The 1-1 draw against Leicester City today has elicited a lot of reactions from the supporters of Arsenal and journalists.
But just as reactions were pouring in, the news that Arsenal are poised to bring in the 27-year-old Sevilla attacker, Carlos Bacca broke and Goal believes that the Colombian would be bought for £12.5m.
However, when quizzed regarding a move for Bacca, Arsene Wenger had this to say: ‘‘I can give you my phone and in the next 24 hours you will see you get plenty of people offered from all over the world.
“We can talk and talk and talk. At the end of the day we sign somebody or not. Could we win the game today without anybody? Yes.”
“We have plenty of strikers and even when we had Giroud-now everybody says we cannot replace Giroud-when you had Giroud you asked me the same question.”
“It’s a recurrence as long as the transfer market is open to make everybody dream by thinking the solution is always somewhere, even when it’s not necessarily obvious.’’
The manager in this statement neither admitted the claims nor refuted it, but made it very clear that having an attacker or not is not the reason why his didn’t win the game today and made ensured he dropped no names.
Goal however, understands that Arsenal has now turned attention to Bacca as Queens Park Rangers’ Loic Remy is no longer available due to his switch to Chelsea just as the Leicester City match was going on.
The player is said to have a £27.6m buy-out clause in his contract but the Spanish club would sell him to any club willing to part with £12.5m.
Carlos Bacca is a 27 years old forward with an impressive goal scoring record for Sevilla and Colombia.
Last season, he netted 22 times in his first season for Sevilla in 52 matches and before then scored 31 goals in 54 appearances for his former employers Club Brugge in Belgium.
He was a strong member of the Sevilla side that won the UEFA Europa League this year and for Colombia, he featured in the 2014 FIFA World Cup held in Brazil.
He has scored 3 times in 11 matches played for his country mostly coming in as a substitute.
However puzzling the manager’s statements are, the hope here for the Arsenal supporter is that the manager will bring in at least one player before the deadline on Monday, 11pm.
He said: ‘‘We are very active.’’
This is a massive hope booster for many Arsenal supporters especially at this time of disappointment when Arsenal played a 1-1 draw against Leicester City.
Other than the attacking position where fans are hoping Arsene Wenger would bolster this few hours before deadline, the defensive midfield position and the central defensive position where Arsenal is short numerically.
In attack, all links have cooled off except the two Colombians, Radamel Falcao and Carlos Bacca, whose name just surfaced, from Monaco and Sevilla respectively.
In the defensive midfield, William Carvalho and Adrien Rabiot are the two names left in the media spaces from a very long list which included Sami Khedira, Morgan Schneiderlin, and Luis Gustavo.
However, the defence has just one player left in this dying period of the summer transfer- Sokratis Papastathopoulos, the 26-year-old Borussia Dortmund player.
