Jamie Vardy - Out of the Blue...

I’ll be honest, over the past 48 hours I’ve actually found it pretty hard to get started writing this piece on the potential transfer of Jamie Vardy to Arsenal. Primarily, this has been because my opinion on the matter changes with the hour, and continues to do so, but also because it is something that has arisen completely out of the blue.

For a while now we have known that Arsene Wenger is looking to sign a striker to (presumably) replace Olivier Giroud up front for us next season. For even longer, we have been aware that though Giroud is a superb player on his day, we are probably lacking a true world class player leading the line for us that could be the difference between us being Premier League champions and, what was it Gary, ‘perennial also-rans’?

Step into the spotlight Jamie Vardy. Everyone on the planet concerned with football now knows the name of a player who twelve months ago would have barely registered in discussions outside of Leicester, let alone England. We all know the story, so there is no point in recounting it here, but what the meteoric rise of the striker does put into context is that this is either going to be a triumphant final scene in the eventual movie, or something left on the cutting room floor, along with any notion of the redemption of Arsene Wenger.

In fairness, there is little left for Vardy to ‘prove’. Sure, he may be terrible next season, and fail to score even half of the 24 goals that he managed in the league on the way to Leicester’s miracle run to the title, but in many ways that wouldn’t take away from the fact that he has just played a key role in said miracle, and is off to the European Championships to represent his nation, five years after turning out for Fleetwood Town.

So what would Vardy like to achieve with Arsenal? Maybe he’ll be tempted by the idea of back-to-back Premier League titles, or maybe he’s banking (perhaps ill-advisedly) on Arsenal being a force in Europe next year, to the level that Leicester may not be able to achieve, though at this point all bets are off for them. The question that the fans are faced with therefore is whether this makes sense for the club, and whether Vardy’s acquisition is likely to make those aspirations (which are shared by the fan base as a whole) any more likely.

I wanted to immediately kick off this debate by suggesting we put aside the negative publicity that Vardy has attracted in recent times, and purely focus on the football, but to tell you the truth, I find it impossible to do that. Some may find this entirely oxymoronic, given my admitted love for Jack Wilshere, a player who has also made his fair share of mistakes (though not of quite the same kind or magnitude) during his career, but that comes at least in part from watching him from the very beginning, breaking into the first team as a sixteen year old, whilst I have known of Vardy, through my Dad’s support of Leicester City, as an outsider, and for only a couple of years.

Our potential newest addition has, in the past, made racist remarks, to which he has since admitted. There is no ‘but’ to that; it is something that all season served as an asterisk to his many on-field achievements, and is something that we will have to live with as we celebrate his goals for the club next season, if he is to join. We will though, because that is what happens in football, so whilst I will not focus strongly on it here, it should not be entirely disregarded, and we will ultimately have to take it into consideration as we determine whether he would be a good signing for Arsenal at the most literal level.

There have been countless comparisons to Ian Wright since the news broke, who signed for Arsenal when he was just about to turn 28, with a similar path taken to the Premier League through several years of non-league football. 185 goals later, Wright departed an undisputed Arsenal legend, and though it would be more than fanciful to suggest that Vardy could reach similar figures, if, as is presumably Arsene’s thinking, we can get a similar tally of goals out of him next season as he managed in this, that might be enough to lift the trophy in May.

The question then is whether Vardy can in fact manage 20 plus goals in 2016/17. The debate here can go one of two ways; either Leicester played to the striker’s strengths this season, in a manner that is markedly different from the way that we approach games, and so the transfer is doomed to go down as a failure, or Mesut Özil will open up defences time and time again for him to finish in a way that Theo Walcott has simply proven unable to do.

In all honesty, I couldn’t predict which way next season will go, and that is why, besides everything else, I feel uncomfortable about Vardy’s potential arrival; this would be the riskiest piece of business that we have carried out in recent memory, and is one that really needs to work, at the very least for Arsene’s sake. This is such a marked change in tack from our manager that I really do feel as if certain corners of our fan base may get their wish and see him depart the club sooner rather than later. I wrote myself recently about how I felt as if we might struggle to move forward significantly with Wenger still at the helm, but perhaps I was wrong, perhaps all we needed was the promise of his impending departure to kick start something that we have been longing to see for twelve seasons now.

This is short-termism to the extreme. The more you think about it, the more (a reported) £22m spent on the second top scorer in the Premier League last season sounds a great deal, but factor in the mere five goals scored in the season prior, the fact that Vardy will be 30 during the course of next season, and the square-pegs-into-round-holes nature of his place in the side, and it looks to a certain degree like desperation from our boss.

There is little out there on the market right now realistically, we badly need a striker, and we do love fun with release clauses. Vardy to Arsenal would be unexpected and unpredictable, but it is far from inexplicable, and we may be forced to get used to it very soon.