Following David Ornstein's recent appearance on The Arsecast, I wanted to shed a bit more light on the transfer situation, and on Ornstein's relationship with the club. I feel like things are sometimes presented to fans in a deliberate and dishonest way, and in my opinion the fans deserve the raw, uncut truth.
The thing is: Ornstein's good, but he's not that good. We all know he's a mouthpiece for the club, and so the information you get from him is selective at best, and of mixed veracity at worst. He told us, for example, about Shkodran Mustafi's off-the-field problems but neglected to tell us about the dairylea incident (I'll get to that later). He also talked a little about Wenger and Gazidis' personal relationship, but neglected to mention anything about the now well documented saga with the persil non-bio spliff. These aren't small omissions. They aren't things you'd just forget to mention, or that a man with the access David Ornstein has could simply be unaware of. Nor are they outright lies. No, these are in fact just two small examples, of many, of David Ornstein and the club conspiring to hide the truth from the fans, and to be in control of all the facts. I'm going to try and give the power of knowledge back to the people who deserve it the most.
First things first: Thomas Lemar. Ornstein explained how Thomas Lemar had expressed willingness to join us earlier in the window, only for Monaco to refuse our offer, with us later coming in with an acceptable offer, only for the player to change his mind. Again, the spine of truth is there but the meat is simply not on those bones. To really understand what went wrong with the Thomas Lemar deal, you have to really understand Thomas Lemar.
At the age of 7, Thomas Lemar told his parents for the first time that he wanted to be a footballer. This was also when he told them for the first time about something else that had been on his mind for a while: goblin sharks. Ever since being shown a picture of one by his older brother a month or so prior, the once outgoing and confident Thomas had become trapped inside himself, simultaneously horrified and fascinated by the rare species of deep-sea shark, also know as the "living fossil" of the ocean.
Let's face it, he was right. Goblin sharks are both horrifying and fascinating. Like most creatures living below the thermocline, the goblin shark makes little use of it's vision, instead relying on electroreceptors (also known as ampullae of Lorenzini) to pick up on the electric fields of other deep-sea animals. However, unlike most other deep-sea sharks, the goblin shark's pupils can change size, suggesting it does make some use of it's vision. This poses a lot of interesting questions such as: how does this pink-skinned chondricthyte calibrate these different senses and make effective survival decisions in such a harsh environment, and how do the other fish have electric fields without getting shocked? After all, water conducts electricity.
It has to make you wonder: what else is out there?
Anyway, Lemar's parents were apprehensive about the football thing but ultimately quite supportive, and somewhat relieved that the "big announcement" hadn't been to do with any confusion about his sexuality. However, when it came to the sharks, they were less understanding, and were in fact quite dismissive. When Thomas began to break down in tears during his confession, his father is alleged to have scoffed, and asked "What's wrong with you? If you can't deal with imaginary sharks how can you ever satisfy a woman?" This kind of approach with children is not only unhelpful (and totally inappropriate), but it also actually compounds the problem and makes it worse. As a parent to a child with numerous phobias and neuroses, I can't begin to explain to you how wrong Thomas' father was in how he handled the situation.
The problems didn't stop there however. Minutes before Thomas stepped onto the field for his debut for Monaco, his father reportedly sent him a text that read: "how can u be scared of somthing thts so far down under the ocean? Just dont go their if your that scared" Thomas had been expecting some encouragement or support before his big night, maybe a "good luck son!", or "score one goal for me tonight my boy!" but instead all he got was more torment. It's not hard to understand how this could have badly effected his confidence, and at such a crucial time too.
As a result, a huge factor in Thomas Lemar's plans for the future were centred around careful management of his phobia/obsession, and he wanted to make sure he was at the sort of club where he could look at pictures of goblin sharks if he wanted to, but where he wouldn't have to look at any if he didn't want to. For this reason he felt comfortable with the idea of joining Arsenal, as he had spoken privately with Wenger about his issues, and Wenger had both reassured Thomas, and also opened up about his own obsessive phobia of cuckold pornography, which he felt somewhat trapped by himself. The idea of some goblin shark-related contract clauses were also floated by Thomas, which Wenger said to put a pin in and discuss at a later date. This was good enough for Thomas.
So, Lemar informally agreed to the move, and the rest is history. Monaco refused Arsenal's highest offer, and wanted the type of money that we simply weren't willing to pay at that time. Much to Arsene's chagrin, the club felt Lemar was not enough of a necessity to warrant the type of fee being suggested, and so the decision was made to go about our business elsewhere.
However, the Liverpool defeat, whilst not a huge shock to many of us fans, came as something of a wake-up call for the board, who realised they needed to do whatever necessary to acquire the right targets to make sure we returned to the top 4 this year. A fee was agreed with Monaco, and it was now time to dot the i's and cross the t's.
However, Wenger, reeling from a humiliating defeat against a rival, was not in the best mood when the versatile French winger phoned him up the next day to follow up about the goblin shark-related clauses in his contract.
"Shutup about your fucking sharks!", Wenger barked.
"They're not *my* sharks! How could I even own a goblin shark? The equipment and expertise required to pull something like that off is simply not widely available, if at all!", Thomas shouted back, before slamming the phone down.
Wenger tried calling back,and left numerous, increasingly desperate voicemails, even sending Lemar an extremely long 11-message text explaining how his insensitivity about the sharks was not an accurate reflection of his feelings towards Thomas' phobia, but more of an insight into the way he felt about himself and his own, at times flawed, psyche. But that was the end of the Lemar saga. He never called back, and the deal was scrapped
So you see how by leaving out small, but crucial bits of information, such as the ill-fated phone call between Wenger and Lemar, the club have been able to sculpt the narrative into something about transfer fees and club performance, when really it came down to a failure in communication between the manager and the player. More next time.
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