It's crap not being in europe. One of the benefits of the Europa League was that some of the kids could get a run out against lesser opposition. It's hard to see the likes of Martinelli, Balogun etc getting much game time at all barring an injury crisis. How do they develop their game?

To be fair I don’t think it was a case of Sanchez going because Wenger chose to keep Özil instead. Time wise there was a significant overlap between their respective Arsenal careers. I suspect the departure of Sanchez had more to do with him (not Wenger) wanting to move on.

Where I believe there was an important consequence between them is that Sanchez going made the club feel they couldn’t afford to lose both at around the same time. Hence we offered Özil £350k a week to renew his contract, and we all know what happened from that.

I honestly believe Özil ended up being paid (I won’t say ‘earning’) £18.2m (£350k x 52) a year at Arsenal because Sanchez decided he was going to leave, and obviously did exactly that.

Good to hear Patino training with the first team.
https://www.hitc.com/en-gb/2021/09/16/reports-arteta-calls-edwards-and-flores-into-arsenal-first-team-training/

Maybe league cup games or if we draw a club a couple divisions below us.

No wonder they conceded three. They were missing their first-choice centre-backs, who between them cost £100 million, and had to play their third and fourth choice centre backs instead (who between them also cost £100 million).

The Mirror, on the strength of what David Hillier says, are reporting Wilshere’s return, if it happens, will be only for training and not playing.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football ... dium=email

And Hillier is in the know!

'I have got inside information on this. I am a lucky man, so I am actually playing golf on Friday with a guy who does all his security systems at his house and he is very friendly with him.'

Sounds solid to me.

First time I’ve ever seen ‘solid’ and ‘Hillier’ in the same passage. ‘Rubbish’ or ‘useless’ or ‘garbage’ - plenty of times!

Harsh, but maybe fair! If I'm remembering correctly, he was pretty good when he first came into the team in the second half of 1990/91, wasn't he?

No, I definitely wasn't advocating for his inclusion just pondering around whether we judge players for a very good but short period of time or for a longer period of 'good-ness'.

Adebayor was a better example who at his best was very dominant in the league, he bullied defences and scored for fun - some spectacular goals as well. He scored more goals in his best season than Aubameyang has ever done but I'd guess Aubameyang has a much better goals to games ratio over his entire Arsenal career

That's pretty much how I see it. We couldn't face the embarrassment of losing both so we did whatever we could to keep at least one, and Sanchez had the greater desire to leave.

Irrespective of the transfer in decisions that have cost us (and we can all list them) some of the biggest reasons we are where we are right now is not selling players at the right time. City offered £60m for Sanchez. We let Ramsey leave on a free - at his peak he would have commanded £40m.

I can understand the injury circumstances of Wilshere and Cazorla leaving on free transfers but there have been a lot of mistakes. Szczesny for £10m, Juve wanted him to replace Buffon - as soon as we heard that we should have been asking £30m at least

When Özil signed his last bumper contract, no-one on the forum objected very loudly. It ended up being one of the club's worst decisions in living memory - maybe not as bad as signing Bryn Jones in 1938 for a British record transfer fee: #AllisonOut - but hindsight is a fine thing.

Saw the same. Just a stop over for Jack till he finds another club.

Will be ineresting to see how Pep does against PSG.

There is another view of Özil's contract. When he signed he brought with him big investment from Adidas and a massive social media presence which was no doubt to Arsenal's financial benefit. He was a World Cup winner, highly respected as a midfielder, and truth is we had nobody else of his commercial worth.

Clear illustration of the lop sided tactics with Tierney’s and Tomiyasu’s touch maps from the Norwich game.

I don’t mind these complex tactics but my biggest concern with them is the effect on the right winger, who either doesn’t get enough help or who has to stay wide because no one else provides the width. It must be a lot more fun being the left winger, Tierney always next to you, you can drift inside and affect the game more.

Most unfortunate we did not have the financial power to keep both of them. They would have helped propel the club together.

I don't think Alexis wanted to stay. He tends to move on near the end of contracts. I don't think he could see the club making the necessary investments to compete. Plus, I think the players around him were going thru the motions. I rate him as the last top quality player at the club. A few of the young ones may make it but that is a little way down the track.

Hi Rich,

I think Arteta tries to overcomplicate a game that is essentially very simple. Guardiola is the same but the difference is that he has elite players in every position and I sometimes feel City win games inspite of his tactics and not because of them.

Let's face it, having players like De Bruyne, Kompany, Aguero, David Silva, Yaya Toure (to name but a few) over the years has hardly required him to be a tactical genius to get results.

What Guardiola has done very well is to get elite players to work incredibly hard out of possession and implement the pressing game. Not always easy when you are dealing with big egos.

I read this on Le Grove

https://le-grove.co.uk/2021/09/16/what- ... long-read/

Seems incredibly complicated.

Morning socrates. Conceptually I wonder if what you say is similar to Wenger’s biggest single error, in my view anyway. Namely turning his back on what made his Highbury years so successful with power and physical presence in midfield and moving to a tiki taka system with the midfield jam packed with skilful midgets (I’m not being too literal when I use the word ‘midget, which I hope everyone realises).

I still see Arsenal’s best (let alone Wenger’s) central midfield as Vieira and Petit. Even after Petit we had Gilberto who was a player with physical presence.

I’ve always suspected Wenger fell in love with the way Barcelona played the game and decided to copy it. The trouble is, they used it with players of the quality of Messi, Iniesta and Xavi and in Spain where football is less physical. We didn’t have that level of player.

Even Fabregas, our best skilful midget at the time who obviously went to Barcelona and played many games for them, never became an automatic first team choice ahead of Iniesta and Xavi.

Martin Keown said the same a few (perhaps more than ‘a few’ now) years ago. These days I think Keown can be a right plonker. But I reckon that’s something he got right. Wenger tried to copy Barcelona with inferior players. As you imply, is Arteta doing the same with Guardiola’s Manchester City?

These days, fairly accurate.

So much for my simple mind.

Then again when I first played football it was 2-3-5.

Not much margin for error for Arteta. The only upcoming game he can drop points in is the NLD. And even that should be a draw. He has to beat Burnley and Wimbledon. Brighton is playing well but the last few weeks but even so, he has to start beating clubs outside the top 5 or 6.

Especially now that we are getting back starters and he has better personnel to work with.

Awards of all types are pretty much rigged. This Ribery article iillustrates it. Sports, entertainment awards, all types are largely rigged.

The Oscars and Grammy's are rigged for sure. At the risk of sounding homophobic and I'll qualify what I about to say that I lived in LA for years. By default you live there long enough to become very close friends with someone who is LBGTQ. I've been to a few weddings, etc. That said, Lil Nas X, the gay rapper (used to be a rapper who just happens to be gay, which is what any thing other than human should be: race, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, etc)
Anyway, at least to me, the music industry is using him to beat us over the head with his sexuality. Having him do all kinds of PR stunts. Latest being a magazine cover where he's photoshopped pregnant. He has won best video for something or another. His youtube comments are millions of 'bot' based comments.

Player of the Year awards in American sports also seem compromised. Some seem like poitical statements if the player has some sort of stance that the league or public wants pushed.


I don't know for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Ballon D'or is rigged.

https://www.givemesport.com/1453609-franck-ribery-has-spoken-honestly-about-not-winning-the-2013-ballon-dor

I never really went along with this...

Wenger was never really a master tactician at all, I don’t see him telling his players to play differently. His team got the ball down and played and his success was more about enabling individuals to be the best they could be rather than how they were set up. It was his weakness. Didn’t TA call him tactically naive about defending. I couldn’t disagree.

I think the change in style lent more to the fact we didn’t have the finances to sign the top players of height, power and pace anymore. I’m sure wenger would have lapped up drogba, Essien, Yaya Toure if he had the finances.

Myself, I think it’s too simplistic to say we couldn’t afford players with physical presence. Are small players always less expensive anyway? He bought Arshavin for a lot of money. From memory Nasri, Ramsey and Rosicky weren’t exactly cheap either.

I do think Wenger decided to change the style and I think it’s over simplistic to we simply couldn’t have afforded to sign players with more physical presence than those we did. I accept the stadium move meant we had limited funds. But surely we could have looked for different types of players to those we did sign?

You disagree. Fair enough. But it all seemed too much of a coincidence to me.

I think we all look back on the post-invincibles era far too harshly, purely because we didn't win any pots. This video shows just how dynamite we were.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkXZRHG5RxQ&t=198s

Pep would die for his current City to play with this much verve and pace. It's absolutely electrifying, whatever the size of the players... and there are Bendtners and Eboues out there too. Doesn't look like tika-taka to me. Looks like lightning in a bottle.

That season more than other is tragic on so many levels. We were magnificent, we won nothing, and you can see from moments in this video that other teams saw only one way to stop us, and that was to clatter us around. And on top of that, the media also decided to legitimise the "stop Arsenal by any means necessary" approach and we all know how that ended up... with players in hospital beds having their legs pinned back together.

A heck of a watch. Such memories reignited.

Watching this clip I can't help but feel we never got the best of Hleb. He had amazing feet.

Another in a stream of encouraging articles about Patino.

https://metro.co.uk/2021/09/15/arsenal- ... IxGyTYGY3k

Hopefully he will come on as predicted. For some reason the name Henri Lansbury came to mind as I read this one. It’s such a tough road to get to the top.

Yes that is right - he loved powerful players and pre oligarchs those guys could well have been at Arsenal rather than elsewhere. Song, Bendtner, Baptista, Chamakh and Adebayor were strong guys who might have done a better job for Arsene - especially Ade who ended up with a mixed career, rather than the stellar one his talent promised.

At Highbury v United I was sat next to a Man U supporter who was gobsmacked by Hleb's skill. "Where did you find him?" This was praise from an unexpected source.

Absolutely the “he tried to make us Barcelona” myth is also crushed by Michael Carrick saying he was literally supposed to be signing for us on the Monday had cesc not turned in that shock performance in the charity shield that changed wengers mind

Decent player but the bloke couldn’t score in an Amsterdam knocking shop. Didn’t score in 19 appearances for Barcelona and only scored 30 odd goals in his whole career. Probably overachieved rather than under if anything

To be fair that was actually in 2004, when we still had Vieira and Gilberto. So I don’t see how Carrick crushes any idea about Wenger later turning his back on power and physical presence in midfield.

Interestingly Wenger always fancied Carrick as a player. He used to give talks at AGMs and the only time I ever recall him speaking of a player at another club was when he once spoke glowingly of some kid at West Ham called Michael Carrick. My guess would be it was probably either the 1999, 2000 or 2001 AGM.

I would say he underachieved considerably given his level of talent. His first touch was sublime. A brilliant dribbler but he had a bizarre mental block when it came to shooting. He just wouldn't shoot. Totally weird.

Per what AG posted about Franck Ribery not getting the Ballon d'Or. He's Muslim. Converted from Christianity to Islam in 2002, as his wife is of Algerian descent.
Not that there haven't been any Muslim players in the running for this award, Yaya Toure, Karim Benzema, example. Yet don't recall any actually receiving it. So based on that premise, most receiving this award were of the Christian faith. If any Jewish players were ever nominated or won the Ballon d'Or, not aware of it. Really shouldn't matter what religion a player is. If they're exceptional, they deserve it.

It was before Vieira famously did his about turn ..

I was moving from the First Division to a team in the Champions League. I’d heard [Patrick] Vieira was leaving Arsenal and that opened up a space in midfield, so it seemed nailed on that Monday morning I’d be an Arsenal player.

Then, however, came the emergence of youngster Cesc Fabregas against Manchester United in the Community Shield. "I saw that a kid, Cesc Fabregas, only 17, started in Vieira’s place. Fabregas played a blinder but I didn’t think too much about the significance. I sat at home on Sunday night waiting for the call to arrange details of the next day. Arsenal! I couldn’t wait.

Your not trying to replicate Barcelona if your signing Michael Carrick really lets be honest.

Hang on. Zidane is a practicing Muslim and he won it (such a class player) Also George Weah too.

Messi could be a Scientologist and would have won it several times. It’s a stretch at best to suggest there’s religious bias involved.