• Bonathan

  Well, i guess we all knew a while ago what was happening with fab and nasri. we all expected fab right from the start of summer, and alex ferguson told us about a month ago that nasri had agreed to go city.

  we made a big mistake with nasri. if we’d offered him 105/110k earlier, we’d have kept him. we didn’t, city got in his ear and there was no going back after that. well, the only way we might have rescued the situation would have been some major signings to make him change his mind. but that didn’t happen.

  so this is the situation we find ourselves in, and i guess we gotta make the best of the hand we are dealt. we have plenty of money now anyway, and won’t be needing to dip into any funds that may or may not have been set aside.

  Enrique is off to liverpool for 6m! belter price, which i feel may come back to haunt us, probably as early as this time next month when gibbs is injured and traore is doing his thing. wenger obviously wasn’t bluffing when he said we wouldn’t be replacing clichy.

  goalkeeping is another area where we are unlikely to invest having seen some good experienced keepers move.

  centre back is an essential, and wenger has said so himself, and we are actually in a pretty lucky position that we can get any of hangeland/jagielka/cahill/samba/dann with little or no competition if we want. so it’s a case of take your pick. hangeland fits the bill perfect for me, but i’d be happy with cahill or jag as well.

  defensive midfield i feel we are ok with song and frimpong (as long as frimpong is as good as they say he is).

  if juan mata is signed then he would give us another option both out wide and as the advance central midfielder. Personally, i would like to see arsharvin given a go in that position also. do we need another midfielder? i’m not sure we do.

  as for strikers, well it depends on whether gervinho has been signed as a central striker as well. i think he has so we have rvp , chamachk and gervinho (maybe vela at a push) who could play that lone striker role. when we play with 2 up fron you can add walcott to that list as well, and maybe arsharvin.

  If it were me, i’d have signed 4 players. shay given, hangeland, jose enrique and juan mata. since it’s clear we are not interested in a GK or a LB though, i’d expect a CB and mata.

  there is a definite worry that we can’t attract mata anymore. and certainly, if we don’t sign him up before the 1st leg of the udinese game, then we could run into big problems if we have a bad result.

• afc4life

  Football is back, and we’re going to win tomorrow.

• sharad

  can we take a 8-0 lead

• sharad

  first time ever im not looking forward to a season Crying or Very sad

  even when we were shit i always had optimism come august and always looked forward to the new season but now im just dreading it -

  Just looking forward to seeing a few mates down the pub. I think it’s a blessing we’ve got such a difficult set of fixtures to start the season with, if it all goes tits up then the heat is on Wenger!

  I think wenger will be gone by the end of the season, and I think that’s why Gazidis and Kroenke are distancing themselves from him a bit.

  He’s hammering more nails into his coffin with all this stuff and maybe he just doesn’t give a toss anymore. Who knows.

  Either way, he’s got absolutely no patience to play with. The fans boo’d the team at the Emirates Cup, can you imagine how it’s going to be after a couple of bad results in meaningful games?

  But he’s only got himself to blame.

  I wish I was looking forward to this season, but we go in weaker than last season. This is the season that Arsenal are officially no longer a big club. Our fall from grace from the invincibles is complete

• yemi

  My only worry is how stubborness can make a man blind !!! It is obvious to everyone (apart from wenger) that we need an influential defender. The average age of our first team cannot be that much than the U23 Olympics team of every nation.

• yemi

  West Brom have rejected a Wigan bid for striker Peter Odemwingie on the eve of the new season.

• Bonathan

  WHAT A LAUGHING STOCK WE ARE.

  I was prepared to give wenger the benefit of the doubt this summer, but i have finally lost faith with the man and the board.

  the final nail in the coffin has come today. we have wenger still maintaining that he expects fabregas and nasri to stay!!! wtf is he talking about?? he must be the only person on earth that thinks fabregas might stay. why embarass yourself and the club. he sounds like the biggest fool on the planet. I can only think that it was an absolute pathetic attempt to try and convince juan mata that they had a chance of keeping hold of one of them.

  It has just been reported on sky sports however, that sources in spain are saying that the juan mata deal absolutely will not be happening now. why? because we aren’t ambitious enough, are a selling club and our manager is on tele making a fool out of the club. great. who do we sing now. i’ll tell you, second rate players who we wouldn’t have dreamed of signing at the start of the transfer window.

  Don’t get me wrong. wenger is a great manager, but i actually wish he wasn’t, because that just makes what he’s done worse. the most stubborn man on the planet, could have had it all, but for all his power, could not fore-see his own demise. one embarrassment after the other for the last five summer transfer windows.

  4th place at best this year, and that ain’t gonna be easy at all. chances are we’ll be pipped by liverpool who have just signed a player we probably should have done for a measely 5.5m

• Kodjo

  Here is my perspective on Cesc

  Arsene knows that Cesc would eventually leave but hoped that he will not and pledge his future. In the mean time i think the sensible thing was to find a replacement…who would agree to be on hold until Barca paid a fair price. Through the whole saga i suspect that Arsene though that Barca might be able to meet the transfer price given the well publicized financial woes, ‘forcing’ Cesc to stay.

  To say that a manager, who has been in the business for all these years plus others in the board, did not make contingency plans is just disrespectful. Like Wenger or not he has proved very intelligent in moving players on and finding replacements, if not altering the style of play to suit the players available.

  As fans we’ve had concerns about the team, but, it doesn’t warrant the vitriol doled out at Wenger. I have questioned his tactics at times but it doesn’t make him a bad manager overnight. The players are equally culpable not to mention the biased officiating, moving to a bigger stadium and bad luck with injuries. Just take a step back and look at the 6 years without trophies in view of the issues mentioned here.

  Could Arsene have done better? Sure enough, but he is human …has made mistake and will continue to make mistakes.

  Let’s get behind the team …..

• Gooner Get Ya

  So we are entering yet another transitional period as we lose the best of our midfield. I do wonder though that if Cesc and Nasri had stayed then would Arsene actually concentrated on signing the defenders we need rather than fight the losing battle to keep them?

  Arsene now has the excuses lined up for the end of the window. Due to the late sales he couldn’t find the right players in time….I hope he proves me wrong.

• Bonathan

  i’m not sayig he’s a bad manager. and i’m not saying he should have forced cesc to stay. i’m not even saying he was wrong to say that he thought cesc would stay at the start of the window or a week or two ago. but to say it today was just and embarrassment. he’s as good as gone!! he could have just said no comment at least. i mean, can you believe anything he says now? no other manager in the world would have said that today.

  It’s dragged on far too long, the transfers have not been delt with well at all. you can’t blame barcelona, they were happy to let it drag if needs be. we should have drew a line in the sand, it’s the only way to deal with it, we didn’t it dragged and now we can’t even attract juan mata because let’s face it, we’ve come out of the whole fiasco looking ridiculous

• Bonathan

  and of course, in the meantime, juan mata’s clause expired.

  anyway, damge done, time to get on with it. we still have a promising squad that is capable of finishing in the top 4, and who knows, maybe winning a cup.

  sounds like we’re signing this jadson guy on monday anyway. fingers crossed that he’s good.

• yemi

  So we’ve signed joel campbell,no sign of a CB yet. And wat about the super quality we were promised by wenger? He said we will be happy this week, are we happy yet?
  Where are the experienced players?

• Steve

  I liked the Tevez – Nasri swap – had me in stitches

  Mind you – we could then swap him for Sneijder

• harry

  There will be no new CBs. Wenger gave his usual excuse of a player returning from injury is like a new signing, and im also hearing the Ignasi Miguel is being promoted due to Spain’s under 21s victory. I dont mind seeing Miguel come in as long as he is ahead of Squid in the pecking order, but I cant believe how little has been done to sign a new defender. We had decent CBs virtually begging to play for us, and a reasonable price could have been arranged for pretty much all of them. The worst part is that he wont even attempt to rectify the situation by adjusting our defensive tactics.

• Gooner Get Ya

  Barton is a prick

• Horse

  Barton thinks that the world is against him for no good reason, when he has been involved in an endless catalogue of incidents like the one that occured today (and worse). People who don’t learn from their mistakes are fools and there is certainly no smoke without fire. I would bet good money that people close to Barton were involved in the looting throughout the country.

• yemi

  Arsenal players are naïve and inexperienced. They all do foolish things! Diaby, sagna,song, kos and now gervinho. I laff. We need to replace cesc and nasri or else we will be a mid table club. We a cf, cb too. Wishes

• Bonathan

  There is a definite problem with the discipline of our players. They just seem to get roped in to doing idiotic things. We can sit and say what we want about barton, and yes, there’s no denying he is an absolute bell-end, but we are playing right into his hands when we react like that. it’s exactly what he wants.

  that said, barton should also have been sent off. and how pardew had the audacity to say barton didn’t raise his hands i don’t know. he had gervinho by the scruff of the neck, rather forcefully as well. Still, gervinho was ver stupid though. I mean, if you really can’t control yourself and you’re gonna hit him, then at least give him a proper thump. A bitch slap is so embarrasing. nearly as embarrasing as the way barton went down like the girl he is.

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