Mixed thoughts on Chamberlain transfer

Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain is not the signing Arsenal need by any means, but his move today, confirmed in the last hour, is encouraging in some aspects.

Firstly, he will continue this new trend of an increasingly English-looking Arsenal side. I'm not one to buy into the hype that surrounds English players, but having seen a lot of foreign youngsters in recent times fail to adapt, or jump ship when a 'bigger' club shows interest, a change in approach is probably a good idea. Although his only experience is in League One, he will at least not find the rough and tumble of the Premier League too shocking, or need to adapt off the pitch to life in this country. Little things like this might help.

Secondly, this transfer was, from the sounds of it, done very quickly. The story only really picked up steam this morning, which would normally mean we'd see him up on the official site holding his Arsenal shirt in about a month. Good to see we haven't completely forgotten what we're doing in the transfer market.

This hopefully means we're close to completing other deals for players more high on our list of priorities - the Phil Jagielkas or Gary Cahills of this world. For now I'm at least mildly more optimistic that we won't be tearing our hair out as we desperately await any news on deadline day.

But it has to be asked, where does Chamberlain fit in? In recent times, only Fabregas and Walcott have started playing regularly for Arsenal at 17, and although he can fill in in a variety of attacking positions, he faces a lot of competition ahead of him in all these roles.

Of course, some of these players are likely to leave, such as Fabregas, Nasri and Bendtner, but then I wouldn't be too happy if Chamberlain was seen as the best antidote for that problem.

This is the problem with signing players at this age: they are too young to be thrown into the deep end straight away (unless they really are special, like a Fabregas or a Rooney), but you also don't want to see their development halted from just sitting on the bench all season. No one wins in that situation.

One of the biggest problems with Walcott, I feel, was that when he arrived after also just getting into his groove at Southampton, he joined in January and didn't play for over six months. I think there's a case for young players playing for smaller teams and working their way up until they're ready for their big move. For one thing, they're still new to the world of professional football, why over-awe them at this early stage in their careers?

A loan move seems like the sensible option for Chamberlain. I'm sure he could get games in the Premier League, perhaps for one of the newly promoted clubs. We handled Walcott badly in his early days and he struggled because of it for a long time afterwards, whereas Wilshere benefited a lot from a loan move before his incredible breakthrough last season.

The problem then is, we've spent about £10million on a player we're not going to see for a while, which again begs the question, what is the point in this move?

I guess we'll have to wait and see. Let's hope this isn't another one we'll all be annoyed about come the end of the season. It certainly won't bother us as much if it isn't the last of our spending.

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