Given his injury setbacks. He’ll be 4th now and his place in the order will go down even more when we get another center back.
So 5th choice CB and a third choice wingback. Will still get some minutes when he’s fit. But ideally someone like Livramento would be an upgrade over him in the wingback department.
Won’t be surprised if he goes. We will get a pretty hefty transfer fee for him too.
How many centrebacks do you want?
You do realise there’s a squad limit of 25 players don’t you?
He will not. His injury recurred after he was played in an attempt to get his fitness back.
Please tell me you woke up from your wet dream after this.
Ideally 5. We’ve got 4 at the moment (including Gomez).
We can look at someone who’s u21 for the 5th CB. Those don’t count towards the 25 player limit.
And please don’t tell me your deluded enough to rely on Gomez with his injury history as a 4th choice CB. Especially with Konate having his own fitness struggles too.
This is the best possible time for us to cash in on Gomez. He’s had way too many injuries over his career and at some point , those injuries will begin to affect his playing (even when he’s otherwise fit)
We don’t know that.
Gonna have to wait a few more months and see.
We went in with one CB short this season and that could well have been a factor in us playing more conservatively. This was more seen after Gomez got his injury and while Konate had his niggles too.
Having an extra fit CB could have had us challenging on multiple fronts instead of having to play conservatively to preserve bodies.
Joe’s injury against Plymouth in January would play a huge part in us toning down on our playing style in a bid to get over the line. That worked in our favour this season but doesn’t mean it works when the other teams don’t have the injuries that they had this season.
We need 5 CBs (one of whom can be a u21 guy)
What season did you watch?
Quansah has barely gotten any minutes at centre-back this season.
Try thinking and checking the facts before you post maybe?
It did not.
No team carries 5 centre-backs who expect semi-regular game time.
But you are wanting to sign someone to play left and right back. The point i made Gomez does that now as well as centre back.
Sure. But Gomez isn’t offering what we want from our wingbacks anyway. He does a good job defensively but we want our wingbacks to attack as well too. Hence someone like Livramento who can play both right and left and still has his attacking focus on. We lose a lot of bite when we are forced to play Gomez in a wingback position.
I like Gomez. But with his injury record , I’m not confident that we can get through a season with 3 main CBs plus him. 4 main CBs plus Gomez (sure) but at that point we might even not need Gomez anymore.
Replace him with a dedicated wingback (who can play both right and left) and add a younger , less injury prone CB. That paired with an import from the u21 would probably help us out loads
Bradley/Frimpong RB
Kerkez/Tsimikas/Robbo LB (I admit that carrying both Tsimikas and Robbo at this stage might be overkill. Probably one of the two needs to go.
And another utility wingback like Livramento who can play both Sides where we do not end up losing out on our attacking threat.
That’s just shifting the goalposts now. I said “5 centre-backs”.
Now, I don’t know much about how the data here is being visualised, but I’m presuming that the green highlights are the respective players’ main roles, which only proves my point. 3 centre-backs.
Not to mention, I’m pretty sure it has been discussed on here (and such is the extent of my knowledge of Arsenal) how Arteta is trying to be Guardiola-lite and use 4 centre-backs across his backline. Not how we play at all.
When we are forced to play Gomez as a fullback, we lose a lot of bite, but I think his attacking proficiency is still far better than most 3rd choice fullbacks, let alone 1st choice fullbacks. From the limited sample size of my memory, he’s far better than wan Bissaka, for example.
Who is buying Gomez for a decent fee though? Hes broke.
Hes made 17 appearances this season.
He had a great December. Got injured, missed 6 weeks, came back and lasted 5 minutes in the FA Cup…season over.
I really feel for him but we cannot keep players who keep breaking down after a month.
We should be finding someone willing to pay 25m for him.
We essentially play Gomez as a inverted fullback. He’s got absolutely no offensive responsibilities. And you’re comparing him to someone like Wan Bissaka, but that’s not what we want from our wingback. It’s one thing if you say that all we are using a Gomez in wingback is to see off matches. But a third choice wingback’s main role is still to be a wingback in our formation. Not to be a CB playing in RB/LB.
I’m beginning to question if you watch any games at all, or if you spend all your time wanking off over who we should sign from the other team.
I’d rather say that I’m way past questioning if you have any basic footballing sense (or any common sense) for that matter.
Apart from attacking people when when you don’t agree with their posts , what exactly do you do ?
For what it’s worth, I don’t think we should be factoring Gomez into any equations as his fitness is not reliable.
If we go into a season with Joe as fourth CB, we’ll soon find ourselves with three CB options.
It just feels like that.
Think before I post, research and verify that what I’m claiming has a factual basis.
Oh and not spam 5 posts with the same drivel that could be condensed into 0 posts.
You should take your own advice.
It feels very much like that, but then his injury history doesn’t really read like that. More often that not in recent seasons, he’s been fit but just doesn’t play.
In the 3 years from December 2021 to December 2024, he missed only 5 games due to injury, according to Transfermarkt.
In that time, he’s managed 6743 minutes, which isn’t too shabby for 3 calendar years, including 3133 last season, with 32 appearances in the league (starting 17 and coming on as a sub in 15, averaging 55.5 minutes per game too so it’s not like he was a last minute sub), playing most of the minutes we had in the Europa League, FA Cup, and League Cup. Most of his missing game time he was on the bench too.
If I recall correctly, quite a few of his injuries have been contact injuries from bad tackles too (I will always remember that Burnley one).
We went into the season with 8 defenders, 4 CB’s.
The numbers we started the season with were absolutely fine. I do agree for a while now that reinforcements are needed in defence. During that time, we had other priorities as well though.
To have or end up with 5 CB’s is no disaster (certainly better than 3), but now it’s time to replace some figures for different reasons.
Hopefully to have 8 defenders, but with a raise in quality (though losing Trent is a blow, can’t hide that) and availability.
