Cesc wins BBC Sports Personality of the Year / Exploding the Barca Youth myth

Posted on December 20th, 2010 | by Geoff in Arsenal News,Barcelona,Denilson,Football,Gilberto,Hleb,Premiership

Twas a day I felt proud to be a Gooner, seeing Cesc up there with his hands on the BBC Sports Personality of the Year trophy… I didn’t care that he was only presenting it, in my mind he had won it!

The Ryder Cup team won team of the year and Colin Montgomerie got captain of the year, oh and Beckham got a lifetime achievment award, I must have missed England winning something then? I expect his next appearance will be best man at his new friends wedding in the summer, move over Harry.

Well the latest rumour is we are going to let Denilson go in the window to Wolfsburg (and Barca!) and use the £10million to bring in out of favour Jolean Lescott from City.

First of all I would pay £10mil to get shot of spinning head but it won’t happen, Wenger loves him way too much and it will be admitting he was wrong, as for Lescott, he is miles better than the two we got from France in the summer, but not good enough for us. I think it’s all just a press frenzied rumour though and it won’t happen.

Interesting debate on here yesterday about Barca’s fantastic youth policy and how they have proved it works, and that’s why we should continue. I said if their youth policy was so good why are they £450mil in debt? Anyhow, as the debate went on, I thought I would do some research.

Danni Alves, David Villa, Seydou Keita, Gabriel Milito, Eric Abidal, Jose Pinto, Adriano Claro, Maxwell, Javier Mascerano, and Victor Valdes all came from other clubs for money, even Pique did 3 years at ManU and one at Zaragoza. So 11 out of the current squad of 19 (their website) are not from their youth set up, hmmm some policy, then you add the kids they signed after they were 16 and there’s even less, how many came as boys? Well 3 actually, Messi, Iniesta and Xavi were the only ones that didn’t join from other clubs. And they only got Messi because they can get South Americans at that age and we can’t. So that leaves 2, the same as us, Wilshere and JET.

Oh and for the record, one player they tried to get and couldn’t, is Benik Afobe, who Steve Bould reckons is the best young player in the country! Whoohoo and up yours Barca!!!

Enough said about them and how wonderful they are, if you add to that the players of ours they took, Overmars, Petit, Van Bronkhurst, Henry and Hleb and if they go ahead and buy Cesc and Torres in the summer, the rubbish talked about their youth system policy, will be even more rubbished.

Swiftly on to us and what could happen this year, apparently we are considering a bid for the next Theo Walcott, one Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, the son of former England player Mark. So what does that mean, we’ll pay him £60k a week to under-perform? Or does that mean he is super talented?

I believe Theo will be great one day, but he should be a forward, now if this kid Chamberlain comes in as an attacking midfielder and Wenger plays him in goal, it will be a waste of time, so why bother? Anyway we have an army of kids that may never make it, so should be concentrating on what quality there is in the window that we can bring in and help us push on.

Remember the days when we bought Gilberto and Hleb for little? And Petit and Kanu? Surely he remembers those days, and surely there must be players out there that are of that age and are good enough?

We’ll see and don’t call me Shirley!

As there were no games this weekend we can only speculate as to what, if anything we’ll do in the window, it’s a week until we play the chavs so we can hope that Everton beat the Northern chavs tonight and don’t go above us in the league.

Good luck Everton!

Have a great day grovers, it’s going to be a slow week and we’ll be speculating, so other than talking about the snow covered pitch, that will be the theme!