Farce Reaction: Arsenal 1-2 (2-2) Olympiakos

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Originally Posted by Mac76

Interesting point made on the aresblog podcast about how unfair it is that the away goals rule favours the away side in the second leg - basically olympiacos got 120 mins to score away goals but we only had 90.

The rule should either cease after 90 mins or they should just scrap it altogether.

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I've always thought that too.

Depends how you look at it, we had 120 minutes playing at home.

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Originally Posted by Coney

Sort of - the Ashley Cole saga was a clear case of the board trying to limit David Dein who was arranging the Cole deal and they stopped him. (I remember Wenger saying how silly it was to lose a player over £5000 - then he said nothing more when he realised he had given away the fact that the board had interfered.)

I think the problems with/for Wenger and the club stemmed from 2 things - firstly the loss of David Dein and secondly the desire to build a new stadium and pay it off quickly at the expense of being able to afford top players for a few years.

Dein was the man who got us a lot of players that Wenger would not have bought. When Wenger would think a player good but too expensive, Dein would do a deal and get him anyway.

The years paying off the stadium meant not buying the players we needed to keep the quality squad we had. Wenger still did well with what we had - for years we were still in the top four - even second once - and that without the extra players that would have tipped the balance enough for a PL title. (I am still annoyed by the £40,000,001 offer we made to Liverpool for Suarez. Should have been £50,000,000 and get him as that might have given us the points to nick the title that year and would have been well worth the money).

I think that what then happened is a stagnation - a drop in expectation - so that when we did eventually pay off the stadium and start to spend again, the momentum was gone. Wenger needed to go, NOT because he was crap but because sometimes you just need a fresh start and you need to change the leader to make it happen.

Of course, the other thing is that with the loadsamoney owners of other clubs, the prices of players have gone insane. When Wenger started the new stadium idea to get more money in for the long term, the size of the future costs could not have been forseen.

So while I agree that Wenger should have gone a year or two earlier than he did, it was not because I think he was a bad manager, rather that his longer term plan was overtaken by big money ruining the game.

Blame the board, Sky, rich bastards. But not Wenger.

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Agree with a lot of this but disagree with the impact on finances. The mortgage payment rates were far less than the extra revenue annually we generated simply from having bigger capacity than Highbury. It was a net positive on our cashflow. The Arsenal shareholders have stated this several times. They had the statement of accounts and shared it. What was unusual is that the banks locked us into a long term repayment plan where we would actually pay a penalty for early pay off. Strange but true. This is why Bayern where able to build a similar size stadium the Allianz in the same time period and paid it off 5 years ago.
What killed us after the move was bad management from Wenger...always buying players he liked rather than the ones he needed and bribing them to stay with ridiculous wages while being totally tactically inept on the field.

The board didn't transform the team from a group of big, technical, high-tempo, win at all costs hard-asses to a bunch of tippety-tap, comatose, choking dwarves. That was all Wenger in his quest to deliver utterly pointless Wengerball MkII.

When he lost the leaders that had come through the ranks during the Graham era his fundamental failings rapidly outpaced his strengths. Shit like letting the players express themselves and train themselves. Bollocks that wrapped the squad in wool and compensated them handsomely for failure. That was all Wenger.

And then when it all went to shit he dragged on for years, master of all he destroyed, clueless about how to halt the slide and compounding the damage as each season passed.

The board's major failing was not having the guts to get rid of him as soon as the danger signs went up. A huge mistake that will cost us extensive time and big money to turn around.

It's very simple to explain why his record towards the end was comparable to Emery's best efforts and now Arteta's early results. Rot takes time to destroy the foundations. It eats away inexorably but, for a while, the house might appear quite normal. But it's doomed and all it takes is the progression of time for the true extent of the destruction to become undeniably evident. He injected the whole club with a slow acting poison that even now can probably take us lower.

Emery likely could have done a half decent job if the squad and the mentality had been somewhat stable, but he was out of his depth as a cancer surgeon. All he could do was watch while Wenger's darlings did what they do best - choke to death every time a genuine challenge was put in front of them.

Arteta faces the same, ongoing problems but at least he's shown some signs he might be able to treat elements of the rot. He's worked a small miracle addressing one of Wenger's biggest acts of vandalism, the defence. I wouldn't claim we are decent, but we could now say we are not catastrophically poor. I guess you can call that progress. And I suspect the weird team selections have a lot to do with general fitness and another treat left behind by Wenger, the overall softness of this squad and their inability to hack a tough season competing on several fronts.

There's so much to do here. Cascading failures across the spectrum. You fix one thing and ten other things collapse. I'll be giving Arteta time because the task he faces warrants it. Listening to fans claiming Wenger did a decent job is quite worrying because it's a prelude to shifting the megaton of shit produced by that inept old fool onto the shoulders of Arteta, should he not produce miracles in short order. Emery suffered that fate, although he never looked like being able to turn things around so he wasn't a great loss. Arteta will probably get the same, sometime during next season. But I have hope he'll be able to repair enough in the meantime to leave a much more realistic challenge for the next guy.

By then, Wenger's appalling legacy will biting into a third victim.

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Originally Posted by Niall_Quinn

When he lost the leaders that had come through the ranks during the Graham era his fundamental failings rapidly outpaced his strengths.

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The argument that Wenger’s early success was because of the leaders in Graham’s squad has some merit but it’s not true to say that the minute they left it all started to go wrong. The Invincibles squad was entirely Wenger’s.

Wenger certainly made mistakes but there were a few factors in us being less competitive in Wenger’s later years.
The new stadium cost coming at the time when the billionaires were having the biggest impact.
The loss of Dein, he was clearly an important factor.
The rest of the game caught up and overtook us. It’s hard to remember now but Wenger came into the English game in an era when foreign players were an exotic luxury, clubs had drinking schools and players dined on fast food. Wenger changed all that, his knowledge of the worldwide game and regime of fitness and diet gave us a big advantage. It didn’t take long for other clubs to catch up.

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And then when it all went to shit he dragged on for years, master of all he destroyed, clueless about how to halt the slide and compounding the damage as each season passed.

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And yet in his last and worst ever season we finished 6th and got to the Europa League semi-final.
The season before that we won the FA Cup. The idea that he presided over a decade of decline just isn’t borne out by the facts. His last season wasn’t much worse than 05/06, his penultimate season was better than that

https://i.ibb.co/NYHtdr5/Arsenal2004-2019.jpg

The season after he left we finished 5th, we were a few points away from the top 4, and we got to the Europa League final. People can keep pretending Wenger left us with this awful squad if they like but last season showed promise and there was plenty to build on. It went to shit under Emery this season. This season has been miles worse than any Wenger season.

Wenger certainly should have gone before he did. How long before is up for debate. But the idea that Wenger turned into this bumbling idiot ™ and was so inept that anyone would do better was nonsense and has proved to be nonsense. It’s just weird to see people who spent years claiming that are now saying that no wonder we have got worse since he left because of the state Wenger left us in. Last season showed the state he left us in. Not amazing but a few tentative signs of progress and a reasonable base to push on from. Even the start of this season was fine, comparable with other recent seasons. It was about 8 games in when it all started to go very wrong. Literally no one was expecting Emery to work miracles, but I was expecting better than the worst start to a season since 75/76. If the form continues that badly then yes, Arteta should go too. But he deserves another transfer window and season before judging him.

Yeah, but you can prove anything with facts. They just get in the way of talking bollocks.

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Originally Posted by Coney

Yeah, but you can prove anything with facts. They just get in the way of talking bollocks.

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I'm not going to argue with the master of talking bollocks himself.