever reason we haven’t spent a penny (apart from the £390,000 in compensation for Yaya Sanogo). With 2 days until the Premier League season is about to start, Arsenal fans are feeling anything but excited.
After checking online numerous times every day since the season ended to see if we’ve bought anyone, it always ends up the same way. The player we’ve been linked with moves to a different club. Higuain to Napoli, Jovetic to Manchester City, Luis Suarez to er… Liverpool and now Luiz Gustavo to Wolfsburg.
How does this happen? We are either penny-pinching to the point where we are losing out on all of our transfer targets or we have the worst negotiating team football has ever seen. We go back to the old adage about David Dein and whatever your views on him, he didn’t seem to have all of these problems in the transfer market.
Arsene Wenger is like me when I go shopping in town for clothes. I don’t like it and can’t be arsed. I see things I like but I dither around because I know fuck all about “what looks good” and end up not buying anything for the fear that I might look like Justin Beiber one of those kids from Wand Erection. My wife on the other hand has no such problem. Give her my credit card and she’ll buy things I never knew existed. So in that sense, Arsene Wenger needs to be more like my wife.
I am rambling slightly now so I’ll end it there. I will say though that even now, when all hope is almost lost that I would find it inconceivable that Arsenal didn’t make at least 2 signings before the transfer window ends. We have a good base (our form in the last 10 games of last season) so to not build on that would be absolutely criminal.
There’s 5 days left until the start of the season, and I don’t know about you but I can’t wait. Ever since the season ended it’s been a painful and tedious summer, where we’ve been linked with so many players and yet signed none (of note anyway). So at least the start of the new football season will be a welcome distraction.
So here we are. Currently in terms of our first team squad, we’ve signed one player (and bought none) released twelve and spent exactly zero pounds and zero pence.
The one signing we have made is Yaya Sanogo who was free from Auxerre. The twelve players we’ve released or sold (including loans out) are Andrei Arshavin, Denilson, Vito Mannone, Sebastian Squallaci, Andre Santos, Gervinho, Marouane Chamakh, Johan Djourou, Francis Coquelin, Joel Campbell, Craig Eastmond and Ignasi Miguel.
That is a lot of squad members to lose without buying anyone to replace them.
I know on Twitter there’s a graphic going around showing that we’ve actually released/sold about 100 players but most of those were youth or reserve team members.
So in terms of players likely to be involved in the forthcoming season, our squad currently looks like this:
Goalkeepers
Wojciech Szczesny
Lukasz Fabianski
Full Backs
Bacary Sagna
Carl Jenkinson
Kieran Gibbs
Nacho Monreal
Central Defenders
Laurent Koscielny
Per Mertesacker
Thomas Vermaelen
Central Midfielders
Jack Wilshere
Mikel Arteta
Aaron Ramsey
Abou Diaby
Attacking Midfielders
Alex-Oxlade Chamberlain
Santi Cazorla
Tomas Rosicky
Ryo Miyaichi
Forwards
Theo Walcott
Lukas Podolski
Olivier Giroud
Yaya Sanogo
So after not including players like Nicklas Bendtner and Park Chu-Young who aren’t going to get a look in this season, then we have 21 players we can call upon for a whole campaign. Added to that, two of those players are injury prone (Diaby and Rosicky), another two have little or no Premier League experience (Sanogo and Ryo) and we have Theo, Ramsey, Vermaelen and Mertesacker reportedly out injured.
So to say the squad is threadbare at the moment would be an understatement.
We’ve had a decent pre-season and there have been some encouraging signs, particularly with the performance against Manchester City, but our squad is light on numbers. Technically speaking, we have a starting eleven which could probably compete with any team on the day but injuries to any of our key players and we would be in massive trouble. Arsene Wenger and Arsenal have done really well in offloading some of the dead wood in the squad but I thought we would at least make a few signings to ease the burden.
It has been widely reported that players such as Jack Wilshere, Mikel Arteta and Theo Walcott have publicly encouraged signings to the club but with 5 days of the season to go nothing has happened.
There’s still over two and half weeks to go in the transfer window but you would think that after seasons gone by we would have learnt our lesson and planned much better. The same point has been battered to death – why not get the players in early so they can settle into the club and squad so we can start the season in the best possible manner?