Summer Transfers 2025 Missed Opportunities and Regrets

[21_GOONER_SALUTE]

I’m confused, you’ve more or less admitted what I’ve said to you. And Yes I view it as you being relentlessly negative because I think you portray things in the most negative light, and because you start out with the first principle of “I believe this club is not run properly” . I conversely don’t believe the club is run badly, I think it makes decisions that I disagree with or from time to time seem objectively self defeating.

Do I think it’s run as well as it could be, No…but neither do I accept your appraisal which seems to view it all from a disastrous lens.

So basically our impasse is that you don’t like how I characterise your view, which is of course something you’re right to do.

But I’m not here to evangelise and presumably you’re not either, it seems to me that you resent that I don’t see things as you do. If I did I wouldn’t argue with you. Sometimes I have misconstrued what you’re saying and I get it wrong, but if I disagree with people here I’m going to say so.

I’m not going to go back to childish insults because they are unnecessary and get us nowhere. But it’s true to say that not only do we fundamentally disagree on our analysis of the club, we disagree on what a club should behave like.

And if you want to look at it like I’m refusing to see the truth of things, well I’ll explain why I think you’re wrong but you’ll believe what you want to (as everyone else here including myself will also do).

Dude, I think we can count, on probably one hand, how many times anyone manages to change anyone's opinion on anything on here, so I doubt that is the aim of every argument you get into, as it is definitely not my aim.

However there are somethings that become self evident and people turn out to universally agree. An early example was the AW cult we had in this club for a significant period of time....which culminated in rash silly statements like Hillwood made where he said, at that time, he has "a job for life". Things like this ulitimately turned out to be unhelpful, detrimental to our aspirations and leave resentment (at least on AW's side). This is universally agreed now, but wasn't earlier. However this never made me question if Peter Hillwood was a fan of the club (though he clearly also loved what AW and the club had done to his personal fortune, which some fans kept conveniently ignoring).


The striker debate was a recent one. Some people on here were comfortable with Arteta heading into the season with no one who saw themselves as a striker (Jesus has denied being one multiple times, and Havertz, well he is Havertz). Some even poured out football treatise on how a striker is not important in the modern game as written by Guardiola with the foreward by Barcelona At least now almost everyone agrees that it was a stupid idea to leave yourself so exposed for +60 game season.

In short, the aim of discussions is to state your peace and move on. Sometimes you'll get it right, other times you'll get it wrong and once in a while someone brilliant will change your mind (we have less of them on here nowadays, miss the likes of PnG)....at the end of the day it's only logical for me to assume at some point that practically everyone on here wants the best for Arsenal in their way and that includes our resident Liverpool fan