I think that was Wenger doing what he does best and being stubborn.
It would have been weak to sell him and do nothing but if we had sold him early in the transfer window and spent all the money and more on a player like Lemar, and maybe even another player, then that would have been a true statement of intent.
Instead Wenger is stuck with a player who clearly doesn’t want to be here and he is scared to sub him off because of upsetting an already unhappy player.
We are also potentially around 80m worse off if he goes at the end of the season on a free.
There weren’t many, but I was one of them, and got heavily criticised by some because of it.
To me, this situation was inevitable and could have easily been avoided if we had a manager who wasn’t so indecisive.
Part of me wants to search through all the people who said they wanted to keep him and see if they’ve now said “I told you we should have sold him”, but the bigger part of me wants to watch re-runs of Friends.
So the choice is trawling through old posts in the Sanchez thread or watching old episodes of Friends.
Could I suggest another option?
Watching paint dry
It would be more satisfying.
Yeah I hear all that. With the hindsight part, I was referring the fact that many of us thought that he had a level of professionalism that would mean that he would still perform to a high level. We thought he had enough personal pride that he would play like he gave a fuck, even if he didn’t give a fuck about Arsenal. The idea behind that being he could quite possibly fire us to CL qualification, which would basically even out the money “lost” by not selling him to City, and overall leave us “profiting” from the decision when you consider the non financial benefits being in the CL would bring.
All your points are valid and I was fairly torn in the summer, but I incorrectly came down on the side of thinking on balance keeping him was a good thing to do. With hindsight I can see I was wrong. Others didn’t need the benefit of hindsight to see we should have sold him, I can admit that.
@Phoebica does have a point about being damned either way, if we had sold him and City had as good a season as they are currently having the people who run the club would have been absolutely destroyed by the fans and wider football community.
Edit: @Phoebica just go one channel up to Comedy Central Extra and watch Impractical Jokers instead, that shit is hilarious
Exactly.
If he wanted to leave there was no point keeping him, so take the money, show some ambition in the transfer market, and get on with it.
If Wenger’s plan was to show a player that no one is bigger than the club, then that plan has backfired and will cost us another season of mediocrity as well as any money we could have got for a suitable replacement.
I actually thought he’d strop for a little while (e.g. his suspect not fit enough to play early in the season) but then get over it by the end of October and accept his fate and play football. I still have hope that he’s the kind of player who can deliver for at least a spell this season and just conjure up 6 goals in 8 games randomly.
I guess to be fair to him, he really wanted a move to City and that move materialised and was snatched away in the last hours of the window when he was probably Zooplaing mansions in Cheshire. I can see why that could have been a big personal blow, but I really thought it’d be over by now.
New York is a big city man, there’s always gonna be people who don’t watch much television, or people who don’t watch comedy. It probably takes them longer to get footage good enough for the show to be fair, we just don’t see the hundreds of times they get recognised.
someone break the smarmy cunting motherfuckers legs so he is useless to the club…FUCKING CUNT, i said this about the motherfucker ages ago. Worse still that cunting motherfucking waster wenger insists on playing the fucking rasclaat. He is playing shit on purpose and the fucking manager still plays him, this club is fucked and i mean seriously and truly fucked, ambitionless stale clueless gutless shyster motherfucking cunts from top to bottom just fuck off already the whole goddamn motherfucking lot of you.
Keeping Alexis would have been fine had the manager done his job organising the team and being tactically smart. He did none of that as usual so here we are with Alexis having no one to manage him. Had Mourinho been in the same position with a player he would have kept him in line and still brought the best out of him.
