Category Archives: David Ospina

After all of that spending, just where does Arsenal stand?

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After a thrilling July saw us sign four players, it was starting to feel like we were finally serious about flexing some financial muscle. The first of the announced signings, Alexis Sánchez, seemed to be a dramatic statement of intent, the beginning of bigger things to come. Those bigger things may yet come, but the close of the transfer-window is less than ten days away. It’s starting to feel like we could go out that window with a whimper rather than a bang. Early-summer optimism is fading to early-autumn cynicism, much like flowers spring forth only to something something something. Finish the simile as you see fit. It’s getting harder and harder to allow Arsène the benefit of the doubt, even given his deadline-day proclivities.To this point, can we even claim that we’ve strengthened the squad?

As with last summer, we’ve been told that we’ll spend what it takes to actually contend for a Prem title. Heck, for most of last season, that was true—until the thinness of our squad was exposed through injuries and fatigue, reducing us to yet again scrabble and claw our way to a fourth place finish. Like last summer, we announced a dramatic, exciting signing from one of Europe’s biggest clubs. Unlike last last summer, we’ve added a few more players for whom we had to actually open the cheque-book. However, once we look past the hullabaloo, it starts to feel a bit like we’re running to stand still—if that.

The chart below lays out our major dealings (with financials from transfermarkt). Study that for a minute and we’ll discuss take-aways afterwards.

Pos
Player out
Fee
Player in
Fee 
Comments
CF
Bendtner
Free
Sanchez
£33.26m
Looks to be the only clear upgrade. Alexis looks far more vital and dangerous than Bendtner ever was or Eisfeld ever will be.
AM
Eisfeld
£880k
CB
Vermaelen
£8.8m
Chambers
£17.8m
Djourou’s departure won’t disquiet anyone, and Vermaelen was also far from starting, but Chambers is exciting more for his potential than for his performance. We now have only two CBs with significant Prem experience.
Djourou
£2.46m
RB
Sagna
Free
Debuchy
£13.2m
A modest upgrade, in my opinion, even for as much as I like Sagna. Debuchy might offer more speed and technical skill than Sagna.
GK
Fabianski
Free
Ospina
£3.52m
It’s hard to see Ospina matching or exceeding Fabianksi’s performance on our way to winning the FA Cup, and he doesn’t seem strong enough to challenge Szczesny—yet.

To date, then, we’ve shed ourselves of six players (maybe five. Sorry, Mr. Eisfeld) of significance while adding four. For those six, we brought in £12m. To get those four, we spent £67.8. If we focus on just the spending, it looks impressive—£67.8m would be far and away our biggest summer ever. I’m proud that we’ve maintained some semblance of fiscal discipline over the last 18 years, if not longer, but the cold, hard truth is that you have to spend to win. I don’t want us going the way of Chelsea, Liverpool, or Man City, but at some point an old adage comes to mind: “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” For as ambitious as we’ve been to date, we’ve not been audacious enough to know that we can beat our rivals. Speaking of which, here’s a quick look at their business compared to ours:

Club
Transfer fees paid
Transfer fees received
Balance
Arsenal
£67.79
£12.14m
-£55.6
Chelsea
£82m
£85m
-£3m
Liverpool
£115m
£76m
-£39m
Man City
£57.7m
£25.8m
-£31.9m

Our net-spend this summer has been a fairly modest £55.6m. This after a variety of promises that we would spend almost double that, what with the new Puma deal, paying down the stadium, and other advantages. We haven’t yet spent the £100m that was bandied about. What’s more (worse?), we can’t quite say that the money we’ve spent equals that spent by Chelsea, Liverpool, or Man City. The quality added is another story. Chelsea, in Mourinho’s second year, look the most-intimidating after adding Fabregas and Costa while bringing Courtois back (among other moves). Liverpool have gone full Spursy, trying to replace Suarez with a plethora of other players. Only City look content to stand pat.

This brings me back to the “running to stand still” bit. Yes, we’ve done a nice bit of business—compared to our own transfer-window history. On those grounds, we look audacious, bold, even reckless, perhaps. However, even for as modest as our rivals’ business has been, a comparison between us and them suggests that we haven’t been quite as bold as we had assumed.

To make a long story short, we haven’t yet done what needs doing if we’re serious about contending for a Prem title past, say, the month of March. Sadly, the Prem season extends just a bit beyond that. If Arsène plans on us competing to the very end, he’s going to have to double-down on his ante to this point—to be fair, that is the minimum we should expect after a spring and summer chock-a-block with promises that we would do exactly that.

What do you think? Have we kept pace with our rivals or are we merely treading water? While you’re thinking, do keep in mind that Tottenham have to qualify for Spuropa League play while Man U have no European distractions at all. Between a rock and a hard place, can we squeeze through?

Um, Arsène, no offense, but WTF?

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Week after week has turned into day after day. In a transfer-window that is still weeks away from closing, it seems more and more like Arsène is signing players with an eye to something more than simply strengthening the squad. Gone, it seems, are the days when we had to wait until deadline-day to learn of a signing. 10 July: Alexis Sánchez signs. 17 July: Mathieu Debuchy signs. Then, a lull…until 26 July: David Ospina signs, and two days later, 28 July, Calum Chambers signs. Time seems to be folding in on itself at a rate that will see us signing someone else 29 July, then someone else twelve hours later, and another six hours after that, and another, and another…in short, we seem to be disappearing into a wormhole with no end in sight. By the time it’s all said and done, we’ll have signed every player in the known universe, after which quantum physics takes over. It boggles the mind.

It started off, as all such processes do, with a big bang as we signed Sánchez. Not content to have poached from Real Madrid last summer, Arsène apparently felt that he had to burgle Barça, signing the scorer of 19 goals and 10 assists (good for 2nd and 3rd in the squad, respectively) for a mere £35m. That one was for the haters, those who brayed that Arsène won’t spend and that the big names won’t play for Arsenal. In two successive summer-windows, Arsène extended his arm and unfolded a certain, central digit and made sure that those donkeys understood whence (vence?) Wenger comes: “I’ve now signed players from Real Madrid and Barcelona, beyotches (pardon his French). What? Wot? You want me to sign from Bayern? We shall see.”

However, Arsène couldn’t resist certain impulses. Once his French-quotient dipped a bit following the sayonara de Sagna, we were greeted by the Debuchy debut (fair warning: you’re going to see a fair-few featurings of frequent falliterations from this fpoint fporward. I’ve had a fpint or ftwo…). Not content to b*tch-slap a few back-benchers, Arsène scratched an old itch by bringing in a Frenchie to play right-back, a debutante by the name of Debuchy. This one was an old-school signing, harkening back to the good old days of bringing in a few Frenchmen to fortify. Debuchy slots in for Sagna, who sidled off to Citeh. So it goes.

Speaking of scratching certain itches, Arsène couldn’t resist the signing of a certain stick-minder, this one of the a South American sort, to step up against Szczesny, perhaps even supplanting the Pole. Again, this signing carried calling-cards of the Wengerian-variety: A pittance paid. Found from France. Nicked from the Niçoise. Nevermind.

Closer to home, Arsène just had to tweak the Mancs, especially those who saw fit to splurge several shillings on Shaw, choosing Chambers for about half what those hankerers handed over for their Hail Mary. All alliteration aside, Arsenal may have acquired the better of Southampton’s defenders. Time will tell.

What’s next? Will we see the signing of Sami, the claiming of Khedira? Or will it be the bringing-back to Britain of Balotelli? We live in interesting times when it’s Arsenal that’s most active in the transfer-window. Willl wonders never cease? The only element missing to this point is the signing of a clinical closer, a striker who scores seemingly at will, at a fee that flummoxes the flibbertigibbets. I’m sure that Arsène will find him…

Chambers, Ospina, and my terrible weekend…

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Ugh. What a lost weekend. Not only did everyone I know fail to buy me a plane-ticket to New York City and match-day ticket to watch Henry’s assist to Wrighty’s son, no one else I don’t know also failed to buy me the same. Worse, or better, depending on how you slice things, the match itself was a bit tepid, ending in a 1-0 win for the hosts. If there’s a silver lining, it’s in the fact that Henry showed us all that he still has something to offer, and no Gunners got injured. Whether that counts as two silver linings is too much for me to contemplate, as I’m still recovering from the Tottenham invasion of my hometown, an invasion that culminated in Spurs actually defeating a team in red for once. To top things off, we still don’t quite know what if anything is going on with Chambers, Ospina, or anyone else we’re apparently pursuing. What a life.

For those of us who watched the Red Bulls-Gunners match, we got what we deserved: a lackluster match in which Arsenal fielded a hodge-podge of players (Rosický as center-forward? Okay…) and basically went through the paces. As I put it in elsewhere, Americans got to see Arsenal without booking a flight, renting a room, coping with everyone driving on the wrong side of the road, or figuring out whether ‘centre’ is pronounced differently from ‘center’. On this side of the pond, we’re more or less comfortable with pitch (not field), match (not game), and of course football (not soccer). It gets a bit dicey when you ask us about boots, kits, and squads. Are we Yanks to use them, are would this sound too much like we’re trying too hard to impress?

Speaking of trying to impress, I hope it’s not too churlish (eh?) to ask for a bit more flair from the lads today. Absent a few moments here and there, I felt like I was watching two mid-table squads squabble without having to worry about relegation or promotion. So it goes. Still, the match had its moments, such as when Wilshere tried to recreate the pornogol against Norwich, but there’s not much to take from it. The sky-is-falling crowd will point to Red Bulls’ goal as evidence that we cannot defend set-pieces. That is their wont. The fun part of being in that crowd, much like being a ‘reporter’ for The Daily Mail or others, is that you need only be right about 1% of the time to earn the right to say, “See? I told you!”

Speaking of rumor-mongers, it appears that we’re about as close to signing Ospina and Chambers as we were a week ago. With Saturday’s match, it’s understandable that there wouldn’t be any dramatic announcements over the weekend. Let Henry and other Gunners enjoy the limelight. Maybe we’ll see a new Gunner unveiled on Monday. As enticing as that may be, we’d likely be looking at back-ups or supports rather than upgrades. Ospina, for all of his statistical prowess, may challenge but not supplant Szczesny as our #1 keeper. A bit of competition would be welcome, if only to keep the Woj on his toes, but it’s not the kind of signing that vaults us to the top of the Prem. Similarly with Chambers, I’d welcome the signing despite my misgivings over raiding the carcass that Southampton is rapidly becoming. I don’t see how it would dramatically intensify our squad. Competing with Debuchy, Chambers would surely grow and improve, but the same could be said of Jenkinson.

As irritating as all of this gossip is, it’s a far-cry better than having to witness the abomination that is Spurs arriving in Chicago. Worse, they actually won. Will wonders never cease? As I’m sure we all know, Arsenal’s loss, coupled with Spurs’ win, can only spell out one conclusion: Arsenal will once again finish above Spurs. It follows as surely as four follows two plus two. This doesn’t do much to alleviate my own personal suffering. I felt one part missionary, one part martyr, explaining why one should follow Arsenal and not Tottenham. It was miserable, worse than rearranging deck-chairs on the Titanic. That the Fire rolled over for Spurs hardly made my job any easier, as those Spuds could proudly proclaim victory. It was a jarring, unexpected outcome, and the various Spuds in attendance didn’t quite know what to make of it, as celebration is to them a foreign concept.

All in all, these visits are like oases in the desert, as our MLS is still largely a retirement-community for the Prem, and any chance to see the Prem’s best and brightest—or, failing that, Spurs—is like manna from Heaven. Speaking of which, may a few more signings come our way before too long…

Thursday Transfer-Talk: Ospina? Khedira? Balotelli?

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Okay, so “Thursday Transfer Talk” doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as smoothly as it should, lacking the actual alliteration all of us aspire to, but there’s something in it nonetheless. The signings of Alexis Sánchez and Mathieu Debuchy were announced at the club website on Thursdays (17 July and 10 July, for those counting). Heck, Mathieu Flamini’s signing was also announced on a Thursday (29 August 2013, for those curious and lazy enough to enquire). There are a few outliers, to be sure—Sanogo was announced on a Monday, as was Özil, but they are shall serve for now as the exceptions that prove the rule. I’ll be going to bed shortly, but, given the six-hour time-difference between here and London, anything could happen, ranging from the announced signings of Khedira, Ospina, and Balotelli, to the signing of no one at all.

It’s anyone’s guess as to what, if anything, may happen on this day. With a 20-man squad arriving in New York City to face the Red Bulls, it’s entirely possible that there will be nothing at all to announce. Why distract from the prospect of Henry facing off against his former club, after all?

Then again, such a clash raises the expectations. Henry, perhaps more than any other player, embodies the successes and glories of Arsènian football: a Frenchmen, plucked from relative obscurity and converted from one position to another, to become a talisman and hero to Gooners on either side of the Pond.

At whatever level, we’ve seen a different, more-ambitious Arsenal of late. Whether this newer version has risen to a level that will satisfy is another question. All too often under Arsène, we’ve been asked to wait and wait again until a marquee-signing (if any) was announced. In this transfer-window, we’ve been treated to the signing of Alexis and Debuchy while being teased by the potential signings of Ospina, Khedira, Schneiderlin, Balotelli, and others. Heck, there’s even been talk of getting Casillas on a free transer, but let’s not go nuts.

We’ve been busy already, at least by our own standards, and there’s been business enough to suggest that we’re ambitious and looking to capitalize on many, many years of penny-pinching. With FFP at least threatening to consider forming a committee to study doing something, Chelsea and Man City have at last pretended to at least look at their books, if not balance them. Meanwhile, for the first time under Arsène, Arsenal are looking to break the bank, not just once for Alexis, but perhaps again for a true striker and a defensive midfielder. On top of that, we may still be in for a keeper and a center-back. Where does it end?

For what it’s worth, the trip to New York City may trump all of this talk. A chance to see Henry play against Arsenal may be just too much. Why try to add hype to hype? Instead, it might be best to just enjoy the meaningless friendly for what it is: a mindless jape for a few Academy players to ply their wares against a squad of once-were’s, never-will-be’s, and one, glorious, always-will-be.

Then again, with an eye to spectacle, could we see Henry, that one, glorious, always-will-be, greeting some kind of heir-apparent? I would hardly deign to suggest that Balotelli or Benzema could rise to the challenge. It’s enough, though, to make minds wander…

Let’s invite Ospina warmly. Khedira? Be more stand-offish…

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Apologies, first of all, for going silent for the last few days. My sister got married this weekend, which afforded too many distractions and imbibements for me to get to the blog. She’s off to Costa Rica, where I’m sure she’ll see how Joel Campbell is doing and report back post-haste. Closer to reality, if only marginally, we seem to be edging closer and closer to signing keeper David Ospina, who sparkled at the World Cup for Colombia and did the same for Nice in Ligue 1. There are the infamous suggestions about “personal terms” with the keeper, with further details that we could bring him on for as little as £3m, which would be a fantastic bit of business. At the other end of things, financially if not feasibly, the Khedira saga drags on with no indication that his camp have budged from demands for a weekly wage of something close to £190m. Just what the hell’s a club supposed to do?

Let’s get the unpleasantries out of the way early, shall we? Khedira is a very, very good player (some might even anoint him as “world-class”), but it’s hard to believe that he’s worth the close-to £200m per week he might cost us. Even if Morgan Schneiderlin would prefer to follow Pochettino to the wrong side of London, and even if we seek a defensive midfielder, I don’t want us forking over that kind of cash for an older, still-coming-back-from-ACL-surgery player. I’d much rather sit Jack Wilshere down on a folding chair with a bare light-bulb swaying above him while various former Gunners lunge from the darkness to convince him that he simply must become the club’s next, great, defensive midfielder. If a creative, attacking type like Arteta can be converted to play more-defensively and at a more-advance age, so to can Wilshere. Putting it another way, should we invest heavily in a player who may need a season or more to adjust to the Prem (such as Khedira), or should we ask a player already adjusted to the Prem to commit to a position? That’s a topic to investigate in more depth…

For now, the apparent topic topic du jour is our pursuit of David Ospina. Arsenal can already boast of being one of the world’s best for keepers, as discussed here, and the rising star that is Ospina could add to that reputation. With the departures of Mannone and Fabianski, we need another keeper—with apologies to David Martinez, who starred as the villain in the 7-5 win over Reading. Ospina seems to fit the bill nicely. He turned in a star performance for Colombia, and a quick run-down of his resumé suggest that this is a keeper every bit as sharp as Szczesny and perhaps hungrier. I love the Woj as much as anyone, but we all know that he needs someone to hold his feet to the fire because he sometimes lacks a fire of his own. Ospina can offer that fire. He may lack the seniority of Casillas, for example, but he can more than hold his own.

For Nice, he turned in a stellar season. Playing for a club that scored less than a goal per game, he almost single-handedly staved off relegation. Nice finished in 17th place in Ligue 1, just two points from relegation. However, if you look at goals conceded, Nice leaps to 10th place in Ligue 1, due largely if not entirely to Ospina’s efforts. With him between the sticks, Nice conceded just 44 goals on the season, level with 5th-placed Lyon, and might have done even better were it not for the five lamentable appearances made by Lucas Veronese, who in his five appearances conceded 15 goals while making one-thirds the saves that Ospina did. Put another way, if Ospina had started instead of Veronese while conceding less than a goal-per-game, Nice might have finished comfortably mid-table instead of scrambling to avoid relegation.

Speaking of stats and saves and so on, it might be worthwhile to compare Ospina to Szczesny, to get a better sense of what Ospina might offer and to what degree he might challenege Szczesny for the starting role. According to squawka, Szcz made 1.95 saves per goal conceded. Not bad. However, contrast that with Ospina, who made 3.39 saves per goal conceded. Ospina faced nearly double the number of shots on goal that Szczesny did while conceding far less often than Szczesny did (25 to 41). I’m not about to parse each goal to assess which of these each keeper “should have” saved. Suffice it to say that signing Ospina wouldn’t just offer us solid support behind Szczesny; it might result in a duel to see who’s the best, a duel that benefits the club as a whole.

I know that, to some degree, I’ve tried to have it both ways with this post. I’ve defended Wilshere against the intrusion of Khedira while offering Szczesny in sacrifice to the arrival of Ospina. It’s hard work splitting the difference between love for the club and admiration of the squad, and I’ll leave it at that until the transfer-window shuts…