Greenlizard0 PL & Championship Football Thread ** spoilers ** [18th - 21st Dec 2020]

I'm looking forward to all the "but he got the ball" shouts. He ****ed his control up and ended up lunging into the challenge to compensate - he was slightly unfortunate that he ends up going over the top of the ball but he went into the challenge with too much force and was out of control.
 
Yeh, you can't get away with those kind of reckless challenges any more.

Potential ankle/leg breaker, deserved red.
 
BaZ87 said:
Now obviously Arsenal should be able to improve from where they are but to get back to expecting to qualify for the CL and challenge for major titles? I actually think Arsenal are now in a position where they're going to struggle to ever get back to the top table, at least without a manager coming in and working a miracle.

This Arsenal squad needs major surgery and there's so many challenges preventing or at least making it harder for them to carry it out. There has never been a worse time to shift overpaid duds and Arsenal have a lot of them to shift. Their strategy of giving out big contracts to aging players is going to come back and bite them on the arse because they won't be able to shift them and they'll also be the benchmark for all new signings contracts. Financially Arsenal are gradually being cut adrift too. As of this season (with or without covid) Arsenal's revenue is approx £200m less than Liverpool, City & Utd's, around £100m behind Chelsea and around £50m behind Spurs (£100m+ if Spurs make the CL next season and Arsenal don't).

Arsenal can't buy their way out of trouble. It's going to take a sustained period of making clever decisions and good management for Arsenal to build their way back up and it's difficult to see that happening when they've had 5+ years of poor decisions and management.
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I'm not sure who is actually expecting CL qualification and challenging for major titles these days though? Sure there was a period a couple of years back where some fans had their heads in the sand a bit about the resurgence of rivals but I think expectations are different now.

The contract strategy is an interesting one because if you look at the evolution:
  • Giving big contracts (£60k/week) to young players, I'm talking the Diaby, Denilson, Walcott etc era of about 10 years ago whilst also not paying top dollar for the star players. We gambled heavily on offloading experienced title-winners and filling up with youth, the problem was the few star players that we had like Fabregas, RvP, Nasri, Hleb etc grew disillusioned waiting around for the team to evolve when they could join powerhouses in Manchester, Barcelona etc. You then had this 'benchmark' problem but at the bottom end, a whole bunch of bench-warmers earning millions of pounds a year meaning when you had anyone decent coming through the ranks you struggled to hold on to them, because they could see pony players getting £3m/year, who wants to be getting paid £25k/week when some clown is on double that.
  • Under Wenger we had a strategy of only offering 1 year contracts to anyone aged 30 or above
  • A lot of criticism has been aimed at the club for letting contracts run down, RvP was sold because they didn't want to lose him on a Bosman, same for Alexis swap deal, Ramsey obviously was let go and we ended up overpaying for Ozil (who now drains about £18m/year in wages.
In terms of duds Arsenal have always had duds, Gervinho, Santos, Squilacci, Song, Iwobi etc. The real top earners at Arsenal like Ozil and Auba shouldn't be 'duds', we need to find a way to get more out of them. As for Pepe well you only have to look at my views when I signed him, people kept banging on about what a massive 'bargain' he was when I was massively unconvinced. I think from memory I said he should've been a player in the £15-30m range.
Anyway guess this is going a bit OT so should be continued in the club thread.
 
What an idiotic decision from Auirier.

Another footballer with marbles for brains.
 
Andybtsn said:
We need a Bilbao type performance against Man U from years back to win today. Looking at them goals, they are so leeds of today. it’s amazing what Bielsa can get out of his players. Half our team were league 1 standard before he came onboard.
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Typically if Rashford is on form we can destroy any team that comes and attacks us aggressively as Leeds inevitably will.

Going to be an interesting game!
 
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