Are Roma Close to Signing Arsenal Keeper Wojciech Szczesny?

With so much focus on Edin Dzeko and Mohamed Salah potentially joining the Giallorossi, and Seydou Doumbia, Gervinho and Mattia Destro leaving, the hunt for Roma's next goalkeeper sort of got lost in the shuffle. With the pie in the sky visions of Hugo Lloris and Salvatore Sirigu always being too farfetched, and the-it-makes-too-much-sense-not-to-happen moves for Samir Handanvoic and Petr Cech being scuppered by Inter and Arsenal, respectively, Roma are still looking for an understudy/would be successor for Morgan De Sanctis.

Well, due to their shrewd acquisition of Cech, the Gunners now have a surplus in shot stoppers, leading to speculation that Roma have set their sights on Arsenal's Wojciech Szczesny, as reported by Il Tempo and Gianluca Di Marzio, with the former indicating Roma has already agreed to personal terms with the young Polish keeper.

Wojciech Szczesny, 25-years-old, is massive young man, standing 6'5" and weighing in at a svelte 185 lbs. Though he first broke through in 2009, Szczesny has found playing time in Emirates hard to come by, falling behind David Ospina and now Petr Cech in the pecking order. Szczesny's Arsenal career hit its nadir when, after committing to costly errors in the Gunners 2-0 defeat at Southampton in January, he was fined twenty grand for smoking in the in the locker room after the match and summarily benched for the remainder of the season.

Szczesny is renowned for his quick reflexes but, much like the similarly statured Sirigu, he struggles controlling the airspace around the six yard box, or at least he did during his limited playing time this past season.

Nasty smoking habits aside (hmm, perhaps he should have been Zeman's pet project not Goicoechea), if Roma can snag Szczensy on the cheap, this could be a good pickup, potentially solving the keep riddle for several seasons.