Tag Archives: She Wore A Yellow Ribbon

Mkhitaryan for Sanchez straight swap a “good deal”?

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But we could have got £60million for him in the summer is a common complaint upon hearing that we are about to swap Alexis Sanchez for Henrikh Mkhitaryan, with no cash exchanging hands.

A lot of people are looking at it as we are then getting no money for Sanchez, and therefore it is a bad deal as we could have got £60m in the summer.

Whilst they are not getting any money for Sanchez, what they are getting is a player that Manchester United were happy spending £37.8m on 18 months ago.

When you consider Alexis Sanchez is available on a free in just 5 months, the fact Arsenal are getting a £40m player in a straight swap is as good as Arsenal getting £40m for him.

But we could have got £60m for him in the summer, you still cry. And you are correct.

But had we sold Sanchez in the summer, we would have had to have bought a replacement. And every club in Europe would have known that:

  1. We had £60m to burn
  2. That we were desperate

All of that £60m, and maybe more, would have been invested in his replacement.

So in reality, Arsenal would not have been getting £60m for Sanchez, but swapping Sanchez for whoever his replacement is.

On deadline day, for example, Arsenal bid £90m for Thomas Lemar.

Would spending £30 and swapping Lemar for Sanchez be a good deal? No.

Another player is Julian Draxler. I imagine had we pushed for him, we would have been able to get him for similar to what we sold Sanchez for. So the £60m we got in for Sanchez would have been given straight to PSG for Draxler.

Julian Draxler is a very good player, but is he worth £60m? Would that price have been inflated due to the Sanchez cash? Possibly.

And then compare to the two players mentioned above to Henrikh Mkhitaryan. Are they actually any better?

Mkhitaryan has had a tough 18 months in England, but he would not be the first free-spirited attacking talent to struggle under Jose Mourinho.

For me, he is on a similar level to Julian Draxler. Actually I would say he is better than Draxler as people still talk about the German as having potential, whilst Mkhitaryan is proven.

Then compare Mkhitaryan to Lemar.

One is a player who has had one good season, and struggled this, the other was quality in Germany over a number of years.

So Lemar would have cost us an additional £30m on top of what we got in for Sanchez, and he is not as good as the player we ended up getting.

Had we sold Alexis Sanchez to Manchester City for £40m and then bought Mkhitaryan from Manchester United for £40m, you would probably all be happy.

Now lets chuck Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang into the mix- a deal for £53m is moving closer.

We could end up with a situation where we get both Aubameyang and Mkhitaryan in, with Sanchez leaving, and a net spend of just £53m.

Let’s go back to the alternative deal in the summer of Lemar in, Sanchez out, and a net spend of £30m.

So for an additional £23m on top of what we were willing to spend in the summer, we are getting a Sanchez replacement and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang.

Is the deal a good deal for Arsenal? Yes.

Ps: in their last season together at Dormund, the pair scored62 goals between them.

Keenos

We need to reclaim our Arsenal back

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Football fans generally have two emotions, elation or agony.  Those are certainly the two I remember from being a young girl standing on the terraces.

If someone had said to me 30 years ago, ‘one day you won’t  feel as though you belong or you will despise the club’ I would have argued with them all day long. How could I not love everything Arsenal??

The Arsenal were my love. It’s where I belonged and where I made my best friends and memories.

The football didn’t really matter. If we lost we felt disappointment, I don’t remember coming away feeling angry. Maybe some anger at a referee, or anger at opposing fans, but not anger at my club. We looked forward to the next game. Someone would get it if we had lost.

Half time we might sing ‘Georgie, sort em out’, we knew he would, George knew.

Fast forward to 2018.

Blue shirt, Cannon facing the wrong way, inept performances, a chairman who treats us with disdain and excuses that run out of every pore of the club.

Fans who treat us a hobby not as a cause, and the fever pitch fans who got involved when football became fashionable.  None of us wanted it to be fashionable.  We liked it that no one liked football. We were looked down upon by the rest of society.

Now we sing to our manager ‘Spend some fu**ing money’ or ‘Get out of our club’.

We now stand where we’ve been told to sit down, hoping the stewards won’t tell us to sit.

We have no idea who will be sitting next to us from week to week, we don’t know the stewards name, we boycott the shop, we’ve stopped buying programmes and when we concede we accept it. We are becoming as passive as those who run our club. I’ve not seen much anger this year.

It’s been like watching a social experiment, how to silence the masses.

We clap poor performances and have been brainwashed to ‘get behind the boys’ at all costs.

We hear more and more ‘there is no point in protesting, there is no point in making a noise’. We buy tickets to games we have no intention of going to…… and we all just wait. We wait for the day it’s going to change.

Earlier on this season I wrote a blog about when anger turns to apathy…..the signs were all there.

Friends whose lives revolve around their job of following the club, started to talk about giving it all up.

So, why do we bother? We bother because we remember. We remember what it was. We bother because without bothering, we wouldn’t ever sit in a pub again and talk about those great days we’ve had with the only people in the world that understand.   Choosing not to go is a huge decision, only a few will really understand that. We are scared of not being part of the new dawn that can’t be far away. We are scared of throwing away a huge chunk of our lives.

The club have become unrecognisable to me. We write and they ignore us, we protest and they wash over it in press conferences. But, we did start to get to them, we were being heard even if they wouldn’t admit it.

I’m not sure those great days will ever come back, but to a certain extent that is up to us.  We have to continue to force change. We mustn’t mirror the apathy on the pitch.  We need to reclaim our place as football fans…. followers of The Arsenal.

It’s our club, it’s still our name on the badge. Anyone who is thinking about bowing out, do so with knowing you have made as much noise as possible before you say goodbye.

JD

It could be worse, you could be a Spurs fan

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Yesterday I wrote a blog about how I was struggling to find any positives with Arsenal at the minute. It was hard work and the only big positive I could find was at least we are not Spurs fans.

And it is true, it is a positive that I do not support Spurs.

Spurs might be “on the away up” and showing “progression”. They might have finished above Arsenal last season. But that was the first time in 22 years. 22 YEARS.

Arsenal are awful at the moment, but the fact that Arsenal are so poor, and Spurs so (allegedly, according to the media) brilliant, and only one of the clubs is winning trophies sums up the whole situation.

Whilst Arsenal fans are celebrating FA Cup wins, 3 in the last 4 years (soon to be 3 in 5), Spurs are reduced to celebrating made up success. Like “most Premier League goals in a calendar year” (Harry Kane) and “most Premier League MOTM awards” (Harry Kane) and “most Premier League goals for Tottenham” (Harry Kane) and most points over the last two seasons.

The reality is:

  • Spurs have not won the league for 57 years
  • Not won the FA Cup for 26 years
  • Won 1 trophy (League Cup) in the last 18 years
  • Won 2 trophies (2x League Cups) in the last 26 years
  • Not won a trophy in 9 years

Arsenal have been awful, but you look at the last 5 years, we have finished above Spurs 4 out of 5 times, and won 3 FA Cups (to Spurs 0 trophies).

On the right hand side on Sky Sports, they put up as part of their rolling news clubs recent successes. Arsenal’s is trophies. Spurs is Harry Kane.

Spurs may well make it 2 years in a row finishing above Arsenal. That will be two years in the last 23 years. If they finish trophyless again, that takes it to a decade without a trophy.

Their fans might be excited about moving to their new stadium, but lets see how excited they are when they realise it is a soulless bowl designed for the NFL that has cost £1bn to build – sending the club into a crippling debt much worse than Arsenal suffered in the mid 00’s.

The truth is, no matter how bad you might think things are for Arsenal, Spurs fans have been much longer suffering, and have had such little success to cling to over the last 30 years that they are having to make up success.

So Arsenal fans, it could be worse, you could be a Spurs fan.

Keenos