There are some questions that are important enough that they’re worth expending some of your time, energy, and brain cells. “What am I having for dinner”, “where should I live”, “do I love this person enough to marry them”, and other queries like that. Those are Life Questions, and they deserve serious consideration and thought before rushing to an answer.
Then, there’s the “who should the captain of my favorite soccer team be?” question. I’ve written at some length on this site before about my thoughts on captaincy in the modern game (tl;dr it doesn’t matter nearly as much as we think it does, but it’s not nothing, particularly internally), so maybe I’m coming at this from a bias you don’t hold, but I can’t really invest a lot of emotion into who wears the little bit of elasticized cloth that means they get to come out of the tunnel first.
With that said, though, Arsenal do have a captain, who currently of course is Per Mertesacker. I mean, he’ll be Per Mertesacker no matter what, but he’s currently the captain of Arsenal. Now that that’s clear, Arsene Wenger was asked about the future of Aaron Ramsey. Wenger is trying to persuade Ramsey to sign a long-term deal, and when asked if that meant he envisioned Ramsey being captain someday, Wenger said
‘Why not? It is all there. He has maturity, has improved technically and is more conscious of the importance of his technical qualities.’
If there’s a more resounding endorsement of one’s skills and abilities than “why not”, otherwise known as the verbal equivalent of a shrug, well, I’ve yet to hear it. But anyway, it would appear that, should Ramsey tie his future to Arsenal, that future might include being the guy that trades those little flags with the other team before every game.
TO BE CLEAR: I like Aaron Ramsey. I hope he stays. I just don’t care about the whole captaincy bit.