Some brilliant articles on Wenger/money stuff

[BOBN]

No, but I think Moyes or O'Neill couldve built that and lasted the distance! Moyes and O'Neill are just two names... I am sure you werent creaming ur pants when AW was first appointed. If an unknown like him can take the club to such heights in 04, why not someone else? How do you know Riijkard, O'Neill, Billic, Van Gaal cant do the same job? These are established names.. may be there are a couple of unknowns who can do it too.

The way AW is now, I can confidently say that any dumbass on the street can do better than him including you and Bruce Arena.

built what? have you seen o'neill in the transfer market? the chairman simply stopped giving him money he was so wretched at it. im confident if he came in in 2009 arsenals team would look something like this today:

--------given
sagna-dunne-toure-bridge
walcott-barry-wilshere-downing
------bent-adebayor

and thats doing him a service suggesting he could have hung onto ade and toure.

and you watch how getting 4th gets spun from "X years without a trophy" into "miracle achievement!!1!!!1!" under a british manager.

[Cripps_orig]

I'd love Bent here tbh

[BOBN]

bar bridge and maybe dunne all those players would add to our squad. im not trying to shyt on o'neill by saying the team would look like that, hes notorious for his obvious signing and long ball tactics.

but I do know that teams ceiling would be a top 4 challenge, equal to what wenger is achieving now. you cant just get rid of wenger and expect any old cunt to do better. this clubs fans are notorious for this idiotic thinking, we had it when adebayor left and people thought bendtner would stroll in and replace the 'donkey', gallas to squillaci, cole to clichy, eboue to jenkinson and so on. it doesnt work like that chaps.

personally if wenger were to leave tommorrow we'd have to look at someone like ancelotti.

[fakeyank]

built what? have you seen o'neill in the transfer market? the chairman simply stopped giving him money he was so wretched at it. im confident if he came in in 2009 arsenals team would look something like this today:

--------given
sagna-dunne-toure-bridge
walcott-barry-wilshere-downing
------bent-adebayor

and thats doing him a service suggesting he could have hung onto ade and toure.

and you watch how getting 4th gets spun from "X years without a trophy" into "miracle achievement!!1!!!1!" under a british manager.

That team wouldnt lose 8-2

[cricketsi]

built what? have you seen o'neill in the transfer market? the chairman simply stopped giving him money he was so wretched at it. im confident if he came in in 2009 arsenals team would look something like this today:

--------given
sagna-dunne-toure-bridge
walcott-barry-wilshere-downing
------bent-adebayor

and thats doing him a service suggesting he could have hung onto ade and toure.

and you watch how getting 4th gets spun from "X years without a trophy" into "miracle achievement!!1!!!1!" under a british manager.

He'd probably have bought Heskey again instead of Bent, tbf.

[Özim]

and you watch how getting 4th gets spun from "X years without a trophy" into "miracle achievement!!1!!!1!" under a british manager.

Ferguson is British

[Joker]

I think tactically, Wenger is a mediocre manager. In the past, he was very good at picking "rough diamonds" and developing them into top quality players (like Vieira, Henry, Ljungberg, etc) He was able to pick up these players for relatively modest fees, and put them into a cohesive team that worked very well as a unit. However, he was also lucky that the back 5 was settled, because we've seen that he has a severe blind spot when it comes to defensive signings. If Wenger also had to bring in a new defence when he took over, I don't think we'd have achieved anywhere near the amount of success we did in the early part of Wenger's tenure. He'd have looked to get in cheap, French defenders from Ligue 1 (like he has since 2006) and that would have proven to be our Achilles heel.

However, in recent years, even his ability to find quality players who are unfinished products has diminished. Combine that with his average tactical mind, you end up with a manager who cannot be called one of the top managers in the world. He's a bog standard manager at the moment.

[Power n Glory]

Not bog standard, just not one of the elite coaches. Not many managers get an opportunity to coach a top flight team for over 10 years and I feel Wenger should have won more. Years and years of Champions League qualifications and he hasn't won it yet. Before he retires, I want him to win that. I'm critical of Wenger but I want him to win that and I wish he was a master tactician but he's not. I was hoping hoping he'd finally see the light and just go for it this season.

[AKBapologist]

Nobody is calling for an Aguero or Torres or Ronaldo at Arsenal.

Why couldnt we have wrapped up Mertesacker, Arteta earlier?

What was the whole waiting period about?

Why did he stick players like Bendy, Eduardo, Vela on the wings?

Why hasnt set piece defending been a priority even though we have been leaking goals from that particular area for the last 5 seasons!?

Which manager in their right mind would play four CM's (against Stoke) in a game?

Why wasnt Almunia replaced when he clearly was costing us points every game? From very solid rumors, it was because fulham wanted 1 million more.. 1 fuckin million!!

What happened to our quick counter attacking football? Whats up with the tippy tappy Barca clone football?

There are plenty of other points and none of them were in anyway affected because 'Man City and Chelsea' are blowing everyone off the water. Thats just typical BS. If Arsene had got a couple of very basic things right, we'd have won the PL or some other trophy.. He is way past it and he is super adamant about making his shit policy of youngsters work.. thank Allah for that 8-2 defeat otherwise he'd have stuck to his same old policy.

I find it baffling the reasons people still come up with to defend AW.. He was good.. he is a gob of shit now!

And yet, according to you we where only a couple of signings away from winning the league/CC.

You really have to talk to some other fans to get perspective sometimes.

[Darth Vela]

Some interesting points scattered across this thread.

Fwiw, Wenger is changing things after the failure of last season, anyone how says otherwise hasn't really sat down and looked at the outs and ins, I think this could well be a season of transition (the last two weren't supposed to be, they were just failure) and that's bloody annoying. We now have older, experienced players to help the youngsters along, something which was a significant part of the stagnation of players like Bentnder and Denilson but once they're out injured we still have young, unproven backup; get lucky with injuries (fat chance) and we could pull something off but otherwise, I wouldn't bet on anything more than a CC.

I think the general approach, nurturing younger talent and combining with experience is the best, and possibly only way we can compete with the big 3 as they'll no doubt be called. I'm a lot less certain though that Wenger is the man to do it, the greater part of his legacy at AFC is behind him so it wouldn't hurt to look at his replacement sooner rather than later.