From Joel Pergande : Chelsea – over the hill?
Fair play to Chelsea for choosing game plans that made the most of their abilities in both ECL semis and the final too.
You would have thought Chelsea had 10 men on Saturday, as they did away to Barcelona.
In fact had they suffered a sending off on Saturday, no ostensible difference would have been made.
It was a difficult one for AFC fans because on the one hand they did not want to see their closest rivals Tottenham competing in the ECL next season.
However on the other by Chelsea winning the cup, we fans now have to concede that Chelsea and not we are the first Londoners to do so.
It is actually ironic that in the first season in 8 that we actually manage to finish ahead of them in the league, we have to doff our caps to them for succeeding in an arena where we have failed time and time and time again.
So should we Gunners revert to recent type and grumble about the current state of the club and its Groundhog Day future?
A closer look at the facts should provide us with a little optimism if we allow ourselves.
For about the millionth year in a row now we have finished above Spurs, despite them having their best side since the early to mid 1980s and despite our worst start to the season since the dark mid-1970s.
Yet again we have qualified for the ECL and this time we are straight through to Group Stages, thus not having to face the increasingly hard qualifying matches. Last year we drew Udinese, but it might also have been Saturday’s runners-up FC Bayern.
It is very, very, very frustrating that for about the 100th year in a row we are unable to show our peers our medals.
However for once Wenger is completely right when he says finishing 3rd in the ECL is better than winning the tin-pot League Cup (sorry Mr. Dalglish winning it did you no favours!) or the treasured-but-devalued FA Cup whose final now kicks off mid-season at tea-time.
It is galling that Chelsea have won the game’s biggest prize before we have but I tell you what, I would prefer to have their current team in next season’s competition than Spurs’ current team.
The old guard of Cech, Cole, Terry, Lampard and Drogba may never play together again and starting with the Ivorian will have to be replaced in a way that Seaman, Cole, Adams, Bergkamp and Henry still haven’t been.
Indeed no amount of the money Mr. Abramovich continues to have can guarantee such a solution.
None of these Chelsea players if they do stay another year will play any better than they did this year and might even play a little bit worse.
They may very well like Di Matteo who may very well get the job on a full-time basis, but that is only papering over the cracks of a terrible league season. Di Matteo was a disaster at WBA and though he had Chelsea’s main quintet on side in a way AV-B could never rely on, he more than anyone will realise the point made above is true that despite their miracle win of the ECL, the Chelsea first team is in decline and requires the massive surgery that AV-B recognised but wasn’t given the support from within or without to perform.
I would therefore contend that Chelsea’s success on Saturday is a good thing for AFC.
In addition to Chelsea’s decline, the Spurs manager and board will now come under immense pressure to hold on to the likes of Bale, Modric and Van Der Vaart.
Ambitious signings they may have made will certainly think twice about joining a club that can no longer offer them ECL exposure (money?).
Both these factors then provide AFC with a great platform upon which to capitalise, so long as they bring in the 2 or 3 marquee signings that they require in addition to Podolski.
Do they need to hold on to Van Persie? Yes – without question they do.
There cannot be another summer of Anelka, Vieira, Henry, Fabregas and Nasri want-away stories.
The club also needs to cut its losses with several players who remain on the pay-roll: Almunia, Fabianski, Djourou, Santos, Denilson, Diaby, Bendtner, Arshavin, Park, Miyachi and maybe even Walcott.
These players will NEVER be good enough and are just holding up the progress of good young players lower down the club and stopping us from signing the other players we DEFINITELY need.
None of these things – RVP apart – are that complex to resolve. Certainly they do not compare with the intricacies facing the owners and team-management of Chelsea and Spurs.
Get them right, and AFC could provide a credible challenge to the Manchester duopoly.
Get it wrong and we are faced with Bill Murray and Andi McDowell all over again…