From Abhijeet Malik : The rise of Wojciech Szeczesny
“Wenger made you pay the highest ticket prices in the world to watch a rubbish goalkeeper for four years.”
I disagree. The first 2 years weren’t when Almunia was certified a clown as yet & Wenger made us pay the highest ticket prices in the world to wait for the rise of a new star so that we don’t hurry him into buying a world class alternative who would end up signing another 4/5 year deal delaying Woij’s growth for another 2/3 years.
If Wenger had bought in a not so old world class keeper in 2009 or 10 … Woij would have taken a transfer. I can bet on that. That was the reason of the saga last summer. that’s why he didn’t buy Steklenburg or Akinfeev. That’s why he focused only on Shay Given & finally tried to get the Australian. That try was more to get a good coach for Woij than a competition.
And we did no good to Arsene’s predicament. We shout for buying a new world class keeper & we also want a bright youngster but are not ready to wait for him to rise. Wenger has even said this in one of the interviews that the things fans ask are difficult. They want you to buy big players , marque signings & also want you to nurture & raise young talent like Walcott, Wilshere, Gibbs, Szczesny !!!! Those 2 things don’t go together. He already had to release Nordveidt, which he didn’t want to do. But he tries not to be enemy of the young player’s careers. He sold Eduardo immediately when he realized he was not doing justice with playing time for the player at this age.
Do you think we as fans have earned our right to expect managers jeopardize young player’s careers by making them sit on bench, purely on basis of the few thousand dollars we pay for tickets round the calendar?
And as for the lad, he is far from ready. It’s not just the distribution. It’s also the positioning for shots from the D line, collections of corners etc.
He was responsible for 3 of the goals that happened & he has been responsible for some blunders which never got punished. He keeps hitting quite a few awry passes to defenders & he still doesn’t have command of communication with his back line. He doesn’t commit for spot kicks, which makes him rely on the shooter to miss than he himself stopping it & HE DOES NOT DICTATE THE WALL FOR SET PIECES.
All in all he is a bright promise but plain simply raw. Yeah hugely high on confidence but heavily short on experience to support it. He is probably a milder version of Higuita. But in some important game if he comes across a skilled & speedy striker or a wily old fox, he wouldn’t even know what hit him.
And Wenger didn’t want to play him too quickly because he didn’t want to let this confidence get dented. He didn’t want to throw this guy to the wolves as he had to in case of Fabianski & then sit to recover the lost confidence.Yeah, confidence is a funny thing. Takes years to gain & minutes to lose.
But yes, I feel Woij promises big things to come & I hope he realizes those.
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Myles says :
He has size and personality. He’s six foot five and shouts at his defence.
I have a lot of faith in Szczesny. He has the basics and what he doesn’t know, he can learn over the next few years.
You can’t learn size or personality.
He has a good chance to become Arsenal’s No.1 goalkeeper.
Against Wigan, in a very one-sided 3-0 victory, he had almost nothing to do. But games like that that are part of his education as well. When he had to come out of his penalty area, he did it confidently. I’d love to see Szczesny prove me wrong. I said big clubs should not try to develop keepers because its the most vital position in a football team. If developing your own keepers was such a great idea, why don’t more clubs do it?
Chelsea didnt develop Cech, Man United didn’t develop Edwin van der Sar, Liverpool didn’t develop Pepe Reina. Joe Hart is big and has personality but he’s not local to Manchester. He was signed from Shrewsbury.
If Szczesny makes it, Wenger will have proved a lot of people wrong. Including me.
I loved Jens Lehmann. You can call me old-fashioned if you like, but I always thought that a club like Arsenal needed an authoritative goalkeeper.