So Long, Song Billong

So Long, Song Billong

So Alex Song has signed for Barcelona, signalling an end to his affiliation with the club. I remember when he first came to The Arsenal, looking a little awkward to say the least. He didn’t seem to be particularly good at anything and was quite representative of our change in policy since moving to Ashburton Grove; buying a player for a pittance and hoping that he would become a first team regular through expert training and plenty of pitch time. There was at least one game where he was booed by fans, harassed and hounded and eventually subbed off if I remember correctly. His first touch wasn’t great, he was supposed to be a defender but couldn’t really tackle and didn’t dominate the air, he wasn’t overly quick, and his shirt always looked far too big for him.

 Quite the contrast to how he left the club, having blossomed into a fine athlete and a commanding central midfielder. He became quite pacey, he filled his shirt with knots of sinew and he could hold off players as well as he could hold onto them (a bit too much pre game opposition hugging for my liking). I don’t care if people say he wasn’t the out and out defensive midfielder we craved, he made more tackles and interceptions than anyone else did, and he developed a killer final ball in the last year of his tenure, something that the Dutch twat made full use of. 

   

He was the penultimate bastion of African vibrancy in a squad bereft of the likes of Toure, Adebayor and our cult hero Eboue (who should still be at the club in my opinion). There was no one to accompany him in a tribal jig after scoring a goal, surrounding the corner flag and making us all doubt our abilities on the dance floor. Santos seemed keen to join in the jives, but he clearly wasn’t up the standard that Song was used to, Gervinho’s forehead obviously hampers any dance moves he may wish to make, and Chamakh doesn’t possess quite the ilk of African vibrancy required. I don’t think anyone else in the squad could pull off the hairstyles that Song did on a weekly basis, and certainly no one looks as good as he did with green, red and yellow sweat bands on. I’ll be honest, I'm genuinely gutted that he’s no longer with us.

I think that anyone who claims that we don't really need Song is correct; but you could easily say that about any player. We've certainly had enough practice at saying it over the last two seasons, what with Cesc, Nasri, and Van Persie all making good use of the exit door. Yet the implications of his departure are less than decent from an Arsenal perspective. If you'd have told me during the middle of the last campaign, after having just lost Nasri and Cesc, that by the start of this season we’d have lost Song and Van Persie too, then I would have been flabbergasted. Don't be under any illusions; Van Persie and Song were the two first names on the team sheet last year, contributing towards 52 goals in the Premier League alone. The Van Persie situation is unique in that it was a player in the last year of his contract (so unique it happened twice in two years!), yet Song had three years left. For a midfielder as effective as he is, with the ability to pass the ball as well as he does, and who fits into our system as perfectly as he does (it was a system developed in tandem with players of Song’s generation), I'm staggered that we sanctioned his sale.

What turns that stagger into full on bewilderment however, is the feeble fee that he went for. £15 million for a 24 year old CM who has the passing potential, in basketball terms, of Magic Johnson. That is perhaps a slight over statement but you cannot deny his effectiveness for us last season.

Footballing intellectuals who sip glasses of orange juice on the Sunday Supplement like to profess that we are a “selling club”, and many of the keenest intellectuals that you’ll find sucking kebab fat from yesterday’s newspapers assert the same. The art of football journalism is a reactionary business. It considers only the previous 90 minutes if we are discussing the entire season, and only the previous season if we are discussing the fullness of association football history in this country. This is how toilet paper like The Sun comes out with headlines proclaiming that we are a club in crisis off the back of an opening day draw, even though in reality we are one of the best run football clubs in the world off the pitch, and pretty bloody good on it too. Simply looking at the Wenger era alone, we have always sold players; we sold Anelka, we sold Petite, we sold Overmars, we sold Vieira, we sold Henry. We’re not the only club; Sir Alex Ferguson sold Beckham, he sold Stam, he sold Van Nistelrooy, he sold Ronaldo, and they were some of the best players in their positions at the time. To be branded a selling club doesn’t necessarily mean that you lack ambition or lack a manager with the strength to rebuke all-comers, it simply means that you have a manager who functions in the real cold and unforgiving world where money doesn’t flow from a hole in the ground in the Arabian peninsula or isn’t taken at gun point by Soviet gangsters.      

In more recent times, Cesc felt the need to return to his home land, Nasri was in the last year of his contract and could earn us a pretty penny, as could Van Persie. The only point of question that I have with Song’s departure is that we didn’t get any significant money for him, and that he genuinely seemed very happy at this club. There have been rumblings of a rift between Song and Le Boss, the result of tardy arrivals to training sessions and complimented by a lack of focus during those sessions. As far as I'm concerned this is just speculation, and as with a lot of the unknown about Arsenal Football Club, we may only know for sure when (and if) Arsene releases a book.

Until then it’s a great player lost, another to add to our collection, but a position which can certainly be improved upon; we are crammed with talent in the middle of the park, so it’s probably the one area of the pitch I don't mind losing a player. Still, I'm pretty gutted.

Oh, and it turns out that Man United are a  club in crisis after losing their first game of the season, having spent £70 million on an aging centre forward who’s only had one decent season in eight attempts. Who’d have thunk it?      

Best regards

@halls_dja