Liverpool consider buying Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain

It’s been a slow holiday week, hasn’t it? Everyone’s hunkered down, doing whatever they do on the holidays, and there’s been precious little of note happening in the world of Arsenal or of transfers in general.

But we’re almost done with the holidays, and the transfer window’s had the paint chipped out of its seams in preparation for being ripped open next week, so of course it’s story time!

Today’s story comes from the Guardian and involves Liverpool, that bastion of, well, something. Anyway, the fine folks at Liverpool have decided that one of their targets this January might be one Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, late of Arsenal and usually of wild swings of inconsistency.

Now, even though this story comes from the Guardian, which is generally reliable, there’s plenty of reasons to be skeptical this will actually become a thing: First, Liverpool are what is commonly known as a “title rival”, and making them better by selling them your players is a bad way to win yourself a title. Next, there’s the whole Suarez debacle and resultant bad blood between the teams, and it’s hard to imagine Wenger wanting to do business with them after all that (REMINDER: Arsenal satisfied the terms of the release clause, and Liverpool then refused to release the player. Snark all you want, but the problem with the Suarez transfer wasn’t on Arsenal’s side).

On the other side of the coin is the player himself. I mean, I like Ox pretty well, but he’s kind of wildly inconsistent. I really want him to get to the point where he’s indispensable at Arsenal. But he’s not there, and in all honesty, if I’m Arsene Wenger and Liverpool say they’ll pay £25 million for a kid that Arsenal bought for half that, I’d have a hard time saying an automatic no to an Ox sale to them, at least on a playing basis.

As mentioned, though, there are many valid reasons to say no to Liverpool; it will be interesting to see what Wenger does.