It starts in 19 days.
Everton v Arsenal is 19 days from now.
For those who can’t wait 19 days you can warm up on Saturday when Arsenal play Atletico Madrid in a friendly at the Emirates.
Mainly,July is a holiday month, a training month.
Arsenal were training last night in a game against a Hungarian club whose name I cannot spell. They played nicely and won 5-0.
Soon we have August and September and October. We know the fixtures and we know that the AGM is on Thursday, October 22. If Arsenal keep winning games, Usmanov won’t turn up at the AGM because there will be nothing to complain about.
For the moment, it’s wait and see who Wenger sells and buys.
Selling Ade and Kolo to Man City for £40 million gives him cash to spend on transfers and the wages of the new players he buys, assuming Toure goes. Wenger controls an annual budget which includes the wages of his players and staff and the cost of new players, plus instalment payments on those he signed last year and the year before, plus instalments and sell-on fees from players he has sold. David Miles chases up those payments
Wenger has to buy a striker before the Everton game.
Leaving it till August 31st to save a couple of million didn’t work last season. On deadline day, he tried to sign Xabi Alonso but his offer was £2m short and he lost one of the top five midfield players in the world, who may now go to Real Madrid for £30 million.
Fabregas and Xabi Alonso would have been superb together and Arsenal would have had a different season. As a rule, the best thing you can do for a great player is to give him another great player to play with. Watching Xabi Alonso hit Arshavin with a long pass would have been thrilling.
Wenger has a squad of useful players, with two very good players, Sagna and Fabregas, and one world class player, Arshavin.
Of course, finding the right players is not easy. He flew to Brazil to sign Julio Baptista for £14m but the so-called “Beast” went to Seville to get a European passport. He got him later on a season loan and we all saw that Baptista wasn’t nearly good enough to play for Arsenal. What a let-off that was. What a huge let-off that was !
If Wenger had blown £14m on Julio Baptista, he would not be in the job now. He almost made a massive mistake there. Wiltord was rubbish but played in a fabulous team and scored goals, as any ambulant forward would have done in that team. Wenger had Reyes watched 42 times, and spied on him in training, and he didn’t make it, so that was a bad buy. The failure of Jose Antonio Reyes was a complicated story and I’m not going into it now. Reyes was an expensive mistake.
What do we conclude from Wiltord, Reyes and Baptista?
That signing players is not an exact science. That all managers make mistakes in the transfer market.
Brian Clough thought Asa Hartford, a small Scottish midfield player, could replace Archie Gemill, another little Scottish midfield player
Gemmill was sparky, fiery, skilful, mobile, a fantastic competitor who won two league titles with Clough at Derby and one at Nottingham Forest. But Archie fell out with Clough when he was dropped for the 1979 European Cup Final and was sold to Birmingham.
Clough then bought Hartford from Manchester City for £450,000 and watched him play three league games and sold him to Gordon Lee at Everton for £400,000. that was big news. That was really big news.Because that was owning up. I love people who own up. Asa Hartford could not switch the play from left to right, and he invariably lent you the ball rather than gave it to you.
I often thought : If only Wiltord had been sold after three games !
Clough didn’t have 26 scouts like Wenger. He had Peter Taylor, who mostly chose the players, who were then motivated by the boss, although Clough sometimes went to see players himself. He watched centre forward Garry Birtles play for Long Eaton and said, “I’ve seen Birtles – and the Bovril was better than he was.” Forest took Birtles on loan, signed him for £2,000, developed him into a European Cup winner.
A great team is always a jigsaw, always a machine where the pieces have to fit together, have to blend on the field. A great team has to be blended, balanced, refined, sometimes re-balanced a bit. Compared to Nottingham Forest, Arsenal looks more like an audition than a team.
When Wenger has achieved that elusive but all-important blend, he has won trophies. Right now, his blend looks fragile, precarious, iffy.
Jock Stein, the legendary Celtic manager, said in 1978, “It’s not just that Cloughie can gee up ordinary players, but he and Taylor know which fellows will go well together, will bring out the best in each other. That probably does more than anything to explain the fantastic record.”
What’s really needed at Arsenal is a big nasty centrebvack like Vidic, a ball-winning spinal anchorman like Tymoschuk or Kompany, and a proven goalscorer.
You might ask : If Clough can win the European Cup with Garry Birtles, a player from Long Eaton, why can’t Wenger win it with Nicklas Bendtner, a Danish international?
I’d say : Let Bendtner learn from Huntelaar. Let a young centre forward challenge an older one, compete with him, strive to earn his starting place.
Looking at the bigger picture, we now are in the 10th year of a new century and Gooners have been sold the future for the last four years. They won’t buy it after this year. They want something now. And at those ticket prices , who can blame them? As each new season approaches, fans ask : How good are we? Where are we?
I think we are at the point where Wenger needs a box player who can score from Arshavin’s pinpoint crosses and passes.
In the summer of 1997 the key question was : How can I get more out of Bergkamp? Now it’s : How can I get more out of Arshavin?
If Wenger is not going to teach defence, and we know he isn’t, he needs an Arsenal team that can score more goals than last season. If you can’t defend a lead, you have to score the goals that kill teams off.
That is obvious. Or should be obvious.
Wenger was interested in Klaas-Jan Huntelaar a few years ago. He didn’t sign him then. He really needs him now but the Dutchman may want to see if Arsenal negotiate their Champions League Qualifier. On the other hand, he may want to play in it.
We shall have to see. The real thing starts on the third Saturday in August. This Saturday it’s Atletico Madrid, next Saturday it’s Valencia away, and the following Saturday, August 15, the meaningful action starts at Everton.