Melquiades
Active Member
So you are saying making a wrong choice to correct a wrong move is right? Where is the logic in that one?
Its decisions like that that will cement our place as a mid-table club.
No, I'm saying that :
a) you want your management to have belief and a plan and follow-through on their moves. As bad as this seems, it would be even worse if management was chasing squirrels and dropping huge-money signings after only a few games.
b) with an investment this large, management needs to do their best to extract value from the asset somehow. Like, they're accountable to their bosses at the ownership level and when they go to ownership to get them to bite the bullet on eating Willian's contract (which will likely happen eventually) they need to be able to tell them that they've done the best they can with this player before reaching their decision. Again, super easy as fans to say 'never play this guy again!' but it isn't how it works in real life.
c) actually, they've pulled the plug on Willian quite quickly. He was basically a starter here for the first 12 PL games of the season, which isn't much for what they had invested in him. Since Christmas he's barely played except in blowouts. The reaction to him playing the last 15 minutes of a blowout win is over-the-top and not in line with how he's actually being used. And nothing about the tiny amount of playing time he's received in the past couple months is 'dropping us to mid-table'.
d) none of this is really unique to Arteta. Wenger was apparently done with Mustafi after his first season ... but kept playing him, for the same reasons. You had a guy with major pedigree that you made a huge investment in, and you're going to follow through on the big investment when it's struggling to try and fix the asset.
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And again, this is the Pepe thread. The main point here is that Willian has taken all of 58 minutes of playing time from Pepe in the last 4 months, all of it mop-up duty in blowout wins for us.