Ainsley Maitland-Niles: Midfielder or in deNile?

Coolest penalty taker by a country mile. But, I am open to selling him as he would command a decent fee. We are obviously struggling to shift our other players.

 

That’s just perception. He plays with full commitment in every game, never shirks a tackle, reacts quickly when losing the ball etc. By all accounts from his peers and managers he trains pretty hard too.

How would anyone who hasn’t met the guy have any idea that he doesn’t appreciate what he has? He came through about as troubled an upbringing as you can get, and bust his balls to make it this far, after being written off by many.

We have to be careful not to judge someone’s character based on anecdotal observations.

 

What...the f*ck? If this is true...we've signed Cedric to a 4 year contract...for no reason?

 

I'm having second thoughts regarding Arteta's decision making and man management.

I'm very happy AMN's staying, and the Cedric signing is a total **** up, and always was, regardless of AMN's status.

 

I like AMN, everyone likes AMN, but the question is: will AMN give us more value on the pitch this season than he'd have given us in cash had Wolves paid 20m+ for him? We've got to hope he will.

 

oh he did that already with that penalty. Dont underestimate that moment and what he did. He laughed at Liverpool in their own ground. We got some of our swagger back. It meant a lot. Rather than the team ****ting themselves with nervousness and letting the tension get to them, they saw good old amn saunter up and chuckle back .

 

That was a cool penalty, but it wasn't worth 20m.

 

it was priceless

 

I'm sure the red half of Merseyside is still shell-shocked and asking themselves whether they'll ever be the same again after that pen shook the net.

 

How are you going to determine that?

 

Being honest I'm not impressed with this situation and I'm probably in the minority but we could've handled Guendouzi better too.

Sure if Guen was a mature 21 year old instead of a man child he'd apologise and we'd get on with it.

But at this moment in time we don't have the money to waste freezing out a kid like him and losing out on what? 20-30M?

Also bringing in a borderline useless player like Soares for four years just because of AMN's time keeping, not great business at all. Imagine if AMN never got back in the team, we'd have probably sold him for 5-10M losing out on a potential 10-15M just this window.

Hopefully Arteta does learn from this, for example what Guendouzi did was stupid, but freezing him out completely is a really hard line, we can't always do that or we'll lose out quite a bit too.

 

Think you need to take that article with a lunch of salt. Ainsley wanted first team and indicated he wanted to leave, even having his agent develop a move to Wolves

Arteta convinced him to stay. Don't think you can question Arteta here and I think the blame for Soares lies with Raul

 

I'm just saying to improve you have to be super efficient in how you deal with your squad. It's not that I wanted AMN to leave, it's just that it seems a bit inefficient to have Bellerin, AMN and Cedric, even if AMN is playing LWB right now I can't believe that's a long-term role for him.

Obviously we just shouldn't have signed Cedric, even at the time everyone knew it was a mistake. I mean rarely do you sign a player to a deal and immediately think "yep, he's gonna be difficult to get rid of", usually that feeling develops after a year or two.

 

Well you can't obviously. If we sign one of the main targets then perhaps it's not so important. But if we don't then maybe we'll be left thinking whether we could have raised more funds by selling non-key squad members.

 

You need a whole squad of players to keep the team fresh for a whole season. Cedric will get games with Europa and Carabao, he is good enough for that. They had to act if there was a good chance that Ainsley was leaving.

 

It’s easy to forget we had to endure several games with Mustafi and Sokratis at right back last season. Cedric is a significant upgrade on those two in that position. Ainsley isn’t anywhere as good defensively on the right as he is on the left, and he seems to hate playing there too.

 

After years of Lictsteiner, a broken Debuchy (he was good), Jenkinson and makeshift options, I'm glad to have Soares as back up.

Maitland-Niles will get plenty of game time as a wing back or full back.

I'd like to see him get games in midfield in The Europa League. Him, El Nenny and Saka/Smith Rowe would be interesting.

 

Cedric is a ****ing bum. No wonder the club is struggling when they are making decisions like this, no club in Europe would sign a 30 year old Cedric to a 4 year deal when you have AMN at the club, only this current Arsenal.

Now we have 3 RBs, and an AMN who starts more or less EVERY big game for Arteta.

 

I’m glad we’re struggling to sign players now, it’s punishment for stockpiling trash like Cedric and Mari.

 

It's not even the fact that we signed Cedric, it's the fact we decided to give him a 4 year permanent contract. This was a guy deemed surplus to requirements at a mid-table side. One of the most mind-boggling deals I can remember. It's not as if we took a punt on some guy and got it wrong, we all knew Cedric wasn't anywhere near good enough, yet still gave him a 4 year contract. It just makes me think there was more to this deal than we know about. It can't be for pure football reasons.