Arsenal have finally confirmed the signing of Charlton youngster Carl Jenkinson, via the official site this morning.
He joins Barcelona duo Jon Toral and Hector Bellerin as the club’s signings so far this summer. It may be early days yet, but on the same day where Liverpool look set to sign Sunderland’s Jordan Henderson for £20million, is this a sign of things to come from Arsenal?
I’m not saying we should be in the market for ridiculously over-hyped and over-priced players like Henderson, who for me is a typical Liverpool or Spurs flavour-of-the-month, next-big-English-star signing who will probably come to very little.
In fact, when it costs a combined total of £55million to bring in Henderson and Andy Carroll, I can sympathise with Wenger for looking abroad for bargains; there’s no way we can compete in this kind of market, where it costs an absolute fortune to bring in anyone with any Premier League experience.
At this rate, I would value our supposed targets like Gary Cahill, Leighton Baines or Scott Parker at £30million or more each. Maybe less for Parker as he’s approaching 31 and West Ham will struggle to keep him, but it’s still looking like too much. If we can swap Clichy for Baines, as has been suggested in some reports, then we could hope to bring the price down a little there as well.
Perhaps we could also get around £15million for Denilson. I know, it sounds mad to me too.
Still, in all likelihood we’re going to see more Torals and Jenkinsons before anyone we’ve actually heard of comes in. Let’s just hope they can emulate the success of Aaron Ramsey, who joined as a 17-year-old from Cardiff and adapted pretty quickly.
Elsewhere, quotes that attracted my attention came from Patrice Evra, who hailed Ferguson’s motivational skills for helping them to the title this season.
He said: “After we lost at Arsenal he asked everyone whether or not they wanted to win the 19th league title and break the record? ‘How many opportunities are you going to miss?’ he said. ‘You’re going to regret it if you don’t win it’.
“I was so pleased we got the point we needed at Blackburn, because if we hadn’t I think we would have got the hairdryer!”
Having seen this kind of fear-inducing discipline work so well at United, and even for us on occasion, one really wishes Wenger would utilise it more often. However, as Gallas suggested earlier this week, it’s clearly not an approach many of our players warm to.
Ultimately, that’s the difference. It doesn’t matter who we sign, United’s team isn’t that much stronger than ours on paper, but Wenger can’t motivate these players to United’s level.
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