Players who didn't fulfill their potential/expections at Arsenal?

The Arsenal
#61

Agree. He is better than anything on the books in our defence right now. He is also what im looking for in this window.

#62

Oh sorry, thought the thread was about players who didn’t reach their potential at Arsenal.

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#63

Lol yeah he does count, I actually thought he was the best defender in the PL in 04/05 & 05/06.

I think my comment was more about how much I’d love a Gallas 06-10 given the dire state of our current crop :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:.

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#64

Definitely Eduardo.
He could have been one of the best finishers in the PL and starting to adjust to the PL before his injury.

Baptista, Wilshere, Walcott, Arshavin and Reyes all had potential but either through constant injuries, or with Baptista and Reyes, couldn’t adjust to the PL.

#65

Eduardo and Rosicky are the ones who I thought could have been world class mainstays in our team were it not for injuries. They are the sort of players who would have elevated us to a tier above what we achieved in the early Emirates years. Damn fucking shame.

4 Likes
#66

I don’t really think Baptista was given too much of a chance with us and was never played in his favoured position. He was a midfielder who had an excellent knack for making the right runs into the area but he was played as a striker for Arsenal and was always behind Henry, RVP and Adebayor.

But then I was a huge Baptista fan and I honestly think injuries ruined him. The guy could never stay fit. I remember he had a run at Roma where he was excellent and then injuries kept him in and out of the lineup. Then he went to Malaga and was blazing in goals before he again got injured and spent nearly a year out. Unlucky he was.

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#67

Andy Cole. Will always be curious how this one would have worked out. Always hard to take when he was slotting for united.

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#68

Clive Allen?

#69

I was thinking of him. Awful decision at the time as we where crying out for a striker. It lead to Kenny Sansom but it just defined our negative outlook on the game then.

#70

Senderos had a big potential when he arrived.

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#71

Seb Larrson never really got a chance. When he did it was in defence strangely.

#72

Yep lol. Went from one of the most promising defenders we’ve had and part of that record setting CL defence in 06 (that minutes without a goal conceded record still hasn’t been broken), to this:

It’s sad what Drogba did to him

#73

That’s it, you can literally pin point the exact game Drogba ended his career at Arsenal and he did so every game after that :rofl:

#74

Which game was it?

#75

The same with Gabriel and Diego Costa I feel.

Diaby is one name that springs to mind. Could have been world class if not for Dan Smith.

#76

It was the 05/06 season when we played Chelsea twice in the space of two or 3 weeks, the first game we lost 2-1 but it was the game we played a few weeks later that he never truly ever recovered from his Drogba nightmare and it just carried on from there.

Edit : The game following the community shield defeat

#77

Find these conversations difficult because I end up wondering if some of the players mentioned ever had that much potential, or just got over hyped because some lazy journalist or blogger labelled them “The Next Whoever”. I’m looking at people like Giles Sunu here in particular lol

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#78

I guess people forgot we already had such a thread on the matter :slight_smile: My big bug bare with new OA, is anything older than a month instantly gets forgotten about later down the line. Oh well. It’s good to have it being discussed again, hopefully it’ll generate more chatter.

Threads merged.

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#79

Merging in progess has to be @Mysty :wink:

I really thought Quincy Owusu Abeyie would have been a big player for us

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#80

You see with Diaby, I feel like Arsenal fans have gone too far to one side when it comes to rating him. He definitely didn’t reach his potential but let’s not act like he didn’t play nearly 200 games for us and we had 3 consecutive seasons of 30+ performances and in one of them he managed nearly 50 games. He was always a very inconsistent and frustrating player who would sometimes look like a world beater and the consequently have multiple frustrating games.

I seem to remember him destroying the Liverpool midfield at Anfield one game though. If he could perform like that consistently then I’d be one of those who think he would have been a world class midfielder but I think he would more likely have ended up just being a very good one.

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