Maybe we’ll do something similar to what we’re trying to do with the Georgian goalie. Offer Napoli more than they can refuse but loan the guy back to them for one season.
Is he right-sided? We really don’t need another leftie.
Ah. Google is my friend after all. He has two feet and can use both of them. Plays on the left but can play on the right.
Not saying that isnt true, but I have never seen him anywhere other than the left. A right footed young Mo is about the best comparison I can make of him which makes sense of why playing on the left makes more sense.
Doesn’t really matter so much as we won’t be signing him but is he one of those that takes corners with his weaker foot? Immediate red flag for me and for that reason alone it’s a big fat NO from me.
Then there’s City with at least five senior CB options. Arsenal have about seven who could play there. Neither with someone as relatively inexperienced as Quansah or prone to niggly injuries as Konate. Not sure either have their best CB out of contract next summer.
“plenty” is doing an awful lot of work in that sentence.
Yes they have 5, but they will play 4 of them at once. Across their entire defense they have only 7 defenders in their first team squad. One of those is only 19 and two are in their 30s with recent injury records as bad as Konate’s
Arsenal have just 2 who they see as primarily CBs and a succession of other defenders who get almost all their games at FB but can be moved into CB if needed. By all accounts this is also how they view Califiori, and with him they have the same number of senior defenders for all positions as we have.
I mean sure, if you ignore the fact he’ll play Walker at RB most of the time you could possibly say they’d play five at once.
And of their CBs just one is 30 and he’s still three years younger than van Dijk.
And it’s just Stones who has a similar injury record to Konate.
Genuinely baffled by anyone thinking we’re sufficiently covered at CB. One out of contract in a year, one prone to niggles, one relatively inexperienced and one considering his options having been half way out the door earlier in the summer. And now we’ve cleared the decks our fifth option will be a 17 year old.
So dependent on van Dijk staying fit and able to play 50+ games a season.
This is a pretty shitty way to discuss something which each one of those 3 statements a response to something I didnt say just to try to make my point seem absurd. There are plenty of ways to disagree without doing that.
Think what you want about our numbers at the back. I see the argument for wanting one more, but Im not going to lose sleep about it if Slot likes Gomez and sees him being a viable option. My point was more about how we need to contextualize the comparison with city’s squad. They have 1 more CB than us in large part because they routinely play 1 more each game than we do and not uncommonly will have all 4 spots being taken by a CB. Overall they have one fewer player to cover their entire backline than we have and that is despite Stones missing almost the exact same number of days to injury in the last two tears as Ibou has and walker only a few weeks fewer. And in that, almost half Ibou’s absences have been from a knee injury he picked up in a tackle which is just a damn luck issue rather than one of physical unreliability