by bigmick » Mon Jul 14, 2008 12:31 pm
Good topic starter John and some interesting points. My take is that although Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester United are going to lose players in the closed season, it will be difficult to overtake more than one of them.
United look like nailed on Champions once again to me, as they have the best players. I'm of the opinion that they only made it interesting last season with Fergie experimenting with his own version of styling, and that in actual fact they were by a distance the best team last term. They fell out of the blocks (which won't happen again) and then rested practically their whole team Away to Chelsea for instance (inevitably losing the match) and along the way cost themselves points with bizarre selections. I don't know the stats, but my impression was that they went in for mass rotation much more than they have previously. Some might say it paid off with them winning the League and Champions league, but I would counter that they were a Steve Bennet favour and a John Terry slip away from winning feck all. That would have been a massive under-achievement given their team, and I'd be surprised if the same mistakes are made again. I expect Anderson and Nani also to step up, they are both excellent players and they will draw level with us this year I should think in terms of titles won. Horrible as it is to contemplate, I simply can't see anyone stopping them.
Chelsea will be hard to pass simply because they have such huge resources. I think Scolari is a top manager, and I expect them to run Man Utd close. Come the end of the whole thing, I think they'll be three or four points adrift.
Arsenal probably over-achieved last season. This is where I don't really agree with the widely held notion that Wenger committed some type of football crime by not rotating heavily. I must say in the Champions League quarter final when Adebayor put them in front at Anfield with nine minutes left, we didn't look to be overrunning them at that stage to me anyway. I remain of the opinion that more significant than stamina in those ties was the fact that Hleb didn't get his penalty and Babel did. Chelsea showed that the "rotation keeps you fresher" argument doesn't necessarily hold water and I actually think Wenger did an excellent job getting a genuine title challenge out of that squad. Despite their managers positively alchemic knack of finding new players, I think they'll miss the loss of some of their better ones and finish fourth, probably about twelve points back.
We for me are the hardest ones to pick. We finished eleven back last season, despite hampering ourselves for the first two thirds of the campaign. Although on the face of it we could and should have been much closer, I also think Man Utd will find another four or five points on top of last seasons total in the next season. If we choose to hamper ourselves again (and I must say I'm a little concerned by a couple of Rafa's recent comments) then of course IMHO we have absolutely no chance whatsoever of launching a challenge, and will finish well back again, all done by Christmas most likely. If one the other hand we go for consistency of selection (and no I don't mean we should play the same team in every single game) and we sign a couple more players, we can I think go very close. If we find a plan and broadly stick to it like we did in the last third of the season, I think the title will be a three horse race between ourselves, Chelsea and Man Utd. We might not win it (infact i don't think we will) but we won't be far off either. I think we'll finish four or five points away, plenty close enough to have a hopefully successful push at it the following season. It would be poetic if the Mancs did finally catch us to win it the next season and pull clear again.
In one sense though we do have a slight advantage as we are unique amongst the top four in that what we need to do in order to improve is fairly obvious.
"se e in una bottigla ed e bianco, e latte".