I have noted with interest Shard’s views on Chelsea vs Arsenal spending and how Chelsea have gone about it.

With Chelsea it’s the reverse. They spent years hoarding all the talent they could find, and even used the loan market to manipulate the league as much as they could, precisely as a result of their high spending. The reason their wage bill is now lower is because they used those hoarded, bloated assets to finance their current assets.(with a little wink wink, nudge nudge from PSG too) Basically, Chelsea could not be where they are at this moment in time without their extraordinarily high spending. They did plan for FFP very well. All the same, they can’t do the same thing again if FFP works, which is good.

So yeah, say Arsenal have a higher wage bill than Chelsea’s, but it takes time to make the money count. It isn’t a situation unique to us either.

Mourinho has made some big decisions about losing certain big players (Mata and Luiz) to get the balance he wants in the side. He saw a surplus in certain areas and deficiencies in others and looked at what he could reclaim from selling off players in positions that they are already well covered in. It was smart business and basically funded Cesc and Costa.

My question is have we got surplus areas where we could secure extra funds to add to the transfer budget to get the world class players we need in other positions? I think on players like Podolski and Campbell and possibly even Santi. With the former 2 likely to leave anyway IMO I would also I would ask have we waited too long to get maximum value from said players? Was the summer the right time to sell some of these players to get maximal funds back?

Even with our new spending power I still don’t see us as a club that can lose significant transfer funds on player sales and I wonder if we have not played the market properly.

Written by GoonerB

Once upon a time, if you wanted to watch a football match you put on your raincoat, put a pork pie in your pocket, queued up at a turnstile, put down your cash and elbowed your way onto your favourite bit of terracing.

You watched the game as you swayed with the crowd, stamped your feet if it was cold and joined in the cheering and jeering. If you blinked when a goal was scored, tough luck, no replays on the big screen and no pundit to tell you what you had missed.

By the time you got home, if you lived in London that is, the classified editions of The Star, The Evening News and The Standard were on sale so you could check the score and scorers and read a brief description of the game, which had probably been written by some drunken hack who had passed out at half-time.

Nowadays every move, every foul, every goal, every incident is shown and repeated as nauseum. There are a host of ex-players, in sharp suits and drawing huge salaries, just bursting to tell you what you had already seen for yourself.

Referee’s decisions are examined in forensic detail, frequently by pundits who themselves are less than au fait with the laws of the game. Players are castigated for making what these “experts” perceive to be the wrong decision even though that decision is made in a split second often under immense pressure from the game situation as well as from opposing players and in the full knowledge that it has been recorded for posterity by half a dozen or more cameras.

Everyone is an expert, everyone can demonstrate their “expertise” on the many and varied blogs that abound on the internet.

Journalists actually use information and opinions garnered from those blogs in their own columns and for their own ends.

A whole new industry has sprung up around football, there seems to be a compulsion for fans to know every little detail about their club, it’s ownership, it’s finances, the manager and players. When Harry Redknap made a throwaway remark about the weight of one of his players it was instantly “news” and plastered all over the back pages of the tabloids for the delectation of “The Fans”.

In the past a player could go out after the game on a Saturday, have a few beers and a game of cards in the smoke filled back room of his local and nobody would be the wiser or worried. Nowadays a player photographed falling out of a nightclub with his trousers at half mast is given the full back page treatment, his morals are questioned as is his commitment to his club, “insiders” will be ready with rumours about the punishment inflicted by his manager and his agent will be salivating at the thought of a possible transfer and his own share of the inflated fee that will eventually be forthcoming.

Are we as football fans better served by the Information Age? Are we better informed by the opinions of the uninformed? Or would we all actually enjoy the game a little more without the existing level of insight?

Somebody once said “Football is a simple game”. Couldn’t we simply enjoy it for what it is? Shouldn’t we simply enjoy it for what it is?

Written by Norfolk Gooner

Of course not.

Alexis Sanchez is a work horse with amazing speed and you know from his time in Barcelona that this guy will run up and down the pitch non stop. Luckily for Arsenal  he hasn’t failed to bring that kind of work rate to us who, I feel, desperately needed a player that can work his arse off.

He carries some of the most important traits needed in football. His work rate, combined with his speed and ability to always score goals is what every club needs. Many times you’ll see players start to slow down midway through the second half as if the game has finished, but we all know that until we hear the whistle the game isn’t over and anything can still happen. When Sanchez plays you can guarantee he will push until the referee says its over.

More over, Sanchez has always been that player in the right place ready to score and I think he has pushed Arsenal despite the absence of Ozil who was meant to be Arsenal’s main star.

We’ve finally got ourselves a genuine talisman. Someone of genuine heart, fight and undoubted quality that can single handily win us games or that can raise the level of the whole team simply through the influence of his performances.

I thought he was brilliant, and I saw something I haven’t seen for almost a decade with one of our player’s – the opposition, defenders and midfielders, looking tentative and unsure whenever he was around. He’s such an all-rounder that you know he can hassle you into errors, win the ball, run at you, beat you with the dribble or for pace, pick a pass and can finish. How do you deal with players like that? They are a nuisance for a defender! Easily, Wenger’s best buy for a decade IMO.

The performance was okay today – not great, but okay.We moved up a gear from last week’s win at Sunderland and that in itself is a positive. I just wonder why it took that first goal before we looked like a completely different and dangerous team. Mental hurdles to clear most probably. I think Wenger got it wrong with Flamini and Arteta in the middle. It was too tentative for a home game, and it was obvious the thrust Ramsey brought into our play when he came on.

Anyway, the last 20 odd minutes is about as much as I’ve enjoyed watching us play this year. Good football played at a high tempo with purpose and incision. I would love to see more of that. Special mentions for Chambers (goal and assist) and Monreal who I thought had a fantastic game at the back, and how nice to have Theo back! Santi needs a rest as he is woefully out of form, but he will be back.

But I think the day belonged to Sanchez, and we should all feel very lucky to have that lad playing for us .

kelsey