Ljungberg's pissed off

"It's all about my injuries. Wenger simply doesn't like those who show a weakness. With him, you generally feel as if you were in the army - it's only in public that he may appear to be some sort of man of liberal views. In reality, his belief is natural selection. The truth is I picked up a knock doing my job and following Wenger's instructions. I always played like this and, at some point, ran out of luck. So while I was being treated for the injury, they went out and found a different player for my position. After I recovered, I was given a chance in the typical Wenger way: I was expected to run and intercept and score just the same as before. He just didn't give me enough time to do it properly. I had no time."

- Freddie Ljungberg, in an interview with Russian newspaper Sport Den Za Dnem

I wonder where all the positive comments have gone. It used to be that ex-Arsenal players had nothing but good things to say about Wenger. Now, it seems like every other player is sniping at the way Le Boss conducts business. Very strange.

I'm not going to question the validity of Ljungberg's statements. Simply put, I don't have the knowledge to know how often he was playing on painkillers, what his physical limits were, or the exact circumstances of his departure. I'm sure we all felt that when he finally left, he was on his last legs and no longer good enough to be part of the Arsenal first team. Without Bergkamp's through-balls, Ljungberg's value was drastically reduced.

But does that mean he should've gone?

This post is about loyalty.

Wenger was talking in the papers a few days ago about how the transfer system is going to collapse because players and agents no longer respect the length of a contract, and soon, will be willing to buy out their contracts on a yearly basis and move to a better-paying club. He said that it's impossible to build a squad with that short time frame.

That's all hunky-dory. However, what about a club's loyalty to a player?

There's something really ruthless about Arsenal's over-30 policy. As Ljungberg alluded, at Arsenal, it's survival of the fittest. Vieria was cut, not because he wasn't fit for a game, but because he wasn't fit enough for his old role. It was a terrible decision. Vieria should've been kept, and the team changed to accommodate him. To lose a captain in those circumstances is shocking, and we still haven't recovered from it. Too much was lost too soon. At the moment, we're not a team of fighters. We're not a team of winners. We're a fragile team which plays pretty, inconsistent football. We're missing the moral fibre of a title-winning side.

And we still miss our captain.

A quick glance at Man Utd shows that quality older players (Giggs, Scholes, Neville) can add a lot to a club despite their decrepitude. There's something reassuring about looking around and seeing guys who have done it all before. I'm sure the development of Ronaldo, Nani and Anderson have been aided significantly by these guys. These guys instill a sense of continuity to the younger players. They make them believe that they're part of a tradition of success, and that they don't have to reinvent the wheel in order to succeed. You need a few older heads to do that.

That said, I'm sure we'll get there in the end. We're very close to it now. But my point is that a lot of our pain was unnecessary. We proclaimed a Year Zero and then killed off everyone over 30. When we found out that our kids didn't know enough to succeed by themselves, we brought in Gallas for his winning mentality. But we forgot that we sold Vieira three years earlier, who also had a winning mentality, had a greater affinity with our players, and who was a club legend. Wouldn't it have been nicer to have kept Vieria, transitioned him to CB, and let him see out his career at HIS club?

****

A few hours later, there's this from SkySports:

"Freddie Ljungberg wishes to make it clear that he absolutely refutes suggestions made by Russian Daily Sport paper Den Za Dnem that he enjoyed anything but an excellent relationship with Arsene Wenger during his time at Arsenal."

Oh well. That's my little post gone to shit.