(The not-so-temporary quite-official) Gooner Thread (Part 2)

https://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/news/arsenal-improved-injury-record-25-6054218

Looks like Shad's made an impact

Wenger remains a football man.

Which is great considering some of his peers seem more interested in wine, brown bags, horse racing and being the centre of attention instead of their teams players.

Monreal to Athletico Bilbao is gathering pace

Still am surprised on this one

Nacho Monreal has dampened speculation he is close to joining Athletic Bilbao and says he is happy at Arsenal.

He told Goal.com:

The ox is hilarious, heaps of arsenal tv stuff with him is gold

He's looking good for a big season. I hope he can stay injury free.

Isn't this the way of the world now? 1) Monreal seem having argument with Mrs 2) Monreal has family problems 3) Monreal needs to go back to Spain to save his marriage 4) Find a Spanish club in need of a left back 5) Link Arsenal with promising left backs that no ones heard of 6) fe Rich of shark talking your way into good SEO traffic

I asked about Park. He didn't answer it directly at all. Just said, "Look, it's not just him or because he's an asian, many european players don't make it at Arsenal too because the level here is very high." We are no closer to quelling the mystery.

The chat with Wenger was nothing major, 5-10 minutes before he ran off for the match meeting. That moment was extremely special. Wenger wasn't particular straightforward though, he's very coy compared to the rest. It was more of a casual chat than an interview so I didn't get to scribe everything down. It was an honor just to talk to him and hear his opinions on certain aspects of football. Afterwards, I spoke to Neil, Boro (doesn't speak much english), Gerry, Steve and I have to say I know so much more aspects about Arsenal than the last 14 years of following the club! Simply amazing.

On which players he enjoys working with in training the most:

Alexis, always working extremely hard in training which can have an effect on the rest.
Santi for his technical ability and also he used the term "extremely intelligent guy."
Theo because he always listens and is probably one who improved the most under him.

On the transfer process:

I talked to the coaches about how our transfers are done. Contrary to some opinions, our scouting network is extremely expansive throughout the world. It might surprise you but we even have scouts in remote places of Africa, Asia and North America. There's too many of them watching too many matches every week so even the media don't know of their existence.

Everytime a scout reports back with a list of players that impressed, one of head scouts will verify and filter the list down. They then keep a database of the player info and monitor them over a period of time. If they don't match the consistency standards set down previously, they will then stop monitoring that closely and move on with another. All these are general daily scoutings.

This will change when Wenger sits down with his team and identify the possible weakness and areas to improve on in the team. Once they get that exact position, they will surf through their database and come up with a list of players together, which is a very detailed process itself. (Wenger takes a lot of advices from his colleagues but ultimately he gets the final decision on whether to close the deal or not) The info will then be passed on to another team which is in charge of the negotiations and acquisition. Whether a deal is done or not depends on a lot of factors and also the market movements. Gerry did mention this process has been altered last season ever since we bought the stat company over. Gabriel is the first of such new signings based on that.

Scouting may become less important for finding the big name stars but there's a lot more work those guys do than simply just look at them and say they are a good player. They look at the dynamic of the team, the balance of what a new signing can offer to us. Its hours and hours of work behind compiling the infos.

We touched about how there's a lack of top quality strikers in the market and Neil agreed with that. Nobody is available or easily gettable.

I believe the info Muzzy Ozcan is saying is completely fake though. We are not in any discussions with any player installments, it's not yet at that done deal stage. I have heard that they are still looking around and not close to any player. What is clear is that Wenger is looking to sign a top quality striker though. We are just waiting for market movements.

Nope we didn't talk about injuries at all.

Expanding on the scouting topic, I mentioned about the Chelsea way of doing things. Steve said that's not how Arsenal goes about doing our stuffs because we feel that we have a responsibility for every single young player we signed, and that includes their welfare, future, livelihood etc. Basically we treat them as our own and give them the best possible chance of a good career. We really take good care of everyone in our setup and not simply blind invest in many of them. We only sign people we think would have a good chance of making it here.

There are some other interesting bits, like

-Gerry saying the best keeper he has coached is Fabianski
-How formation changes in our structure is harder because we work on repetitions in training + we play the same formation throughout all the age group.
-Big game approach depends on the quality of the players we have

On a transfer rumour, Flamini to Galatasaray.....

Hope so. Get him off the wage bill asap.

Not unless we have a replacement.

Coq gets injured, then what? We're in a similar position to what we were last season with not enough defenders.

I like to think that dropping Bielek into the deep end is as risky as having Flamini start

Szczesny on loan to Roma, Ospina stays. Right call for me. New environment might help with Szczesny's development and I'd rather have Ospina for now anyway.

Not unless we have a replacement.

Coq gets injured, then what? We're in a similar position to what we were last season with not enough defenders.

Arseblog has some thoughts for you...https://news.arseblog.com/2015/07/szczesny-instagra...