What Clichy sale says about Wenger

So Gaël Clichy's move to Manchester City was, as expected, finally completed yesterday afternoon, after eight years with Arsenal.

While I can't complain about us offloading a clearly overrated player, it's a bit different selling him to City than it would be to a foreign team like Roma or Juventus as he'd been previously linked with. Even a move to Liverpool probably wouldnt've been as damaging.

But at City, under a manager who knows what he's doing defensively in Roberto Mancini, Clichy's obvious raw talent could be more acutely harnessed, and this ever-improving team will be even harder for us to chase.

If the reported fee of £7million is true, considering the financial power of City and the fact that they just pipped us to third place, then that's a bloody joke; why is Wenger so happy to sell our players? As I said, Clichy is not the best full-back in the world, but along with Fabregas he is our longest-serving player, and having them around is quite important. This is something that seems totally lost on Wenger.

I said many times that our club is suffering an identity crisis as it is, with Wenger dismantling the Invincibles far too quickly. If we lose Fabregas next, our longest-serving player will be van Persie, and he's injured too often. Apart from that there's Almunia, but hopefully he won't be here. After that you have Diaby, Song and Walcott who are all still quite young and unreliable.

It is now vital that we keep hold of Fabregas for another year. There is simply no suitable replacement for the captaincy. Unless we bring back Vieira, Campbell or Henry back in a coaching role sometime soon, we will just be left with our most experienced players as ones who have never won anything or ever even played with players from the Invincibles era.

Anyway, on a more practical note, the left-back situation is now definitely an issue. I like Kieran Gibbs, but injuries have held him back. Leighton Baines would now be my first choice as a replacement, but there's no way we'd get him for £7million, even though Clichy is arguably the more reliable player. Most Premier League clubs don't sell to other Premier League clubs for as cheap as we do.

Anyway, this summer has been an absolute disaster so far. We need to strengthen more than arguably anyone else, and yet our first move has been to sell an experienced player to a rival. Nasri to United or City could be next. Meanwhile, United have signed some brilliant players because winning an easy league losing the Champions League final, for them, was seen as a bit of an embarassment. Talk about different standards.

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