Cesc out for most of the season: What I would do
Add comment December 24th, 2008
You might have noticed that unlike a lot of other sites, I didn’t report the news that Cesc would be out for several months yesterday. That’s because a) at that stage it was an isolated story in The Sun, and b) I was in denial, desperately banking on The Sun’s unreliability and hoping that Arsene would announce today that Cesc would only be out for a week.
I was wrong. It’s worse than any of us imagined: four months. The Times calculate that if Arsene’s projection proves to be correct, Cesc could take part in a maximum of eight games at the back end of the season. By that time, who knows what we’ll have left to play for?
I can’t beat around the bush: this is disastrous. I can’t imagine there’s anyone out there who needs me to spell out why, but I’m going to anyway:
- Cesc is our best player
- He is our captain – the decision to bestow the armband upon him was a brave one and now Arsene is without his shiny new unbeaten skipper for the forseeable future
- We have no cover
- We now have to buy cover whilst what we actually need to do is supplement our existing squad
- Alex Song will inevitably get yet more playing time
This Arsenal team has no chance of winning the league without Cesc Fabregas. None. In fact, this Arsenal team without Cesc Fabregas could well struggle for fourth place. He is that important.
So where do we go from here? Well, the answer is simple: the transfer market. At the moment our squad contains three realistic options for central midfield: Denilson, Song, and Ramsey. Diaby is not yet considered as an option, as the quotes from Arsene in this piece make clear. Of the other three, Denilson and Song have many deficiencies, whilst Ramsey is not even 18 until the day of the Villa game. With such a shoddy squad, we really have brought this crisis upon ourselves, and now reinforcements are badly required.
The problem is that we already needed signings before this blow. You assumed we were on the lookout for a partner for Cesc, with perhaps a centre-half and a creative wide-man on Arsene’s shopping list. Now the most pressing concern is finding someone who can fill the void left by Fabregas’s injury.
What would I do?
For me, there are two options. The first is the most obvious one: we buy a new central midfield pairing. We buy the destroyer we’ve lacked since Flamini and Gilberto left, and a more creative partner who can replace Cesc and challenge him for a place when the Captain returns. For the sake of argument, we buy a ‘Barry’ as well as an ‘Arteta’ (the latter being a suggestion made last night by the venerable arseblogger).
The other option? We buy the defensive midfield player, and put him alongside Denilson in the middle. We then buy a creative outlet who plays further up the pitch, possibly on the right or behind a striker – again just for the sake of naming names, let’s say an ‘Arshavin’. Although this would require us to alter the shape of our side, it would mirror our more successful teams of previous seasons, which tended to have two primarily defensive central midfielders, but with wider players granted greater license to roam – it’s a system Man U often employ these days.
The obvious problem with these ideas is that they both involve buying at least two players – and that’s without even looking at the issues we have in defence. Neglect to the squad over the past few transfer windows has left us in a situation where leaks are springing up all over the place. I somehow doubt Arsene has enough buckets to deal with them all in one transfer window.
Before I go, I really do want to wish Cesc the speediest of recoveries. It’s the first remotely serious injury of his career, and I’m sure it’ll really hurt him that he’ll be unable to help the side, especially since he only recently took on the responsibility of the captaincy. If there is one positive to arise from this event, it’s that I know Cesc will be determined to come back from this better than ever, and will doubtless be absolutely committed to remaining at the club and proving himself to be the leader we all know he is capable of being.
That said, it would arguably be unfair of any us to expect a player of Fabregas’s undisputed class to miss out on Champions League Football. Which is why Arsene must act, fast.
Merry Bloody Christmas, eh.
