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cubeadvance

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The Fox

The Fox

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I don't have a problem with booing. I wouldn't do it myself because as a grown man it just feels incredibly silly, but I think it's perfectly valid for paying fans to boo the players/manager if they want to. But the stuff in that video goes way beyond that and whatever you think about the bloke's suitability for the job, he simply doesn't deserve that. He's arguably the most important figure in our club's history, only Chapman can challenge him, and he's given us some fucking incredible times. Also, for all his flaws, he's clearly a very decent person, and he's turned down some of the top jobs in world football to stay with us.

Look, I do a fair number of away days. I get the cost involved and the time commitment it necessitates, and how annoying it is when you do all that and the team are shit. But at the end of the day I go to those games knowing that sometimes, your team can play like shit and lose. It's an occupational hazard. And getting that wound up over football, to the point where you'd openly abuse our long-serving manager to his face, well that's never gonna compute with me. I get angry at the football sometimes, but I don't lose my frigging mind like that. Shankly was talking bollocks. It's just a game.

But then I guess people have become so polarised in their opinions on the manager, and so angrily entrenched in their stances, that the abuse is sadly not surprising. You've got factions at both extremes on the Wenger issue, both becoming increasingly mental in their viewpoints, and I can't see how that's going to improve. It's only a few months since we won the FA Cup, and we'd won three on the bounce prior to Stoke, but then you get one shit performance and poor loss and all hell breaks loose. I don't see that improving and I do wonder if Wenger might jack it in at the end of the season as a result. I suspect he figured the FA Cup win would get people off his back for a while but clearly that hasn't happened, and some people's patience is now thinner than ever. Apart from winning the league or Champions League this year or next, which both seem borderline impossible, I don't think there's any scenario other than Wenger seeing out his final contract amidst a sea of venom. It's all rather depressing, to say the least.

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Steve007

Steve007

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I think it's the manner in which we are losing games that is getting to people. Arsenal of old used to lose a few games but we we went down fighting but in recent seasons we've been getting battered & humiliated. 5 & 6 against City, 6 against Chelsea, 5 against Liverpool... this is unacceptable!!!

Wenger assembled the squad and he's ultimately responsible for the state of it. The FA Cup win doesn't mean shit at the end of the day. It was a great day out but that was last season and doesn't help in any way with our current position. Fans have got to stop living in the last and they have to realise the glory days were 10 years ago. Wenger has been riding on that success for years and it can only carry him so far before enough is enough. Fans are now turning as they are fed up and it's time for him to go come the end of the season.

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Timmo

Timmo

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There's an interesting book in managers being the victim of their own success. Give fans success and they come to expect it. Ian Holloway, Nigel Adkins and now quite possibly Nigel Pearson are recent examples of managers whose reward for getting promotion is the sack. Arsenal, a team that has the 3rd or 4th highest spend in the league, tends to finish 3rd or 4th. They overachieve a couple of years and people then expect to be doing it every year. Your best bet to keep your job is to do what David Moyes did at Everton, keep knocking on the door but never go in.

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The Fox

The Fox

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Winning the league is an unrealistic expectation for any club outside City/Chelsea/Utd because of the vast financial disparity. We're gaining and will probably continue to do so as FFP stuff comes in, but right now it's a virtual impossibility.

This isn't to absolve Arsène for problems of his own making, nor is it to necessarily say he's the best guy for the job. And it is definitely not an excuse for capitulating pathetically to Stoke City. But the fact is that with the money the top clubs have, it would take an Atletico-style almighty freak of a season for any club to beat all three of those megabucks sides over the course of a season. It's in inconvenient truth that should also be inescapable, but I think some people refuse to accept it.

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hauk

hauk

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Yeah it's really hard right now with us having apparent financial parity with Man City and Chelsea, but they stacked their squads up prior to FFP coming in so although in the long run we might be able to compete, it's seems unlikely right now. I did read that our wage bill is now higher than Chelsea's though.

Having said all that, none of this excuses Wenger's refusal to pay anywhere near the market rate for defensive players (including DM's).

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toythatkills

toythatkills

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I think Wenger's had choices to make for the last ten years. He can spend money on defenders or spend money on attackers, but he can't do both because Arsenal simply haven't had the money to do that. So he's spent money on attackers because that's how he likes to play and then just kind of hoped for the best in defence, and he's just about gotten away with it.

The total fuck-up in this pre-season is pretty inexcusable though.

Still, we've needed Wenger these last ten years. Without him, Arsenal haven't been in the Champion's League for at least the last five years and have finished behind Tottenham for most of them as well. I know people were pissed off at Wenger because we weren't winning stuff and "fourth place isn't a trophy," but getting rid of Wenger wouldn't have got us winning stuff, it would have sent us the other way. Everyone just seems to assume that changing the manager would have led to titles but I can't see it.

There's no manager who could have achieved what Wenger achieved at Arsenal with the constraints he was under, and done it so consistently. Maybe he's not the man for the job now that those constraints have been lifted somewhat because he still seems to want to work under them, but the question still remains - who's out there to do a better job? Take out the people who are obviously not going to come here, and take out the latest one-season-wonder flavour-of-the-month managers, and there's not a great deal out there to take the club somewhere other than where Moyes took United.

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The Fox

The Fox

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I'm open to replacing the manager at the end of the season if someone can be hired who has a good chance of being as good if not better. That's a very small list though.

Realistically I think he'll go until Summer 2016 then step down. I don't think he'll see out the last year of his contract because everyone knows he's not signing another one and he'll be a lame duck. I still think we'll finish top 4 this season, probably comfortably, if we can buy a decent Koscielny alternative in January and stem this ludicrous flow of injuries.

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Steve007

Steve007

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I think Wenger's had choices to make for the last ten years. He can spend money on defenders or spend money on attackers, but he can't do both because Arsenal simply haven't had the money to do that. So he's spent money on attackers because that's how he likes to play and then just kind of hoped for the best in defence, and he's just about gotten away with it.

The total fuck-up in this pre-season is pretty inexcusable though.

Still, we've needed Wenger these last ten years. Without him, Arsenal haven't been in the Champion's League for at least the last five years and have finished behind Tottenham for most of them as well. I know people were pissed off at Wenger because we weren't winning stuff and "fourth place isn't a trophy," but getting rid of Wenger wouldn't have got us winning stuff, it would have sent us the other way. Everyone just seems to assume that changing the manager would have led to titles but I can't see it.

There's no manager who could have achieved what Wenger achieved at Arsenal with the constraints he was under, and done it so consistently. Maybe he's not the man for the job now that those constraints have been lifted somewhat because he still seems to want to work under them, but the question still remains - who's out there to do a better job? Take out the people who are obviously not going to come here, and take out the latest one-season-wonder flavour-of-the-month managers, and there's not a great deal out there to take the club somewhere other than where Moyes took United.

As I said, stumbling in to 4th and occasionally 3rd isn't an achievement. I still can't get my head around how people think this is something to be celebrated. We have some good players and with the players Wenger has had at his disposal, he's underachieved. Why can't people see this? We've consistently lost/got battered by Chelsea, Man City, Liverpool & Man United even when at times we've had by far the better players on the pitch. Then look at how many points we consistently drop at teams in mid-table and below, it's pathetic. Then there's the spectacular collapses which we do better than anyone else. How about the 4-4 draws with Newcastle & Spurs as very painful reminders?

I don't expect us to win every game as that's impossible, but I do expect us to go down fighting. When we lose it's rarely a defeat where we can consider ourselves unlucky. Normally we get well beaten, be it a thrashing or by a very comfy goal or two deficit where we don't look in any danger of threatening the opposition.

The champions league qualification is a nonsense anyway. All the competition does is fill the coffers by £20m a season. We all know we will get dicked by a real top team in one of the knock-out stages. If we get to the quarter finals that's seen as an achievement and I feel embarrassed by that as that's a small-time mentality that gets on my fucking wick.

I think if we went down with a scrap more regularly fans wouldn't feel so disheartened. To get well beaten quite regularly like we have done over the last 5 or 6 years isn't something fans like myself can accept or take, which is why we want change. We all pay sky high prices to watch this mediocrity, too. To the non-paying fan they are perhaps not as demanding as those of us that spend £1000's a season watching our team underachieve. I can't accept a top 4 finish as a decent season. With the revenue the club generates from TV & record breaking sponsorship deals for kits/naming rights etc, we as fans deserve better. I don't demand we win the league, but at least give it a go. If we fall away towards the end (say late March or early April) then at least we can say we've given it a go and build on it for next year. Finishing 12, 18 or 20 points behind 1st place shows how far we have to go and the top teams will keep getting stronger as we tread water.

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toythatkills

toythatkills

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The champions league qualification is a nonsense anyway. All the competition does is fill the coffers by £20m a season. We all know we will get dicked by a real top team in one of the knock-out stages. If we get to the quarter finals that's seen as an achievement and I feel embarrassed by that as that's a small-time mentality that gets on my fucking wick.

All it does is fill the coffers by £20m a year, so that's £200m over the last ten years, without which we don't have Sanchez. Where are we this season without Sanchez? Somewhere around 15th? That's ignoring all the other players we also don't have. I don't really understand this "qualifying for the Champion's League every year isn't an achievement" thing, because of course it fucking is, it's just not the achievement you wanted.

There's probably a few seasons in the last ten that Arsenal should have done better, and certainly on a game-to-game basis we've lost games we should, on paper, have won. But I think if you honestly looked at the teams that finished above us every year you'd find it pretty hard to argue that our squads were consistently better than theirs to the point we should have won the league. And yeah, some of that is because Wenger has made mistakes, but I think a lot more of it is to do with the conditions that he, and any other manager, would have been forced to work under.

It's easy to look at Mourinho at Chelsea and say "he wins stuff, therefore he'd win stuff at Arsenal," but at Chelsea when he has a problem he can just throw £30m at it and it's solved. At Arsenal he'd have to work to find a solution, and Wenger has been doing that for the last ten years better than anyone else could have. It's meant we haven't challenged as much as we should have, but it wasn't possible. We should be challenging now, for sure, but to dismiss what Wenger has been doing for the last ten years is just idiocy.

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redbloodcell

redbloodcell

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All it does is fill the coffers by £20m a year, so that's £200m over the last ten years, without which we don't have Sanchez.

Or pays the wages for about half of the starting XI. Think about who the backups are for your 4 best players (Steve, not ttk), would you want them starting every week?

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The Fox

The Fox

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Fourth is par. Third is slight overachieving if you look at the finances and squads Chelsea, City and Utd have had. We finish about where we should do every single year. This refusal to accept that football changed when Abramovich rocked up with his roubles in 2004 really confuses me, especially when it coincided with us dropping £400m on a stadium. Since he bought Chelsea a decade ago no club besides those three had managed to win a trophy while finishing top four, until last season. So no, finishing fourth isn't particularly something to be celebrated, but the consistency of achieving 'par' or ' one under' for ten years on the trot is clearly some sort of achievement. It's not *nothing*. You don't "stumble into fourth place" for heaven's sake.

There's not a manager in the world who could have had us challenging for the title right to the very last, year in year out, against far richer teams with far better squads. Not a chance. It's a complete fantasy, a pipe dream. If you've demanded that over the last decade then frankly you're living in the clouds, and your sense of entitlement is baffling.

There are legitimate doubts about whether Wenger is the best guy going forward, but he was certainly the best guy before. Who else would have turned down Real Madrid or managing their country in order to stay in charge of a ragtag mob containing Denilson and Eboue, with a board of directors who kept implying you had money to spend even though you didn't?

Some people are bored with Wenger. I get that. I am a bit as well. I hope they're not blind to the fact that any new manager will have new flaws, and a risk to take us backwards. But I suspect for them, at least the flaws will be new ones and not the same old annoyances we've seen time and time again. But I don't see how any of this justifies people shouting at his face to "fuck off", or trying to disregard his achievements, his loyalty, and his positive qualities.

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Rev

Rev

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The trouble is, we all know that spending ~£30m extra (even adjusted for inflation) at pretty much any point in the last decade would have got us trophies. It's this injury crisis spoiling the good run that is never prepared for, we just need a proper second eleven. It can be promising kids, but ideally it needs to be players that do something different so we've actually got tactical options.

Fourth is fine, but the reason for us being fourth never feels like it's "we were the fourth best team" it feels like "we'd have been right up there if we'd had just an extra..." which is awful.

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The Fox

The Fox

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The trouble is, we all know that spending ~£30m extra (even adjusted for inflation) at pretty much any point in the last decade would have got us trophies. It's this injury crisis spoiling the good run that is never prepared for, we just need a proper second eleven. It can be promising kids, but ideally it needs to be players that do something different so we've actually got tactical options.

Fourth is fine, but the reason for us being fourth never feels like it's "we were the fourth best team" it feels like "we'd have been right up there if we'd had just an extra..." which is awful.

Only Wenger's most lunatic supporters would try to defend the squad he went into the season with from a defensive perspective. The problem is it's felt like we've been a couple of players away from challenging for pretty much ten years. Until a year or so ago, you could argue that we basically couldn't afford those players. But this summer we clearly had money to buy one centre back or Arteta alternative, and didn't do it. Everyone knew that would come back to bite us, and so it has. This seems to be the main beef people actually have with Arsene: he seems to have these blind spots about such obvious squad/player flaws, and every summer seems like groundhog day. People are fed up of it. Even a lot of people who are still huge fans of his are incredibly frustrated about this, because it seems like *everyone* could see this defensive crisis coming apart from the one bloke who can do something about it.

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toythatkills

toythatkills

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Debuchy is back tonight, our defence is almost at full strength now so there'll probably be no need for Wenger to splash the cash in the January window.

Frontline of Podolski, Campbell and Sanogo. This should be fun. The bench is pretty amazing as well: Martinez, O'Connor, Kamara, Maitland-Niles, Zelalem, Iwobi, Akpom

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Gotters

Gotters

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some tekkers are good, but that was unbelievable tekkers from Ramsey there for the 3rd


Podolski is Graham Hick, he'll smash a double hundred against Scotland or the Cambridge University but see how he does against the Aussies - flat track bully

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