Just before I went to bed last night my phone pinged. It was Giles from the Gooner Ramble and he’d dropped a WhatsApp group i’m on a message about the rumours: Szczesny is off to Juve it seems if reports are to be believed.
Now we all know that Buffon isn’t going to last forever and that eventually he will need to be replaced, but it goes some way to showing just how Szczesny has performed in Italy that Juve want to snap him up for £14million now so they have somebody ready to take over when Buffon retires. And if Wojciech has been given a message that Buffon has maybe a season left in him, he’d be absolutely mad not to want that, because Juve have a proven track record of winning and going deep in to European competition like they are doing tonight by contesting the Champions League final.
Suffice to say that I think this would be a big mistake on Arsenal’s part and actually, I think it shows what a mess we are right now, because Szczesny really is one of us. He’s a boyhood Arsenal fan, spent almost 10 years at the club and has grown in stature in the two years he’s been at Roma. Cech is 35 going on 36 and at times this season it’s been clear his star is waning. Having Szczesny come back to fight to win back the gloves from him would only be good for us and if these stories turn out to be true, I think it shows what a shambles we are, right now.
Szczesny has a year left on his deal too, so if he wanted to he could also tell Juve that he’ll run down his contract at Arsenal, play the “I’ll fight for my place” next season, then bugger off anyway next summer. All because we’ve failed to get our arses in gear. But let’s be honest, that’s a so very Arsenal way of losing a player, isn’t it? It just all looks a bit messy, stupid and shows a lack of any foresight whatsoever.
But then again that is Arsene’s Arsenal these days. He does everything and because he does everything and doesn’t accept help, we have these situations, because he doesn’t have a David Dean to drive a Gilberto up to the training ground and say “here you are Arsene, this is who you wanted, now get on with fitting him in your team” like he used to. And because of that we get these situations like we’re in now, where from the outside everything just looks like chaos. It could very well happen with The Ox too, as we’re still in the dark as to why he hasn’t signed a new deal.
And so to Mesut and Alexis, with whom Arsene has given an interview to beIN saying that they won’t leave unless we find a replacement of the same quality. He says some stuff about how its not a problem for us to keep them to the end of their contracts but if you ask any Arsenal fan about that as a possibility i’m sure all of us would agree that’s the worst thing that could happen. Why? Because then they can go anywhere. Chelski, City, United. Nobody wants to see that in a million years and if you gave me the option of seeing them move to an English club or being shipped abroad, I’ll drive the players to London Stagnated myself. So whilst I get that Arsene is taking the approach you’d expect with his best poker face on, the fact he’s even talking about this kind of stuff in this way makes me nervous.
The comment about finding a player of equal quality replacing them is right, but what I really hope doesn’t happen this summer is that we lose Alexis for example, then bring in a marquee signing to be told that we’ve made our ‘one or two’ that Arsene mentioned after the cup final. No, we need those better players to augment the existing first team players, not replace them. If you just replace, then you’re doing nothing more than treading water.
But that’s Arsenal under Wenger and Kroenke, who haven’t challenged for a title properly since 2005 and haven’t gone deep in to the Champions League since 2009, sadly. Simply replacing one great player with another marque signing won’t help us to ‘kick on’, it will just keep us where we are.
Still, at least he’s dangling the carrots of players like Mahrez, who I still think would be a good signing, providing it’s not silly money we’re forced in to paying. He’s had a bit of a difficult season last season at Leicester, but the whole team was poor this year and as soon as they got the new manager bounce towards the end of the season, his form picked up like the rest of their team. I think being at Arsenal would add a minimum of 10 – 15% to his game just by training with the players of increased quality, so if Arsene can get the deal done for a price that suits his own agenda, then I think that would be a promising one.
Whether or not he’d just be a Lucas Perez replacement I’m not sure, but what would be interesting is working out where he would fit in the current system. We’re playing a forward three of Alexis, Ozil and Welbeck at the moment and i’d be surprised if we saw Mahrex up top, so in the extremely unlikely event that Alexis is an Arsenal player at the end of this summer, perhaps it’s a return to the forward line for him that we’d see?
Anyway, that’s probably enough of speculation for now, because we’ve not even hit the official first day of the window opening. There’s still plenty of time to get cheesed off at who we haven’t signed!
Catch y’all tomorrow.
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