Hey Big Spender

The man to lead us to Premier League glory?

Here we go again. We’re two weeks out from the start of the season and the promise of big money signings rings hollow once more. There’s a few rumours still floating around, but by and large, the big name players we have been linked to over the summer don’t look like they’re going to happen. Ozïl, Schwarzer, Cole, Mertesacker, Stekelenburg, Jagielka – can you see any of them actually appearing in an Arsenal shirt? Cole, obviously not – a move to the Scouse underlining the fact that for all their travails last year, they’re still more of an attraction to players than us. Maybe they offered more cash, but we could have matched it – easily. However, despite us missing out with Cole, you’ve got to feel that actually with both him and Ozïl that they’d be just another good, attack minded midfielder, in a team that already has a fair quota of those.

The bigger disappointments lie at the back. Sol has gone off to the Toon, Gallas is a free agent, sure we’ve got Koscielny but we need height, presence, steel. We’re woefully short at the back, and an injury to either Vermaelen or the new boy will leave us woefully exposed. And yet the rumours in the blogosphere are flurrying around a Bosnian chap called Emir Spahić. No, me either. He’s 29 and currently plays for Montpellier. Hardly going to set the shirt printers into a Spahić-fit is it? As virtually every person who’s ever seen Arsenal throw away leads (hello Celtic at the weekend), fail to clear set pieces (ditto, only with Milan) or generally get bullied into submission by beasts like Drogba, will tell you we need presence! It costs us a good number of times every season, and it prevents us from winning stuff.

That presence needs to start right from the back, the no. 1 – which as Arsene says, we don’t have one right now. For all the talk of Schwarzer, who is a pretty dependable glovesman, I’d hoped we could go out and land a huge name – an undisputable talent, and someone who we’d get a good few years of service out of. The least we could hope for would be someone like Lloris, Stekelenburg or Weise. Jeez, there was talk in early summer of Buffon being available. I’m not a huge knocker of Almunia, there seems a genuine dearth of top-drawer keepers in the world right now, and after the comedic reign of Jens he’s been OK.

Thing is, if we’re to be a title-challenging, non-goal-leaking machine then OK just won’t suffice. And nor will players like Spahić. The money’s there. Go spend it!