Hello there friends. I hope you are having a lovely Monday and I hope that you’re not too bent out of shape about the whole ‘Fabregas: legend or no?’ Debate that I’ve seen raging online in recent days.
Can I admit something to you: I don’t really care if I’m honest. In the whole ‘legend’ tag. I mean it’s not as if it makes any impact on the current situation at Arsenal, it’s not as if it will impact our ability to enjoy football more or less, it’s just a word that people use. That’s it.
Cesc Fabregas played 300 odd games at Arsenal. He scored some goals, made plenty of assists, then left to join his hometown club in Spain. I can watch some of the goals he scored for us and enjoy them, but I’m not really that bothered about calling him a snake, or a legend because quite frankly, what does it matter?
The term ‘legend’ is subjective anyway and so nobody will ever agree with it. If I think about it from my perspective, I would call a person a legend if in my eyes – and my eyes only – I can look back and feel so happy and privileged to be able to have seen them.
So for me I think of how good David Seaman was. Or Rocky Rocastle – my first ‘favourite’ player. Or Paul Merson. Or Ian Wright. Or Dennis Bergkamp. Or Thierry Henry. Or Patrick Vieira.
There are no doubt a few more in there; for example why didn’t I pick Liam Brady? Because he was before my time and I’ve hardly seen him play apart from a few short videos of him scoring. So I’m sure he should be viewed as a legend but I haven’t seen enough of him to pretend to wax lyrical about the player.
It’s all subjective folks. Which is why there’ll never be a full consensus on these sort of things. And who cares if there is? Football is about your own experiences as much as it is the tribalism and collective joy.
So what else is happening with the current lot then?
Not a lot, really, because we had a routine 3-0 win. There were a few decent performances from the youngsters but these sort of results always tend to get tarred with them ‘yeah but it’s only…’ tag. I can understand that. It’s the way football is these days, but the confidence factor that this win will have done to the likes to Ainsley Maitland-Niles, Alex Iwobi, Joe Willock, etc, will be very valuable in the long run. Even Eddie should be taking some positives from the fact he was at least creating chances during the Blackpool game. Unai has had nice things to say about him as you’d expect and hopefully this is enough to keep his confidence up. When you’re a striker you tend to measure all success metrics on hitting the back of the net and after two quick goals in the league cup last year against Norwich, there was probably a sky-high feeling the kid will have had. But after a few games without a goal this season he might be starting to question himself.
That’s where we find out if he has enough mentally to make it at The Arsenal. If he can get another game – perhaps if we can do the business in the first leg against BATE so he can get a chance in the second – and score then it will be great for him. But I suspect it’s probably starting to play on his mind after a few performances that deserved a goal but didn’t quite come.
The longer term question is whether he is good enough to become an established first team player at the club. On that I’m not so sure, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have all the hopes that he does, because it’d be a great story if he can. But so far I’ve just not seen a player in the similar mould to Rashford when he broke through and at Eddie’s age in order to get in to the first team you basically need to have that kind of an impact within the first year or so, otherwise your own personal career momentum begins to slow down, which we’ve seen with so many players and is particularly true when it comes to strikers.
Anyway, he’ll get a few more chances before the season is out so let’s just hope he takes some, because with Welbeck our we need him to have as much confidence as possible.
Catch you all tomorrow.
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