All clubs go through periods of good form and poor form, it's normal. But few clubs keep on repeating costly mistakes over a period of a decade without taking decisive steps to correct those mistakes. Assuming Wenger doesn't want this stuff to keep happening, the conclusion has to be he has no effective ideas to get what is a team of talented players competing properly in this league. He wants to play his vision of football regardless of what the other teams are doing.
Football has devolved into two camps, one for the richer clubs who try to play a bit of football but make sure to reinforce it with steel, the other for the clubs with less resources who focus mainly on stopping the opposition playing. We are stuck playing a lightweight passing game that ignores all of the shifts that have gone on in the league. We don't have the steel to support the way we want to play, so them more talented teams easily contain us before unleashing their own weapons - the 8-2, 6-3, 6-1 type beating we suffer. We don't have the organisation and mentality to go up against the wreckers who again easily contain us often using methods that would never be permitted in another league but are considered legitimate in England.
We could previously paper the cracks and edge results by having a bit more pace, creativity and stamina than most of teams we faced. But now we've lost the pace, become one dimensional and our fitness levels are suspect due to the horrendous amount of persistent and repeat injuries so many of our players are susceptible to. We all saw Giroud miss that sitter that would have brought is back to level pegging against the orcs. As a supposedly top striker playing for a supposedly top club you can't let those chances go begging. Misses like that change games.
Then you have a German with 100 caps who ducks under a ball as it comes into the penalty box. This when he knows he's up against a twelve foot beanpole who specialises in barging the ball into the goal off his head, his elbow, his arse, by any means. How, after so many games for the club, does an International defender make such a fundamental mistake? How does the full back let a cross go into the box without making a challenge? What are these guys doing on the training pitch? What are they doing in the post match analysis? Do we have a post match analysis?
How does a supposedly world class midfielder receive the ball in space, with time, look up and pass it straight to the opposition thereby turning possession into scrambled defending? Why does a player who works his arse off, running all over the pitch, get the ball, beat two men, look up for a target and find every other team mate static with not a single sod making themselves available for the ball?
Is this how these guys would play in a well drilled, disciplined team? No way. But this is how they play in a team that has no discipline, no tactics, no plan for the opposition. And it's all down to the manager and the coaching staff.
Of course you can lose a game, the chavs demonstrated that. But falling 3 behind against Stoke? Getting mugged by the worst Utd team in decades? Being played off the pitch against bottom of the league Dortmund? Turning a comfortable victory into a shocking defeat against a team of Belgian kids? When we screw up we screw up 100%, we fail completely.
Wehn new players arrive they look great, because they are still carrying what they learned from the normal, functional teams they previoulsy played with. A few months with us and they are done. It's disgraceful how we waste our resources, especially after a decade of thrift. And so we need a new manager and new coaches before the players we already have here are ruined beyond repair.
I don't know how anyone can be suggesting Bould as the manager. He's part of this mess too isn't he? And if he's not, if he's just sitting there letting this shit unfold, then his balls aren't big enough for the manager's job anyway.
I hope Wenger decides to walk. I don't think he will but he'd do us a massive favour if he realised the task is beyond him. A hard thing to admit, no doubt, but if he really loves the club and wants to retain the respect of the fans then he should do what's best for all concerned and hand control over to somebody who can start the long task of rebuilding the foundations on which any half decent team out there is constructed.
He won't go. It'll get nasty and that'll be a shame.
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Originally Posted by Maestro
