Not sure what to make of Vermaelen
Firstly if anybody can tell me how to phonetically spell ‘Vermaelen’ I would be happy. I pronounced it to my friend, only to say after that we signed a Belgian defender from Ajax. Needless to say he didn’t sound too impressed.
It seems that the new club policy is to not make officially comment on their player targets. Every Arsenal fan knew we were signing Vermaelen but the club waited and waited until it was finally revealed on arsenal.com.
Another club policy now is that they don’t reveal the transfer value. It could and most likely is to show that Arsenal don’t have that much money. Any deal that is ‘undisclosed’ sounds a great deal cheaper than the actual fee is mentioned. Of course Ajax revealed didn’t they that it was around £10 million, so that put paid to that.
In the current transfer climate which is in the middle of a recession, this signing does seem rather cheap. I don’t know about you but that is rather twisted don’t you think?
Anyway moving on Vermaelen, I think after the way we shipped goals in games against Liverpool, Chelsea and Utd any signing would have done I suppose. Well as along as it wasn’t another Silvestre.
I think the last really good defensive signing was Campbell about 8 years ago. Gallas was part exchange while Toure was converted into a Central defender. So, Vermaelen is of course a positive signing.
I don’t really know about him since I haven’t seen him perform for Ajax. The picture of him and RVP reveals that he is a no-nonsense defender, ala Keown. If he turns out to be half of Keown was I will be really happy.
Counting Vermaelen, I make it 6 centre defenders which means someone has to go. The media seem to think and almost wish that it is Toure. Personally I wouldn’t mind if that was the case. The Ivorian has done remarkably well in defence overall but at times he seemed to panic too quickly for my liking. But if you’re going to put money on a defensive departure it has to be Senderos.
And yet the strange thing is that Senderos is a year older than Vermaelen. The Belgian prodigy from Ajax is talked up and his experience in the Champions League is highlighted. But wait a minute. Wasn’t a young Senderos a part of the Champions League team that got to the final? I didn’t see many fans wishing we signed Vermaelen.
None of us really know what Vermaelen really is like. He might turn out to be as error prone as Senderos. I hope he isn’t but I do feel for the Swiss defender. We expected too much from him and he might yet deliver but it will most likely be at another club. I just hope that we are more patient with Vermaelen.
ver-may-len
thanks for that!
A big part of the reason we don't reveal transfer fees is to avoid other clubs jacking up the price of players we are interested in. If every club knows how much money we can and have spent then they assess our financial situation and possible increase the fees of their players whenever we inquire about them. If we spent,f ro argument's sake, 15M on Vermaelen, then every club will begin to compare their players to him and say "If Vermaelen is worth 15M to Arsenal, then my player is worth 20M" and then we end up being charged an arm and a leg for players we ask about.
I definitely agree with you there WC.
However somewhere along the lines Arsenal should make a deal with the selling club to not reveal the value. It is all a bit pointless if Arsenal say undisclosed and then the BBC say oh it was something like £10 million because that's what Ajax told us.
Undisclosed all the way though!
I expect Vermaelen to have a bit of a rough start but then once he gets his bearings he will be fine. The epl is faster than eri-d and he'll need to get used to it. He does however have all the intelligence and physical attributes to succeed at Arsenal. Vermaelen is very active around the top of the box and has good technique. Also his attitude is spot on, he will bring a serious personality into the team which is very much in need.
Melo would be a good fit for us provided he wants to play for us as Vermaelen does.
Ver-mah-len
Rhymes with Stalin
Which makes any potential song pretty gruesome.
hahahahaha nice one agent.