It's natural that a manager wants to try and keep his best players. If he'd sold Fabreags and Nasri at the start of the window, people would undoubtedly be accusing him of letting them go without a fight. I'm afraid that with those two it was a case of 'damned if you do, damned if you don't'. I agree that we should have gone in with a better offer for Cahill, but in the last year of his contract, Bolton were having a laugh holding out for £17m Who knows, maybe we'll go back in Jan with an offer? I think it's easy to criticise from the outside. Much harder to actually be in the position of having to negotiate. As Wenger has said, transfers are not down to the buyer only, there is the player, his club, their manager, the players agent, a fee, wages, terms and conditions - which all have to be agreed for the player to move.
On the first count Piskie, he should have anticipated that at least one of them would be departing and gone in early in the transfer window with at least cover for one of them. Who knows if an important signing may not have persuaded Nasri to stay? At least an early signing would have meant time for the team to prepare together. Arsenal did not spend all of the money available to them so it is possible that they were not able to seal a transfer or two or may be looking to secure those players in January. As far as player negotiations go, there is already one aspect on which we are quite likely to come up short...... our wonky wages policy. Can one blame a top player for being tempted by 150K or more when all we'e offering is a bare 90 to 100. This is something that needs further appraisal. If we don't get our defensive strategy right for the rest of the season, we won't be able to tempt key players even with the opportunity to play in the CL because sadly we won't be in it...
Oh Gawd, I've just seen that he was asst to Pulis at Stoke.. Nah pal, we play football at Arsenal not rugby
By the way, Cahill is crap. What we have now is far better than what it would be if we signed him. Let liverpool have him, they seem to like signing rip-off overrated british players.
atcham jack ' give peter reid the role and number 2 to arsene' PISKIE: Comedy's not your strong point.... Disagree -- It made me laugh.
