Wednesday night at White Hart Lane summed up our season, in fact the last few seasons really. Any side that can’t hold a 3-1 lead away from home isn’t going to win many trophies.
It would have been – no doubt – a great game to watch if you were a neutral. No Gooner I know regards it as anything other than two points dropped. In both League games this season we’ve two goals up against Spurs and managed one point out of six. Not good enough.
We now have the fiasco of Cesc Fàbregas’ interview with Spanish football magazine Don Balón. As I speak Spanish I’ve listened to a recording of the interview. Suffice to say Don Balón has it right. A further example of Arsčne Wenger’s retreat from reality. In the planet on which he lives at the moment any critic is anti-Arsenal and can’t possibly love the club. Well, we do mate. And we pay through the nose for the privilege, unlike you with your huge salary for which we pay, regularly topped up by working as an analyst for French TV during major tournaments.
This is so, so sad for a man who has contributed so much to Arsenal both on and off the pitch. Truly up there with Herbert Chapman. Chapman was taken from us all too early by pneumonia in 1934. Let us hope that Wenger doesn’t irrevocably sully his legacy as one of our great builders.
Absent an implosion at Old Trafford we have our work cut out to finish in the top three now, never mind win the League. Off the field the imposition of a four percent increase in Gold, Silver and Red general admission prices, plus the imposition in full of the 2.5% VAT increase on Gold members which Silver and Red members have been paying since January is seemingly a done deal. Not the first act of Stan Kroenke’s tenure that we were looking for, especially with the recession, unemployment, pay freezes and cuts and the sub-par performance of the team.
Today we learn that Liverpool have signed a new kit deal with Warrior Sports, based in Boston, Massachusetts, home of Liverpool’s new owners. The deal is even bigger than Manchester United’s current £23.3 per season million contract with Nike. We’re pulling in £8 million a season from Nike, £17 million less than Liverpool will be when the new deal takes effect in 2012/13.
Yes, we had a lot of money up front from Nike to fund the building of the Grove, but we’re lagging way, way behind our competitors in commercial income. Even Schalke 04 pull in lots more than us, part of which keeps ticket prices down to a sane level. I understand that we don’t want to get a reputation as bad faith business partners but there are strategies and tactics we can adopt to drive commercial income whilst we wait on our current kit and jersey sponsorship deals to expire in 2014 and the stadium naming rights deal in 2021.
All in all, we’re underperforming by some margin on and off the field at the moment. What are our new absentee landlord Stan Kroenke and chief executive Ivan Gazidis going to do about it?
Happy Easter.
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