The (slightly younger) Kids and Squad Depth
So the kids have done it again. And by kids, I mean the slightly younger kids than the usual kids we call the first team. Whenever we get a Premiership team in the League Cup, I always fear that our kids will get knocked out. But they never do, and it’s win after win. Our last five League Cup opponents were Everton (away), Liverpool (away), Tottenham (home and away), Chelsea (final) and now Newcastle (home) … 4 wins (one was in extra time though), 1 draw (2-0 and they fucked it up … haha) and losing to a near full strength Chelsea in the final is a great record against these strong teams, League Cup or otherwise.
The team that played against a pretty much full strength Newcastle (who are sitting 5th in the table, 3rd if us, Liverpool and them all win our games in hand) contained not one single player that could be considered part of our current first choice 11. Eboue, Eduardo, Bendtner, Senderos, Denilson and Walcott and maybe even Diarra might fight their way into the first 11, but in all likelihood, they will be lucky to just get a seat on the bench. The media often say we have no chance of winning the title because we lack squad depth, but that’s only because they don’t know our kids like we do. They may not be full internationals, or may not have attracted million dollar fees, but that doesn’t mean they are not good enough. We have a chance to win the title, maybe not the favourites to do so, but that will suit us even more.
The media then go on to say the Mancs will win the title easily because of their squad depth (two weeks ago they said it was Liverpool, again for the same reason), and then this happens. By my estimates, more than 50 million dollar worth of talent was on show at the end of the game against Coventry (Nani, Anderson and Carrick), and what did they have to show for it? Is this the squad depth that the media was talking about?
This actually got me quite curious, so I drew up this table comparing squads between us, Mancs and Liverpool. The squad list comes from Soccerbase.com, I believe they only include players that have had first team experience (including pre-season friendlies) – they missed a few obvious Arsenal players like Nacer Barazite (who scored against in our first pre-season game) and reserve team captain Havard Nordtveit. It shows the first XI, the bench, “reserves 1″ consisting of players that most people have actually heard of and have made some impact on the first team (first team squad players), and then “reserves 2″ consisting of players that most fans of other teams not know about, mainly because they haven’t played in first team games (League Cup and pre-season apart).
Liverpool seems to have the strongest squad, and they will need it when Benitez rotates his squad every twenty minutes. They have the likes of Babel, Kewell and Sissoko not even making the already quite strong bench. I still think their starting XI lacks class in certain areas though, and our kids have shown that they can beat their “B” team quite comfortably. But if you compare Man Utd to us, it seems that players not in their first XI + bench aren’t really all that good. Okay, they have good players in Nani and Anderson (but worth the price paid for them?), and Ben Foster is a good keeper, but while Fletcher, O’Shea and Silvestre have experience, they are hardly going to win games for you. That’s why the team they assembled could not beat Conventry, and the team we assembled can beat Newcastle. And even on our “reserves 2″ list, we have the likes of Fran Merida, Carlos Velas and Nacer Barazite, and as Arsene pointed out recently, our new reserve captain Havard Nordtveit is quite a player too.
So while we could still use a few more players, wingers in particular, I don’t think squad depth will be much of an issue for us unless we have 8 or more of the first team out due to injuries (we currently have 4 out injured, so it’s not so far fetched), and even then, we’ll just play some of the players that started against Newcastle and they should be alright for a game or two.