Alexis Sanchez is playing transfer poker, Arsene should fold

By Pedro & filed under News Review.

It’s pretty clear something is up with Alexis.

He came back from vacation claiming he had the flu. Let me tell you this straight up if you have never had flu. It takes longer than 4 days to recover. There is no such thing as 4 day flu. Especially when you are a 28-year-old Chilean warrior robot who is biologically impenetrable.

This week, the story is he has abdominal pain. Our most important player is out for the Leicester game, maybe longer.

Call me crazy, but if I were Trump, I’d be capslocking FAKE NEWS on my Twitter feed right now.

Alexis is not injured, he’s merely giving us a taste of what’s to come this season.

Simple rule of football. If a player wants to go, there’s little point in keeping him against his will. Alexis does not need to play for a contract. His job this season will be to preserve his body so he’s ready to go to the World Cup in tip-top condition. Same thing that Robin Van Persie did in his second season at United, and hence the dip in form. It was all about winning his final World Cup.

Alexis is a pain in the arse. He was last season, despite an outrageous contribution to the goals tally. That doesn’t make it a good idea to keep him this summer. Mainly because we’ll be leaving £80m on the table that we’ll then use as an excuse next season when we replace the Chilean with Slimani.

Factor in the negative impact on the squad. You’re basically working with someone on 9months notice.

• Month one: Put in a shift
• Month three: Start rolling in late, leaving early
• Month five: Where is Sanchez?
• Month six: Sanchez has hurt his finger again
• Month seven: crack pipe in the dressing room with 12 escort girls

Arsene should have bit the bullet on this issue early on in the window and signed Auba and Lemar as soon as he could have done.

Now we’re into full on disruption mode.

I think Friday should be a good result for us regardless, but we are looking light. Ozil, Ramsey, Mertesacker and a suspended Koscielny are going to lead to a makeshift starting 11. Wenger is also thinking of taking fitness gambles, just like he did last season when he played a whinging Ramsey into the starting line up against Liverpool.

“I have players coming back who have not played, like Mustafi. Alexis will not be available for example, so I cannot go into the game with too many uncertainties. I can take a gamble on one, maybe maximum two, but I focus more on the players who had the right number of competitive minutes in recent weeks.”

Worrying. But kind of standard. When are we ever prepared properly for the opening game of the season? Wenger likes to take an extra month to get his ducks in order. We usually pay the price for it, and that’s that. No consequences because we are Arsene FC.

Right, that’s me done… I’ll leave you with Wenger’s opinion on our new left-back.

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