theHotHead wrote:Words of a Sunday School song come to mind.... "A wise man built his house upon the rocks" and it stood firm after it rained. A "foolish man built his house upon the sand" and when it rained his house fell flat.
I liken that to what you are saying Jay, how are you gonna rebuild a team with bare youngsters, where are the experienced heads ? Where are the leaders ? To me this rebuild is gonna collapse without some players the youngsters can look up to and be led by. The rebuild should be established respected senior players augmented with young players.
Leaders don't have to be old and experienced.
Tony Adams was a leader at 21 for us. In fact, our entire back 4/5 in those days were leaders at a young age.
Tierney is 23 and already a leader within the team.
Saka already leads by example.
ESR is playing like he's 10ft tall.
Martinelli is fearless.
Then we do have older players with experience anyway - like Partey.
Frankly I have had enough of the 'experienced heads' being asked to lead. They haven't.
We've wasted time, effort and money on signing old has-beens like Willian and Luiz for literally no benefit and dishing out massive contracts to the likes of Auba for no benefit.
I want to see Arteta build this squad for the future and I am encouraged to see younger players coming in to add to what we've produced ourselves from Hale End.
Will it work? I don;t know, but I do know the approach we've taken for a long time now has not worked, rather it's engrained a shitty culture of failure in the squad and the whole club. I've advocated a burn down and start again approach and I am hoping this window is the start of the real journey back.