The plus side of never signing players...

Transfer deadline day. Stirs one of three emotions: loathing that your best player is leaving (in our case, nearly always to Barcelona); schadenfreude in your rivals selling their best player; or over-egged optimism that the player you’ve just signed will, despite being just one player, turn your mediocre top-six hangers-on into title contenders.

The January window nearly always means the middle one for us – as Wenger spends 31 days convincing the fans, his players and probably even himself that the squad he has is good enough.

That’s not the voice of cynicism speaking. Even the BBC have been quipping about it during their livetext coverage of the day’s transfers:

1419: To all you Arsenal fans who thought you wouldn't get a mention on transfer deadline day, you were wrong. Are you ready for this? BBC Lincolnshire report that 20-year-old Gunners defender Gavin Hoyte has extended his loan deal at Lincoln until the end of the season. You can pick yourselves up off the floor now...

This window has been dominated, of course, by Fernando Torres declaring he wants to go to Chelsea. It’s a blow to Dalglish’s revolution (apparently a win at Wolves and a lucky 1-0 home win against Fulham accounts for a revolution these days) and Torres is now about as popular on Merseyside as an episode of ‘Celebrity Come Dine With Me’ featuring Kelvin McKenzie, Boris Johnson, Jon Venables and the Chief of South Yorkshire Police circa 1989. (“It’s Jon’s turn to cook and tonight’s speciality is a dish Jon learnt to cook some years ago: slop.”)

Torres is being reviled for requesting a move after apparently committing his future to Liverpool last summer. Fans and ex-players across Merseyside have been condemning him for “moving for the money”, “having his head turned” or “being greedy”. I also love that they are upset with Chelsea for the timing of their bid – despite themselves bidding £35m for Newcastle’s Andy Carroll this afternoon, deadline day.

Surely the only thing Torres is greedy of, is wanting to win trophies. Isn’t that what we were told every time Vieira, Henry, Hleb and latterly Fabregas were linked with Barcelona? Wasn’t it expected that these players would want to move for the chance to win silverware? Don’t the media tell us regularly that Fabregas will go because Arsenal haven’t won a trophy for six years?

Well Liverpool haven’t won a trophy for five years, and any fan who thinks Liverpool have as good a chance of winning trophies as Chelsea, is deluded. The fact is Torres signed up for success – and it hasn’t been delivered. The fact he wants to leave is no surprise and, for once, I don’t believe it’s about money.

The problem, as usual, is that Liverpool and their fans think they have some God-given right to have the best players, to have success, to not have to sell. That’s delusional. The reality is they are a long way from those things nowadays.

Of course, come midnight, that same delusion will see them hailing Dalglish for signing a replacement and getting rid of Torres, who they now despise.

In the meantime I’ll be at home, flicking occasionally between ‘Come Dine With Me’ and the breaking transfer news on SkySports. At some point, I expect to ask myself two Liverpool-related questions:

1: Does £35m for Andy Carroll (more than David Villa, Didier Drogba, Wayne Rooney, Carlos Tevez and Edin Dzeko) stink of desperation?

2: Did Liverpool learn nothing from signing Aquilani as a panic-buy replacement for Alonso? He, like Carroll, was injured - and spent three months on the bench watching a big hole where his predecessor used to be.

Schadenfreude.

The important news of the day

It was one of those weekends that produced plenty of news: hat-trick for Berbatov, hat-trick for van Persie, defeat for Man City, goal for Bent on his debut.

There was plenty of controversy too. Despite Gary Caldwell blatantly whisking Cesc Fabregas’s legs away when he was clean through on goal, six yards out, Roberto Martinez came out to slate Fabregas.

He said: “I know Cesc very well. He knows how to buy decisions from referees. Cesc comes from a different culture – you do not cheat if you take a decision from the referee: it is because you are clever and you are getting something for your team. In England, to do that is cheating.”

Elsewhere, Charlie Adam requested a transfer to try to force a move to Liverpool, where he’ll play the first half a dozen games and then become to them what Scott Parker and Steve Sidwell were to Chelsea.

And then there was all manner of trouble over the female assistant referee at the Wolves-Liverpool game. Richard Keys and Andy Gray said someone would have to go down and teach her the offside rule, before Keys turned his attention to Karren Brady’s claims of sexism in football by saying: “See charming Karren Brady this morning complaining about sexism? Yeah. Do me a favour, love."

Perhaps it’s time someone showed Keys where the ‘off’ button sits on microphones, considering he was also responsible for this…

… and thought he was off air, but wasn’t, when he said of Theo Walcott: “You’ve been shite, son, in your daft pink boots – absolute rubbish. Get up, you stupid little boy.”

With all this to discuss, it was inevitable TalkSport would lead on one of these hot topics this morning. You’d think. Instead, what they actually ran with was an analysis of which teams have the most English players in their squad.

Of course, Arsenal came bottom of TalkSport’s ‘league’ of teams with the most Englishmen, allowing them to show a massive picture of Arsenal's foreigners and to state we can’t be proud of our team because it doesn’t represent our home nation. Click here to read.

But here lies the flaw in their argument. What their ‘analysis’ actually does is to point out a clear correlation between clubs with few Englishmen and clubs at the top of the Premiership. For example, the top five teams in the Premier League - Arsenal, Man U, Chelsea, Spurs and Man City - are all in the bottom half of TalkSport’s table of clubs with the most Englishmen.

Meanwhile, the bulk of TalkSport’s ‘most English’ clubs – Blackpool, Aston Villa, Newcastle, West Ham, Wolves – are in a relegation battle.

So, if they really cared about this issue, and did any form of genuine analysis, they would have concluded that if you buy English, you end up shit. Buy foreigners, and you go up the league. Football, you see, is about coming as high up the division as possible, not about buying as many Englishmen as possible.

But then I suppose TalkSport isn’t about football. It’s about controversy.

The clever people

I find Clarke Carlisle a bit annoying. The Burnley full-back’s appearance on Countdown a couple of years ago gave the media the chance to ramble on endlessly about how amazing it was a footballer could add up and make a word out of some jumbled up letters. It was tiresome.

Ever keen to boost his profile as a clever boy – which in fairness should secure him a pretty lucrative media career when his playing days are over – Clarke is taking a seat on politics show Question Time tonight.

He says: "I don't consider myself to be a politics buff by any stretch of the imagination, but with the economic crisis, my wife and I started to take a keener interest and I just hope I can give a layman's perspective on things."

Yeah, this economic crisis must be just as tough for you on your footballer’s salary as it is for me on mine. Thanks for the “layman’s perspective”.

Of course, it’s easy to see why Carlisle has been able to position himself as the leading football intellect when you take into account the opposition. In 2004, Carlisle was vote “Britain’s brainiest footballer” by an ITV show of the same name. But he didn't exactly have to be a genius when you consider his nearest rival, the man voted second, was TalkSport’s own Alan Brazil.

That’ll be the same Alan Brazil who once said live on air: "I was sad to hear yesterday about the death of Inspector Morse, TV's John Shaw… I mean John Thaw. Do you know, I've been doing that all morning. John, if you're listening, sorry mate."

And the same Alan Brazil who said: “Our talking point this morning is George Best, his liver transplant and the booze culture in football. Don’t forget, the best caller wins a crate of John Smith's."

Even better though, he’s also the same Alan Brazil who, in this clip, asks about the health of a dead Bob Monkhouse….

…and who here uses all his intellect to try to get out of a drink-drive charge, without success.

With people like Big Al as his closest competition, it’s no wonder Clarkey is top of the brains tree.

Arsenal vs Leeds: plenty of history

Around the time the teams take to the field tonight, or shortly after kick-off, the stat-obsessed commentator will roll out some drivel about how the FA Cup may well be Arsenal’s best chance of a first trophy in five years.

He’ll probably also mention some of those who have played for both - Johnny Lukic and Lee Chapman, and maybe even Chris Whyte. He’ll definitely talk about the 1972 Final and may even mention the series of replays we had in the early 90s, when Ian Wright earned us a 3-2 win at theirs after three games. And he’ll say that George Graham managed us both.

If he has any real sense of the history, he should – although I suspect he won’t – mention another man who managed both: Herbert Chapman, who would have celebrated his birthday today – had he lived to be 132 (not many do).

Chapman has always been held up as Arsenal’s greatest manager, a bronze bust of him adorning the entrance to the stadium. Prior to his reign at Arsenal, though, Chapman was a Leeds man, taking a team at the bottom of the lower league to the brink of promotion before the First World War interrupted their rapid rise.

It was nearly a decade later that he arrived at Arsenal. On paper, Chapman won just two league titles and an FA Cup for us. But, in the days where players rarely moved around and squads were built for the long-term, Chapman’s team - following his unexpected death at the age of 55 - went on to win three more titles in the 1930s alone.

Chapman was an innovator. He was the man behind the introduction of floodlights, was the first to suggest European competitions, and introduced shirt numbers.

He is even credited with forming the first tactics and training programmes. Until Chapman, players ran around like school kids chasing a plastic fly-away football in the playground, causing him to remark: “No attempt was made to organise victory. The most that I remember was the occasional chat between, say two men playing on the same wing.”

In response he created the now famous ‘WM’ formation, which pulled midfielders deeper, allowing the forwards space to play the ball but more importantly allowing the team to attack as one, with pace. “A team can attack for too long,” he said upon inventing counter-attacking football.

Nowadays, of course, we have another innovator at the helm - a man credited with transforming modern-day football through his approach to diet, training, tactics and spending, and a man who has left just as big an imprint on Arsenal Football Club as the great Herbert Chapman did.

However, if you’re really looking for a sign of just how similar these two were in approach and philosophy, take a look at the job advert that tempted Chapman to move from Champions Huddersfield to relegation-embattled Arsenal. Had Wenger been alive in 1925, I suspect he may have applied too:

“Arsenal Football Club is open to receive applications for the position of TEAM MANAGER. He must be experienced and possess the highest qualifications for the post, both as to ability and personal character. Gentlemen whose sole ability to build up a good side depends on the payment of heavy and exhorbitant [sic] transfer fees need not apply.”

Happy birthday, Herb.

What the past few weeks have taught us…

I was - and remain - determined that this blog won’t be a match-report blog. I also refuse to do one of those cliché-ridden ‘half year reports’, laden with lazy school-related puns about how a team ‘could do better’ or gets ten-out-of-ten for effort but five for achievement. Chelsea’s season alone is evidence that those are worthless. Their first ten weeks of the season told us nothing about the next ten, just as a mid-season analysis will tell us nothing about what’s to come between now and the end of May.

Having said all that, the past few weeks have taught us quite a lot - about what we’ve got… and what we’re missing.

Good wins against Chelsea and away at Wolves and West Ham showed we have the ability and determination to stay in this title race longer than our usual March collapse, and we are fast becoming a team that plays as well away from home as it does at the Emirates.

We also learned from the game against Man City, where we peppered them with more shots than a gunman standing on Gianni Versace’s doorstep, that money can’t buy you everything. While the likes of Man City, for all their spending, are still happy to stifle games for a draw, I’m proud that you never see us go out for a 0-0. It may be our undoing on occasion. But at £40 a game I’d rather watch us try to win every time we take to the field.

Another thing we learned was that Wenger is now pretty certain of his first 11: Usual back line. Song holding, Fabregas and Wilshere creating for Nasri, van Persie and Arshavin/Walcott up ahead. For Chamakh, it seems, van Persie’s return may signal the chance for a few more US holidays, if you get my drift.

We haven’t just found out good things, of course.

Not managing to score against Man City gave every pundit in the world the chance to say we can’t break teams down. Not battering Leeds and Ipswich further fuelled their claims that we’re not creative enough in the final third. The problem is, that’s like saying John Terry is now a dedicated husband and loyal mate because he didn’t nail a team-mate’s wife three nights in a row. Or that James Corden isn’t fat anymore because he didn’t eat a cake for three successive hours.

The Ipswich game also saw us, according to ITV, on the receiving end of “the biggest shock you will see this season, if not for many seasons” - despite Premier League Newcastle losing to non-league Stevenage three days before. But that’s a different story.

Other not-so-good things we learned included that Arshavin is having a disaster this season, that Fabregas has dipped a bit, that Wilshere looks tired and Nasri can’t do everything on his own. Oh, and if I read one more “Arsenal in for the new Walcott” story I’m going to go mental. I’m still waiting for the first one to turn up regularly.

Of course, everyone knows it’s not up front that we really have concerns. Clichy and Sagna have lost the ability to defend, which is pretty bad news as they are both, well, defenders. We still seem incapable of defending resolutely or seeing out a slender lead - Wigan away was a prime example of that – and I am never more nervous in games that when we are 2-0 up.

Johan Djourou and Thomas Vermaelen playing together could well be the answer to these defensive problems – but this is still some way off happening, if it ever does. These two players have a combined time at Arsenal of nine years – two years together - but are still yet to play in the same side. Vermaelen’s pending surgery means it won’t be happening any time soon, either.

So the past few weeks have taught us we’re in a pretty good position, and that a centreback signing in this window could be crucial. Wenger has said he’s likely to buy. So that’s good. But for once I agree with Stan Collymore (can’t believe I just typed those words), who said at the weekend that if we sign big and we sign well, we can win this league and maybe some other stuff this year too. If we recruit badly, or not at all, we will probably concede too many goals to win anything of worth.

What I hope the most is that we don’t sign another stop-gap defender – someone who is a bit older and quite cheap, but who will do for short time. We already did that – his name was Squillaci and it hasn’t quite worked.

For once I can see real merit in going out and spending real money. What I can’t see merit in is signing someone like Matthew Upson – far too slow, way too easy to turn, who left Arsenal because he wasn’t good enough, has found his level in teams like Birmingham and West Ham, and remains not good enough.

Signing him – or similar – would be a step backwards, when what we need right now is a genuinely talented player to sure up a defence that’s leakier that an Australian side street.

Arsenal 0-0 Manchester City

If that's what £1.08bn buys you, I'll pass.