Arsenal’s last-gasp Watkins bid hints at muddled thinking, writes IAN HERBERT

The spooky look in the eyes of Mikel Arteta on the last afternoon of last season you told you that Arsenal would take their next search for the Premier League title at the neck.

'Don't be satisfied. We want more than this, “he told the fans of the club, who held the Emirates after seeing Arsenal second for a second consecutive season.

The fact that the sun colored by the sun came up in me when the miserable lack of planning of the club led them to offer Ollie Watkins from Aston Villa, with only a week to go before the end of the transfer window.

The maneuvers for Watkins on Monday really had it all. An offensive offer, reportedly £ 45 million, made to a direct rival, at a time when everyone knew that the Saudis of Al-Nassr were about to offer Villa more than £ 62 million for Jhon Duran. Well, they say that timing is the secret of good comedy.

Arsenal has previously irritated rivals with low bids for their strikers. It is more than a decade because they offered £ 40 million plus £ 1 for Luis Suarez, then from Liverpool, who has heard a buy-out clause of £ 40 million in his contract.

Liverpool was so glowing that even the most important owner John W Henry joined the choir. “What do you think they smoke there in the Emirates?” He said at the time.

You may ask what they are smoking in Arsenal, given that the needs of the club to an elite attacker-a story is made as old as the hills crucial by Bukayo Saka's months of absence due to injury, and Gabriel Jesus That member of injury Saka on the sidelines.

At the very least, a bid for Watkins would have been wise at the beginning of January. There was no such urgency. The lack of injuries was made about the cracks last season, when Arsenal unlikely scored 91 Premier League goals, their most in a season, but it apparently promoted the delusion that title-winning teams did not require a top class of the top class.

There, absolutely available to them last summer, Brentford's Ivan Toney, who, 28 years old and soon had no contract, was too expensive at a price of £ 50 million.

Arsenal could also have moved to Watkins at that time, since he offers their team a point of difference – playing the shoulder of the last defender while he is also great in the air; He scored more with his head than anyone, Bar Harry Kane since 2020.

He also did not exactly hide his wish to play for the club.

“I mean, yes, that's the dream – to play for Arsenal one day,” Watkins said in 2020, when he was asked about his ambitions.

While Toney went to Saudi for wages of £ 400,000 a week, Arsenal did not move heaven and earth to sign Watkins, Sporting Lisbon Viktor Gyokeres or RB Leipzig's Benjamin Sesko.

Such complacency is always the enemy at clubs that notice that they are blooming in football. A few weeks ago, Graeme Souness said on this platform that the coaches of the serial trophy-winning Liverpool team for which he played 'were never completely happy with the group they had and that was a large part of their success in the past decades' .

Arsenal could have used a dose of that mentality last summer.

So, with Manchester City who finally looks clear, Arsenal is on panic stations, desperately looking for the attacker they need if they want to challenge Liverpool.

They have looked at Brentford's Yoane Wissa, in Mathys Tel from Bayern Munich, in Wolves' Matheus Cunha and again at Sesko, but the price that is placed for each of these is of course substantial and that is all thought in the longer term: jam : Jam: Jam tomorrow, no goals today.

Alexander Isak of Newcastle is the one who really wants Arsenal and that will probably last £ 120 million the next summer, but that will let them go in boxes, in an attempt to find an attacker who would work with Isak or as his backup in the Future, still deliver goals in the meantime.

That bid for Suarez in 2013 had consequences for a player whose head was everywhere for a while, but he decided not to penetrate the move to the Emirates, for fear of the reaction of fans of Liverpool who had supported him by a racism -controoverse.

It is unclear whether Watkins would feel the same about his own club. A second arsenal supply for him is perhaps up to his hands, but Villa is not categorically not prepared to sell their two -star strikers in the same week.

Again, Arteta says he is not satisfied. 'We miss options in advance. That is clear, “he said on Wednesday evening after the 2-1 Champions League win in Girona. These are the consequences of incorrectly reading the market and failing to provide the challenges.

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