Morning Gooners! Who’s missing their weekly dose of Arsenal?!?! I certainly am, so I thought I’d write a blog post to go through the squad and try and decide who I think should move on to pastures new before the window closes.
Goalkeepers
Let’s start at the back with the ‘keepers. This is an absolute no-brainer for our number 1, David Raya is one of our most important – if not THE MOST- players, so he stays.
For Kepa, this is a little more uncertain. I’m trying my very best to look past the Cup Final incident, but I’m finding it very difficult!! Let’s face it, that cost us the game. In a huge game. A mistake that all Gooners know, David Raya does not make, at least not like that. Is it Kepa’s fault though? I said at the time I wouldn’t have played him, harsh as that would have been. It was a big game and called for our big players to play and to put out our strongest team, and Mikel Arteta failed to do that, so the book should stop with him.
As far as back-up keeper’s go, I don’t think Kepa is that bad. On paper (I know, I know) he’s more like a number 1, and came to Arsenal on the back of doing just that at Bournemouth a season earlier and he’s still the most expensive goalkeeper in the history of football. That last bit says more about Chelsea’s inability to negotiate a transfer, but you can’t argue with the facts.
Rumour has it, Kepa has a £5m buyout in his contract, similar to what he had at Chelsea, and that he still thinks of himself as a number 1 keeper, rather than a back-up. If even just one of those is true, I think he will go. At 31 years of age, he still has a plenty more years left in the tank and I’d imagine he doesn’t want to sit around on the bench for the next 3-4 years and will look for his final big move. If he had been 35-36 years old, he might have been content to play understudy/training partner to David Raya, but at 31, he’ll look to go.
On a personal note, I would like to have a younger keeper challenging David Raya, who can eventually be groomed to take over from the main man when the time is right, so I’m okay with Kepa leaving.
Tommy Setford is maybe a tad too young still, with so little professional minutes under his belt, so I’d send him out on loan – ideally in the Premier League – although it has to be somewhere he is going to play. Let’s see what he can do and then make a decision on him next summer. The third choice keeper role is better for a more experienced player in the latter stages of their career. I think they wanted Daniel Bentley from Wolves to fill this role at some point, so maybe they will go back for him, now Wolves have gone down.
I don’t know who that young back -up keeper to Raya would be though, I’ve not seen any links so far, aside from someone in Greece that I can’t remember the name of. Joan Garcia would have been perfect, but he’s very much a Barcelona player these days, so Inaki Cana will have to get back to his little black book and find us another gem!
Karl Hein also left permanently this summer, so that deal is done and I think we pocketed about £2.6m from that deal, which isn’t bad, all things considered.
So that’s it for goalkeepers – one staying, one going and one on loan, with a new face coming in and potentially an old head to also arrive as third choice while Setford is on loan.
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