Right Back Hokey Pokey

By: Martin | June 16th, 2009

You put one right back in, you put one right back out….

There’s not a great deal of transfer stuff going on today, but what speculation is going on centers around our two right-backs, Bacary Sagna and Emmanuel Eboue.

There was a great deal of speculation this morning that right back Bacary Sagna was Real Madrid’s next target, and that Sagna was not against such an approach. But Sagna just came out and refuted that. He claims he never said any such thing and is “100 percent” committed to Arsenal. He also said:

This is a great Club and I’m proud to wear the shirt. I’m looking forward to returning for pre-season training in July and preparing for the challenges that next season will bring. We have a great squad of players at the Club and I know that we can achieve something together at Arsenal, my focus is nowhere else.

Hell yeah, Sagna! I think you have to take such a firm denial at face value, so Sagna is definitely in the fold for next season.

Honestly at this point it’s getting exhausted. I’m just going to set up some sort of macro or template that says “Media reports this morning said that [insert name of Spanish club] were planning on making an approach for [insert name of Arsenal player] for [insert absurd amount of money]. Reports suggested that the player was [pick one: excited/willing/not against] the move. However, [insert name of Arsenal player] immediately came out and said he had never said that, the media was just making things up as usual, and he’s playing for Arsenal next season.”

It would save me a lot of time.

In other news, though, it does appear that Eboue could be on his way. Reports suggest that Eboue is unhappy at the lack of first-team football he’s in line for, and could push for a move to another club. However, he did say that “I[]f I leave Arsenal, it would be for another league because it is out of the question that I develop elsewhere in England.”

It’s kind of funny. If you told me at any point up until last March that Eboue was leaving, my reaction would have been joy bordering on euphoria. He was my least favorite player on the team, and I would have flown to London, rented a car, and personally driven him wherever in the world he could find a club to take him if it meant never seeing him in an Arsenal shirt again. But as I’ve said before, I think he was a different player in the spring, and really showed me something. Now, I would love to keep him around as a veteran presence, injury insurance, and impact sub.

But the fact is that Walcott is firmly entrenched on the right wing, and Eboue won’t be overtaking Sagna at right-back. And with Gibbs coming into his own, and Wilshere showing promise on the right wing, Eboue has to look at this situation and (correctly) conclude that he will never be a first-choice starter at Arsenal. Now, as last season showed us, we will suffer injuries, and Eboue would definitely be in the mix for starts should either Walcott or Sagna go down. And he’d still get some starts in the domestic cups, and with his pace can function as an impact sub coming in for Theo.

However, he appears to be looking at this situation and thinking that he’s 26, in his prime, and is being slowly pushed out of the club’s first-team and long-term plans. He basically has two options: he can (a) hang around at Arsenal for a couple more years, playing in cups and coming off the bench–after a couple of years of this, he’ll really be out of the club’s plans, and he’ll be in late 20s, which would make it harder to find a top-level team willing to give him a chance; or (b) he can leave now for a team in Italy, Spain, or France, to a European-quality team willing to make him its starting right wing or right back for the next 3-5 seasons, and he can be one of the key members of the team.

It’s easy for someone like me, who loves Arsenal, to say, “Why doesn’t he stay? He’ll still play a role, and we have a good chance of winning trophies over the next couple of seasons.” And I believe that, and I hope he does stay. But I don’t, and can’t, put myself in his shoes. He’s basically worked nonstop for his entire life to become a very good football player, and now that he believes he has finally reached that goal, it must be excruciating to be told you can’t, and won’t, start, and that you should just sit on the bench and watch younger players play the game. If he decides he wants to be a more integral part of the setup somewhere else, and we can get decent value for him, I think we can’t blame him for wanting to leave, and I would certainly wish him luck wherever he lands.

Also, Thomas Vermaelen’s agent has come out and said it’s really just a matter of when, not if, Vermaelen makes the move to North London. It seems the fee between Arsenal and Ajax has been agreed, and at this point it’s really just dickering over personal terms. This could drag out a while, but we’ve still got a while before training camp starts, so there’s no huge rush.