Tag Archives: She Wore A Yellow Ribbon

The Arsenal Revival Continues

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What is it about Arsenal performing once there is little else to play for? We have seen it time and again in recent years, a late end of season run when we have a dozen+ points off the title, off the pace from top 4, and then we put a run together to secure Champions League football.

It is almost as if our mindset changes when we start to be written off in the press. Disregarded by the footballing public. The odds on top 4 extending. And this season it is déjà vu.

After we as a club, a fan base, a team, hit rock bottom on a Monday night 3-0 defeat against Crystal Palace, we were all done. It was time to pack up and go home. 4 wins in 12 games, 2 of which were against the might of Sutton United and Lincoln City. After the defeat to Crystal Palace, an FA Cup exit against Manchester City was on the cards.

A month to do the day of that defeat against Crystal Palace and things look a little better. A run of 5 wins in 6 games has seen us get into the FA Cup final and claw back points in the race for the top 4. The only game we dropped points in was that awful defeat against Tottenham Hotspur.

The revival comes as Arsenal moved to the 3-4-2-1 formation.

Personally, I refuse to give Arsene Wenger any credit for changing formation. It is too little too late. And this is where this positive happy blog takes a darker turn.

Just because I am happy Arsenal won, it does not change the fact that Arsene Wenger needs to go.

The fact he took so long to try out another formation is sickening. By the time we moved to 3-4-2-1, the title had gone, finishing ahead of Spurs had gone, we were 6th. Fans have been calling for a change in tactics for years, and it took an awful run for Wenger to react. It sums up Wenger’s second half of his Arsenal career. He is a reactive manager rather than a proactive one.

He follows other teams tactics rather than develops his own. If his side wins a game one week, he puts out the same side the next, not thinking about the opposition. He has struggled. He has been left behind. Winning 5 games from 6 does not suddenly make him a poor manager. Does not justify the 2 year contract that has allegedly already been signed.

Too many of our fans are fickle. The protests have dwindled. The noise on social media hushed. A couple of victories and everyone has fallen back in line. You do not have to be one or the other. You can want the team to win, whilst still calling for the managers head. Still celebrate victories whilst demanding Wenger Out.

I glance across at Juventus and see them in the Champions League final. Their second in 3 years under Massimiliano Allegri. Allegri flirted with leaving Juventus at the end of this season. He has since signed a new contract.

Was it just a power player to get more money from The Old Lady? Or was he genuinely looking to leave? It certainly felt on Tuesday, whilst watching them celebrate making the final, of a bit of Bully “here’s what you could have had”.

Did Wenger’s situation at Arsenal stall the club on making a move of Allegri? How many other top managers will we miss out on as Wenger digs his heels and stays? Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola have already gone, Carlo Ancelotti and Unai Emery also recently made moves. Reports are today that Diego Simeone could be making a return to Inter Milan. Another we have missed out on.

Wenger’s arrogance, his ignorance, his stubbornness is damaging Arsenal. It is meaning we can not move one. Then again, if you were due to earn £19m over the next two years, why would you step down?

Lets turn this blog into a shit sandwich and finish on a high.

Beat Stoke on Saturday afternoon and the pressure is on Liverpool on Sunday when they visit West Ham. Victory will leave us a point behind Liverpool, 3 behind Manchester City (assuming they beat Chelsea in the early kick off).

With home games against Sunderland and Everton to finish the season off, you would not beat against us sneaking into the top 4. 8 wins out of 9 will give us great momentum to face Chelsea at the end of the month. And ultimately that is the real trophy.

Give me the FA Cup over top 4, over progression any day of the week.

We are all in this together.

Spurs make cut backs on £800m stadium project

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When news broke recently that the cost of Tottenham Hotspur’s new stadium had sky rocketed to £800m, everyone in the red side of North London laughed.

The costs had more than doubled from the £400m first quoted seven years ago.

Arsenal struggled with the financing of their stadium, and it gave Arsenal a rough 10 years where we were having to sell to cover stadium debts. Sponsorship deals were front loaded to pay off debt, leaving us short at the back end of the deals. It was hard work, but Arsenal got through.

Spurs were always going to struggle more. A lack of regular Champions League football and them simply being a smaller global club than Arsenal means that their turnover was already fair below what Arsenal’s was in the early 00s (relatively speaking). The Spurs project at £400m was already a tougher financial task to make ends meet. No matter how many NFL games, cheese rooms, boxes and extra seats they had. When this price doubled, I imagine, Levy, Enic et al got an itchy arsehole.

And now the cut backs have begun,

Plans for a hotel as part of its new stadium development was recently put on hold due to it being “unviable”.

The proposed building on the corner of Tottenham High Road and Park Lane, which includes a 180-room four-star hotel, a basement car park, pool, gym and serviced apartments, will cost £67.8m to build, according to planning documents submitted to Haringey Council by the club last month.

A new financial appraisal revealed “a worsened overall scheme viability, largely due to construction cost inflation and the impacts of Brexit”, according to the club.

The club have said it “remained committed to building [the hotel] as soon as practicable” and described it as a ”key place-making component” of the overall scheme.

A letter from the club’ head of planning Richard Serra to Haringey Council said: “Hotel construction cannot commence… until after the completion of the new stadium, by which time the viability of the hotel may have improved.”

The hotel element of the complex, which covers 167,000 sq ft, will cost £31.8m to build, while the 49 serviced apartments on the upper floors will have a total build cost of £16.8m.

The serviced apartments have been redesigned from the original planning application submitted in 2015, with balconies and oversized units added, while residents will also have access to the hotel’s 3,230 sq ft roof terrace, as well as gym facilities, as part of the amendments.

The rooftop restaurant (£1.6m), and the health centre fit-out and swimming pool (£1.6m), make up the remaining costs of the hotel building.

The football club added that new ramp access into the stadium basement car park from Park Lane has resulted in a “significant increase in the cost of the construction of the basement beneath the proposed hotel”.

Earlier this week, the club received planning permission from Haringey Council to add extra seats at the stadium, with the £800m development now set to hold 61,559.

In recent weeks, Spurs have also done a deal to rent Wembley. With talk already about having to spend 2 years at the national stadium, costs will continue to rise.

How many players will they have to sell this summer just to finance the ongoing costs?

Keenos

Time for Arsenal to re-sign former star?

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In 2014 Arsene Wenger got the call. Cesc Fabregas is leaving Barcelona. Do Arsenal want him?

When sold their captain back to his home town club in acrimonious circumstances back in 2011, the club had the foresight to insert a first option buy back clause in the deal, ensuring that if Fabregas ever left Barcelona, Arsenal would have an offer accepted on him.

Whilst at Barcelona, reports are that Arsene Wenger remained in fairly frequent contact with Fabregas. It was an estranged father / son relationship. The door clearly always open for the return of one of the best players Arsenal have had in the last 15 years. But when the time came for Fabregas to leave, Wenger’s phone stopped getting answered to the Fabregas camp. The door was shut. The deal not going to happen.

You could argue it is one of the biggest mistakes of recent years by Arsene Wenger, as Fabregas went to join Chelsea, and win 2 Premier League titles, acting as a driving force in both.

It is very easy now, in 2017, to point and laugh at the mistake. Football in hindsight is a wonderful thing. We see that on Match of the Day as pundits pick apart every tactical and positional position made by players and managers that result in a defeat. It is easy to pick holes in something 5 hours after the event. If these pundits were brilliant as they pretend to make out, they would be top level managers, not sitting on a sofa late on a Saturday night discussing what has happened in games. Hindsight.

So to be fair to everyone involved in the deal, we need to go back to the summer of 2014. David Cameron was Prime Minister, the UK was still in the EU, Jeremy Corbyn was a back bench MP, Ellie Goulding was at number one with Beating Heart and we were a week away from the release of Transformers: Age of Extinction. Spurs had not won a trophy for a long time, the league even longer. Arsenal had just won the FA Cup.

For me, the Cesc Fabregas deal did not die in the summer of 2014, but the previous summer. The summer of the £1 Luis Suarez bid.

In 2013, Arsenal needed a marquee signing, a superstar striker. They went for Luis Suarez, bid above his contracted minimum release clause, and the deal should have gone through. Liverpool held their ground, and basically said to Suarez “take us to court for breach of contract”. It would have been a long, drawn out process, a court case that would have taken years. Instead of taking Liverpool to court, Suarez signed a new, better paid deal, with the agreement that he could leave abroad the next season. Ironically he ended up at Barcelona in 2014, with the Catalonians having to sell Fabregas to finance the deal.

Had the Suarez deal have gone through, I am adamant that the next season, if Fabregas was available, he would have returned to Arsenal. Fabregas playing behind Suarez. It would have driven Arsenal to the Premier League title. But as soon as the Suarez deal died, Arsenal had to explore other options. With very few top quality strikers on the market, Arsenal made a last ditch move for Real Madrid’s Mesut Ozil in a £42.5m deal. Arsenal had arguably secured the best number 10 in the world.

Roll on a year to 2014. The year Fabregas came available. Mesut Ozil had driving Arsenal to their first trophy in 9 years. A successful first season. Fabregas came on the market. He wanted Arsenal, but he found that Arsenal no longer had space for him. With Ozil in his position, there was simply not the space for Cesc Fabregas as a number 10.

Ozil was 18 months younger and clearly a superior player. There would be no way Arsenal would even look into offloading the German after a single season to replace with an older, more injury prone, Cesc Fabregas – who lets not forget basically went on strike to force a move away from Arsenal.

Instead of Fabregas, Arsene Wenger decided on another Barcelona outcast. Alexis Sanchez.

When the Suarez deal fell through, it was clear what Arsene Wenger wanted upfront. A battler. Someone with pace, but who would chase down lost causes, would battle for the team, would be the spearhead. Alexis Sanchez was the man. In came Sanchez, to partner Ozil, and Fabregas eventually went to Chelsea.

It is an interesting conundrum. With Suarez, Arsenal would not have signed Ozil, without Ozil, Arsenal would have signed Cesc Fabregas, without Suarez Arsenal signed Alexis Sanchez.

In his first season at Chelsea, Fabregas won the Premier League. In the 2nd season, he showed his petulant side, alongside Diego Costa and Eden Hazard, they basically stopped performing for Jose Mourinho. This season he has returned to his former brilliant best as Chelsea look to romp home with the title by double points more than their nearest rivals.

But has Fabregas actually performed that well this season?

When I have seen him, he has been excellent. But he has only started 11 league games this season.

He begun the season in a midfield two, where he was horribly exposed for his inability to get around the field. His legs had gone. Very good on the ball, but he had zero defensive awareness and was simply unable to cover as much ground as he used too when at Arsenal. Injuries had taken their toll.

His poor performances in the midfield 2 this season (and previous) have actually justified Arsene Wenger not signing him. With Mesut Ozil in the squad, Fabregas would have had to have played deeper, but he clearly does not have the attributes to play their at 30 years old. So his only role can be as a Number 10.

At Chelsea, he has found himself behind Eden Hazard and Pedro, playing behind Diego Costa. Willing runner Willian also often gets in the side ahead of him. It is this lack of game time that has led Fabregas to seek a new club this summer.

So should Arsenal make amends for what is a potentially clear mistake back in 2014 and re-sign Cesc Fabregas?

I am not sure.

He is now 30 years old and clearly still has his petulant streak and poor attitude. As Arsenal move forward to a 3-4-2-1 formation, he would clearly be unable to play as part of a two man midfield. He simply is not mobile enough.

Could Arsenal line up with Fabregas and Ozil behind Alexis Sanchez? This would be fairly exciting and a way to accommodate both Fabregas and Ozil. But it would also make us one dimensional. 2 excellent passers behind the striker, rather than a passer and a runner. Would it give us the most balance?

If Ozil stays, and we move Sanchez upfront, I would actually prefer a move for someone like Isco over Fabregas.

Isco is 5 years Fabregas’s junior and does not have his poor injury record. He might not be as good a passer, but he is much better driving forward with the ball. His ability to drop into a wide position is also essential in the 3-4-2-1 formation when the two attacking midfielders are expected to assist on the wings. Isco would simply be more suited.

There are reasons why Fabregas has started just 11 games for Chelsea this season. His immobility to play in a , and his inability to perform in a wider position when required too. Pedro and Hazard, like Ozil and Sanchez, or Isco, have this ability. These lack of attributes would not suddenly appear if he rejoined Arsenal.

What does need to be chucked into the mixer, however, is the future of Mesut Ozil.

If the German does go, it does leave us short of players who can make a game breaking pass. At that point, Arsenal should seriously consider the return of Cesc Fabregas, as there are still few better than him at spotting and executing an assist.

It is the same conundrum as Arsenal and Arsene Wenger faced in 2014. Can Arsenal accommodate Cesc Fabregas with Mesut Ozil in the side?

It is still a no from me.

Whether you would have Fabregas over Ozil is another debate.

Keenos