Players Out: Page 209 - The Arsenal discussion forum and community: One More in the Tolly

Players Out

spacemanspiff

Best LB we've had post-Highbury. Wish him all the best. Hope he can drop by the Emirates from time to time to catch a game.

mdgoonah41

apparently el neny's loan includes an 18M euro option to buy at the end of the season, which seems completely insane.

Clrnc

Pound for pound the top 3 signing in post Invincibles Wenger era. Love Nacho to bits.

Bold Tone

mdgoonah41 wrote:
apparently el neny's loan includes an 18M euro option to buy at the end of the season, which seems completely insane.

He would have to wow them or they won't activate it so, for me at this point in time, that's pie in the sky and i'm just glad we have extra minutes for one of our youngsters in midfield.

MistaT

Klaus wrote:
Nacho was brilliant for us. Going from Gibbs to him has to be the biggest upgrade we've made in the post-Invincibles era.

Absolutely, Gibbs couldn't make a forward pass and that was only further highlighted by Monreal's involvement in our build up play.

lorddulaarsenal

Clrnc wrote:
Pound for pound the top 3 signing in post Invincibles Wenger era. Love Nacho to bits.

A few I rate higher than Nacho, namely Cazorla and Koscielny but agree, Nacho has been a top servant

deardevil

Gibbs started off so well but he just never developed his game. He also spent way too much time on the injury table. Then there was Armand Traore.

Bold Tone

Top 3 most likeable, yes.
Best top 3, i'm not so sure as he would, pound for pound, have to be rated higher than 24 of these 26 players.
hleb, walcott, adebayor, song, diaby, rosicky, eduardo, sagna, arshavin, nasri, ramsey, vermaelen, koscielny, arteta, gervinho, mertesacker, cazorla, giroud, ozil, sanchez, xhaka, aubameyang, lacazette, torreira, leno, sokratis. I left out pepe, tierney and ceballos as they are too new.

deardevil

Ozil was also great signing. Incredibly pivotal in changing our fortunes. Moreso than Cazorla, even though I preferred the Spaniard.

MuswellHillGooner

Nah. Cazorla was more instrumental in keeping us in the CL.

Klaus

Özil is/was a better player than Cazorla, by some margin. Santi had no shot at ever being the playmaker again after Özil arrived. He was just not good enough in that space compared to him. He had been found out a bit in Champions League the year before we bought Özil too which caused Wenger to punt him on the left flank. He wasn't quick enough on the ball. The question was value for money though and Özil was a club record signing while Santi cost something ridiculous like £10 million because Malaga were imploding. Definitely think it's enough to earn him a spot on the Pound For Pound list along with Nacho and Koscielny.

Klaus

Although if you count Ramsey as a post-Invincibles signing - which he was - there's a big argument for him topping the list I guess. £5 million back in 2008. Peanuts for a guy who ended up Arsenal POTY twice, won three FA Cups and scored and assisted 90+ goals in an 11-season career here.

QuincyAbeyie

Cazorla was more versatile, nothing negative about it. You simply can't put Özil as a CM, it's like the Auba/Laca situation.

Klaus

We spent a club record fee on a playmaker the summer after we signed Cazorla for that role. Nothing to do with versatility; he just wasn't good enough to cut it there.

MuswellHillGooner

True he wasn't as good as Ozil at number 10 but, together with Coquelin, he plugged the hole we had in central midfield which helped us with the weekly grind of point accumulation versus premiership cannon fodder and that's why i specified CL qualification.

Ray

On the whole Cazorla was a better signing than Ozil IMO.

Klaus

Muswell Hill Gooner wrote:
True he wasn't as good as Ozil at number 10 but, together with Coquelin, he plugged the hole we had in central midfield which helped us with the weekly grind of point accumulation versus premiership cannon fodder and that's why i specified CL qualification.

I really hated that midfield personally. Cazorla wasn't dynamic enough to play deep without help, so you had to put Coquelin in there to press like mad, but Coquelin in return was awful at just about everything else, so we tucked Ramsey in wide as some weird auxiliary winger to get someone who could play the ball forward, and that in return sacrificed our width. I have very few good memories of that Frankenstein creation. We should have just dipped into the market to replace Arteta the minute his knee gave in. He was the last really outstanding CM we had at the club.

mdgoonah41

that santi performance against man city a few years ago was one of the best individual performances post-invincibles. on his day, he was absolutely unreal

deardevil

I'm in the Cazorla crowd but you can't deny the impact Ozil had on the team, which was definitely more significant. Ozil more than anything made the players around him perform better. Ramsey and Giroud in particular.

jones

Klaus wrote:
We spent a club record fee on a playmaker the summer after we signed Cazorla for that role. Nothing to do with versatility; he just wasn't good enough to cut it there.

We wouldn't have signed him if we were successful with our pursuits of Higuain and Suarez. Saying that we spent a club record fee on a playmaker sounds like we intended to do it to fix anything when it was more or less coincidence we landed him. Also let's not forget this is the same management who thought not buying another striker early 2016 would be a good idea when it would have probably given us the league title, there's rarely rhyme or reason to what we did

Cazorlas first and only season playing #10 he got 12 goals and 13 assists. Özil in his whole time at the club reached that kind of output once in his best season

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