Some fairly encouraging signs were noted in our away victory against Cologne yesterday, Gervinho's excellent goals and performance in particular. The biggest down was the injury to Conor Henderson, fingers crossed it is not a really serious one and good luck to the lad. The absence of Armand Traore was interesting, it may signal something big or he may have picked up a minor injury, I'm sure we'll find out in due course.
The big stories that we need to sort out are those concerning our 'club captain' Cesc Fabregas and Samir Nasri. For me both need to go and soon. Why I hear you ask? Well the reason we dropped a lot of silly points last season was down to a lack of commitment in games when we should have know better. Cesc appears less than 100% committed, as does Nasri, the latter's behaviour leaves a lot to be desired and he has shown his lack of commitment to the cause by failing to sign a new contract. It is foolish to keep players who no longer want to play for the club, it would also be madness to loose over 20 million by letting Nasri walk away for free next summer.
The club could easily cope with losing these two, we have lost far bigger and better players in the past. It would be a big loss, Cesc far more so than Nasri in my opinion, but if we then used the millions gained to replace them both with some top drawer talent then I am sure we would have forgotten about them in no time at all. There are some top players around who would surely be keen to come to the mighty Arsenal FC, Juan Mata for example. My hope is that the club's pretence of wanting to keep Nasri is simply a way of getting the biggest possible fee for the wantaway Frenchman.
Overall I think the priorities must be shipping out these two and replacing them, shipping out more dead wood (Eboue/Bendtner/Almunia et al), bringing in a young pacey powerful striker and a strong physically powerful centre half. If we can bring in that little bit of needed experience then it will complement some of our top drawer young talent very nicely indeed. I am particularly hopeful over Gibbs, Frimpong, Lansbury and Miyaichi.
I am not naive, the club has to be very cunning in the way that it spins reality in order to get the best deals in can in the market, both in terms of selling and buying players. This means that the club will very rarely be honest and open in revealing its motives to us, it would be foolish so to do. The club are running out of time and they need to act fast to resolve these rather significant outstanding issues. I just hope we can get it all done and dusted in time for the season's opener in August. Come on you Gunners.
