Arsenal announced on Friday that 10 Gunners will be released this summer, 2 of which leave with FA Cup winners medals.
Maitland Niles was man of the match when we last lifted a trophy. While his time in North London hasn’t ended how he would have liked, no one can ever take that afternoon at Wembley away from him. It will live forever!
The Gunners have won the famous tin pot 14 times in their history, he contributed to one of them.
Then there is a certain ……Matt Smith.
The midfielder was on the bench that day against Chelsea, 3 years later he departs having never played a senior game for the club.
I will admit I haven’t researched the squad of every winner of the competition, but there can’t be too many cases where someone can claim they lifted the FA Cup but never actually played for the first team?
It could be the answer in a pub quiz.
How exactly does the 22-year-old describe the occasion the day his children look at his collection of individual honours?
Is it an item he shows off to the grandchildren?
Do the parents proudly have it on show when hosting dinner parties?
Any family should be proud.
The odds of getting from the academy to being part of a winning squad are low.
It took sacrifice and hard work to get to that level.
So don’t think this is me mocking the achievement.
Since loaned out to League One sides, it could very well be the only winners medal he has.
Yet how does he view his medal?
Did he truly feel part of that team?
Is there an Asterisk? The need to give context.
An explanation how he won as much at the Emirates as a Fabregas and Van Persie?
Does he need to point out to his kids one day that the pandemic changed the rules of the sport, allowing managers to name 9 subs and make 5 changes?
Or does he address the elephant in the room. That while Arteta must have trusted his character to involve him at all, in reality Smith was a chess piece in a political game.
A prop to further humiliate a certain …. Mesut Ozil?
8 subs planned for the game, one the latest ploy to make an employee so miserable at work he would feel compelled to rip up his contract.
A deal the German’s employer openly offered, and he was simply respecting.
Remember that the next time the club leak how an individual is not being loyal because when they wanted to retract on an agreement, they tried every trick in the book.
Arteta maintained at the time that all his decisions were based purely on sporting merit, that Ozil was training well, was being a professional and that it ‘hurt him’ to leave him out. The Spaniard even claimed he felt he had failed him by not being able to offer more minutes.
There are many things our manager has got right since, but I wrote it then, and Smith being a free agent confirms my stance, Arteta was blatantly lying to us. To himself. To Ozil.
He was a ‘yes man’. The Kroenke’s wanted the wage bill reduced because of COVID and Ozil was a logical sacrifice. Especially after he openly questioned what our owners were doing to support the club during lockdown while they were asking players to take salary cuts, then sacking 55 staff regardless (they told players they would be protecting jobs by taking a pay cut).
You should be able to separate your opinion on Ozil the person, and answer this question with a balanced thought process.
Do you truly believe that a 19-year-old who had never played a second (still hasn’t) for us was picked ahead of a World Cup winner on sporting merit?
Ozil wasn’t banned, we were constantly told there had been zero issues in training. Yet if we had been losing and you needed some creativity, someone to pick out a pass, you truly think Arteta had more faith in a teenager then someone with a record for assists?
What no one has been able to answer is that Ozil’s final game as a Gunner was to create the winner for Lacazette.
No one knew that fixture against West Ham would be his last.
Very strange, isn’t it?
Your number 10 assists the winner and is then dropped, eventually from the entire squad, at a time when how many you have on the bench increases.
That doesn’t happen too many times, does it?
A player whose job is to create goals, creates a goal and then gets frozen out.
This is when we were finishing 8th, our lowest finish in quarter of a century!
So, it’s not like anyone else was doing better than him in his position.
Yet Ozil couldn’t get in a squad of 20, one of the worse in Arsenal’s Prem history.
Based on sporting merit?
It’s almost like something happened off the pitch between when football was paused and then returned after three months.
In that time the German refused to a salary cut because he correctly predicted the Kroenke Family were misleading the public over promises to protect nonplaying staff, and Arsenal had distanced themselves from comments the player had made regarding treatment of Uyghurs in China and Muslims failure to speak out. An Arsenal game was removed from Chinese TV as part of the backlash.
Coincidence? He makes a goal in the last game before the pandemic.
He publicly faces the backlash over refusing to take a pay cut and costing the club oversees TV revenue, and suddenly is ghosted?
China get the world seeing that Ozil is unofficially being punished, while a player never plays for us again after calling out Stan Kroenke for not telling the truth.
Sporting Merit?
Non-negotiable principles?
The argument at the time was I hadn’t watched Matt Smith in the youth set up.
How did I not know that he wasn’t the next big thing?
That this wasn’t simply part of his development?
Well Arteta never gave him a second on the pitch. Not in the League Cup, not in the Europa, not for the final minutes of a match we were 4-0 up in.
That’s Matt Smith’s legacy I’m afraid.
Ozil still got his medal, by the way, having played earlier in the competition.
Arsenal couldn’t prevent that.
They did ban him from the stadium so he couldn’t celebrate with his peers, hiding behind COVID restrictions.
Ozil, meanwhile, wished his team-mates good luck on social media and congratulated them at full time.
That’s class!
Matt Smith was at Colney since the age of 7.
If you said to him one day, he would lift the FA it would be a boyhood dream come true.
Yet he can’t tell his story without saying: ‘So, you know Mesut Ozil? ‘
Dan