Maybe Im harsh but he drops a lot of clangers and gets pulled out of position a hell of a lot but the point im making is that we could and should have replaced the BFG earlier and cheaper. The rampant inflation in the league far from slowing down is gaining pace now with chinese impetus. We will be left behind again unless we act but we have blown our budget so I dont see us moving on and upwards because i dontt see us spending large or developing youngsters.
The market for players now as a whole will be three tiered ,Chinese ,Top European,the rest !
Every transfer window has its value and importance, and you don’t want to screw up any of them.
A couple of times if we made some reinforcement in January, our chance to winning the title would be a lot higher.
There was also one summer, our manager just bought a keeper… no outfielder…
People really dwell on this a lot. The whole ‘we didnt buy an outfield player’ is hugely played up by the media precisely to wind up Arsenal fans.
While i dont think that was necessarily right, every single other club that we compete against accross about 4 different tournaments did buy outfield players, and only in a handful of teams did it actually improve them.
I really dont believe it was the hinderance/key to victory its made out to be. Or else this season would be shaping up far better, no?
Everybody was screaming for bodies in the midfield that summer. What happened? Both Cazorla and Coquelin got injured and in January he had to buy Elneny. Was it key to victory? I don’t know. Hinderance? Probably. We could have rotated more which might have helped with injuries. The player we would have brought in would not need a period of transition in the middle of the season. It seems squad management could have been done a lot more efficient. Rather than acting when you are forced too.
The injury crisis at Arsenal is ever present and it is not caused by nor can it be resolved by our transfer strategy.
I believe we should always seek to add world class players into the squad, however i was simply pointing out that its not guaranteed to result in an improvement, let alone the secret to winning.
The summer we didn’t sign an outfield player we then went on to play Flamini in about 16 League games so I would say it would have made some sort of difference.
What about general squad management apart from the winning? Sometimes you also need bodies. With Arteta and Wilshere’ situations 99% of the fans agreed we needed another midfielder. And there was Flamini being his shit self. Not adding somebody in the summer was naive. Something Wenger figured out for himself when he had to buy Elneny. For the cb situation a year earlier and Gabriel goes the same btw.
Oliver you are of course right.
Failure in transfer windows is just one of our clubs many faults .
It is the combination of 4 or 5 systemic failures that keep us from improving as a football team and will continue to do so untill Wenger leaves as he has shown year after year that he cannnot and will not change .
By the same token it can be argued that those same traits that some including me see as failures others hold as qualities that keep us relavent .
So we stay in limbo never too high never too low.
Many say we play some great football and we do 3 or 4 times a season . But the rest of the time we play the most awful crap Ive ever seen ,and Ive seen some crappy Arsenal teams.
Weve had due to the failure of our rivals a whole bunch of chances in the last few seasons to go on and win the league but each time we trip over our own feet .
I think ever season this will be my last but next season im determined not to give them my money .
You must not have watched Luiz steady improvement over the last couple season. I believe he made FIFA world team of the year in 2014 if I’m not mistaken, followed up by consecutive appearances in the domestic team of the year in France.
He’s not an elite defender by any stretch of the imagination, nor is he even world class. But he’s a lot better than you seem to want to give him credit for. But then he doesn’t play for Arsenal so that doesn’t surprise me.
After all, Rob Holding was deemed better than John Stones after 2 senior competitive appearances by some people on this forum so I’m not particularly surprised.
And vice versa, Stones was crowned as the best young CB in the world after stumbling and bumbling his way to a big transfer fee at city. So that must mean he’s great right? But this is an Arsenal forum so I’m not surprised that every disgruntled fanatic will find a way to praise anyone and anything non Arsenal related. It’s kind of embarrassing tbh
Luiz has been quality for years now and I was just pointing out the Mustafi isn’t twice as good as him. I know its a struggle for the AKB crew to deal with when they took the piss out of Chelsea signing him and now he’s played nearly every game in a defence thats allowed 15 goals thus far.
