Bold Tone wrote:
General Mirth wrote:
Grimandi the player does not have any bearing on Grimandi the scout.
I know that, but i don't think i am being unfair on him and if you want i will say the same about Steve Rowley and every single one of our French scouting team including Wenger.
We have not got many/any hidden diamonds as a result of his scouting. He is THE Gervinho of scouting just as he was the Gervinho of his time at Arsenal.
As Clarence mentioned, picking out Sagna (French player of the year) and Nasri (youth prodigy) is not as impressive as finding Vieira or even Anelka! Maybe Kos, but he is no way as impressive as those guys and was quite rubbish for a few years here. Even now he is not a world beater!
You are being unfair if you try to imply a link between his playing career and his scouting career. You don't need to be artist to be an art critic.
But I agree, our scouting work has not been very impressive in the last four or five years. Maybe it's a question of complacency or, like everything else, it has become outdated.
For the record, someone like Vieira would not be an unknown in today's world where reserve team players for Crawley town have their own videos on youtube! Certainly a reserve at AC Milan would have a folder dedicated to him.
It's not a question of being an unknown talent anymore, every club is privy to the same sort of information. It's about looking at the same players that 50 other clubs are looking at but being able to spot something that everyone else missed.
That's how Newcastle got Cabaye (who was a known talent) and Swansea got Michu (who was the top goal scoring midfielder in Spain) That's how we got Vermaelen and Koscielny as well.
A secondary concern is that we don't actually go for the top young talent either. I expect we identified Hazard, Neymar and Oscar at around the same time the rest of the world did but we won't actually take the financial hit and turn to the second tier of talent.
