Couple of points regarding next year’s squad:
1) As I mentioned at that time, Arsenal’s most pressing need is for Fabregas to add 10-15 lbs. of muscle, while still being able to play football with his current finesse level– otherwise, Arsenal are going to continue to get muscled out of midfield by the Boltons of the world– Wenger is not going to abandon the midfield pairing of Gilberto and Fabregas (when they are healthy), for at least another couple of years– he puts too much faith in his established veteran players for him to bench Gilberto in favor of a more physical enforcer against the brute-force teams, and Gilberto is not suddenly going to become a fast, intimidating enforcer, so this leaves the only other option of Fabregas maturing into a strong enough player to hold his own against those teams… I don’t necessarily think this is beyond him– he’s not any much smaller than Roy Keane, and he’s only 18, so he could add the physical size to allow him to dominate in midfield, if he makes it an off-season priority (maybe he can hook up with Barry Bonds’ Balco connection, to follow in the footsteps of another supreme talent who was originally slight of build).
2) I continue to find it ridiculous that any Arsenal fan thinks that either Clichy or Flamini would be a suitable or sufficient one-for-one replacement for Cole– neither of them is ever going to be the attacking threat that Cole is.. if we want to be the most dangerous attacking team in Europe, we need to have the same kind of threat from the left (Cole) as we obtained from the right when Eboue emerged… if we get that, and Reyes and Hleb continue their progression, Pires and Ljungberg will become superfluous in another season (just as they have become superannuated)… but Sean Wright-Phillips (whatever his Englishness or Arsenal connection, which seems to count for more with the Islington-based fans than it does over here) is never going to fill that need for us– he could be a good addition to the midfield, but we would still be left with a diminished left-side attacking threat, as compared with the days when Cole, Pires, and Henry were all on song. I’d take SWP, if he wants to take a pay-cut to come over and boost our midfield, but not at the cost of Cole. I could see a 3-way deal which involves selling Reyes back to Spain (probably Madrid), and then using the funds to buy SWP from Chelsea (if they’ll sell reasonably), and then moving Hleb to the left and putting SWP on the right– but that would make too much sense, so it probably won’t happen.
