Pretty sure Newcastle's first transfer window they leaned on Howe as they didn't have a DoF in place. They even had one of the old hierarchy stay on a bit to help them through it.
It's not being bigged up, it's just a showcase that Arteta has improved Arsenal from where they were to now. Not every year has to have a trophy to indicate improvement of a club. Not every year has to contain a title to constitute improvement. Arteta started poorly, but has now shown that he's improved Arsenal from where they were to now and it took time. Perhaps Potter will, perhaps he won't but Chelsea can look at Arsenal as a project and see that despite a rough start it can get better.
Hazard is another example. Nowhere near the deal and suddenly in after winning the CL.
Robben, fecking Mikel was holding our shirt. Morata had his hair dyed red for his United unveiling
How can anyone forget that bizzare Mikel story.
Morata was our second choice. Woodward was using the tactic of negotiating with multiple targets and completing them in priority order back then and when we signed Lukaku we dropped our interest in Morata.
Sorry what? We has a clear interest in him and Joe Cole was at Lillie the season before trying to convince him to join us.
But he wasn't joining you until you won and then you just paid up all the agent fees etc.
Yes but we didn't have no interest and suddenly hijack it, we had a long standing interest which we were always going to pounce on if we got encouragement from his end.
There’s a reason his agent went to jail and his club had to pay Chelsea back. Of all the players we “stole” you can’t list Mikel because the facts link United to what was essentially trafficking.How can anyone forget that bizzare Mikel story.
Tweet
— Twitter API (@user) date
I think 8th winning an FA Cup is better than 5th...
That's looking at a very shallow end of the picture. You could clearly see where Arsenal were heading. They had a clearly defined style of play & sold bright young players on a project. Arteta had board buy-in because of his vision. Results took time to come but look at them now.
Bizarre to mention Morata in any 'hijacking' context.
Tweet
— Twitter API (@user) date
Didn't you get forced to pay us 20m or so in a fee though?
Solly March?
If they had their best manager of recent years they wouldn't be losing either.
notbad.com
The defence looks shaky as hell to me.
Chilwell / Fofana / James improve it by some distance to be fair
Well if they had Chillwell, Fofana and James fully fit that would significantly improve their defence.
“Hardest job in football” for someone out of his depth
They've spent £180m on defenders this year...
Yeah obviously. It's just that the point you were making was that they've been functioning quite well tonight, I was disagreeing based on the defence looking shaky.
And?
Attacking wise yeah, they've been good and functioning as you'd expect a Potter team to.
You would think that would mean they'd be okay without Chillwell and James
Well that assumes a baseline level of competence that is clearly overly generous
