I made the point a few times over the years that a team with 4-5 players on 10-plus goals is far more effective than one that relies on a main goal scorer. Your preference works perfectly well until that goal machine loses form, gets injured or gets caught with a locker full of betting slips. Nobody pushed back on that view until now.
I wasn’t saying I don’t want any of our players getting that many goals, more that it’s a riskier plan to go all in on a goal machine than having a strong goal-scoring group of forwards. Although, as a declaration of conflicts I should also mention that I have “Hypervigilance” and I’m severely risk adverse.
I’m a bit meh about this one. Nothing against Raya, he is a good goalkeeper. I just didn’t think this was an area that needed immediately addressing. Ramsdale isn’t the reason we didn’t win the league, and earlier in the season he had some pretty great performances.
I don’t like alternating goalkeepers, and as has been established already, teams don’t have two top goalkeepers - top goalkeepers want to be no1. So only way I see this going is whoever isn’t no1 by next year moving on, and then we buy a lesser goalkeeper to be no2.
I don’t think Ramsdale is lazy by any means but he has never struck me as one of these psychopathic guys who live for the sport and will naturally just push themselves to be the best absent any kind of competitive pressure. I don’t want him to plateau, I want him to push himself to be the best keeper that he can be and play at the very highest level. If that’s how he responds to Raya coming in, great. If he doesn’t, then he wasn’t the guy for Arsenal long term.
