Quote Originally Posted by Mac76 View Post
*sigh*

but you CAN blame him for all the mistakes I listed elsewhere, about playing the wrong players in the wrong positions

the Auba on the left thing is just the biggest example but there are others
Yes, you can. No dispute there. But my original question was how did we manage to go from a squad which just last season got to the Europa League Final and finished 5th with 70 points - we were only 2 points off 3rd, the top 2 aside we were as good as anyone (or bad as anyone as the top 2 aside no-one looked much good). How did we go from that to the utter shit we are seeing this season? And the answer to that is not "Arteta". He took over a shit show and hasn't turned it into anything much better, admittedly, but he didn't cause this. MO alluded to this above but last season maybe our final position flattered us somewhat. They say the table never lies but if you remember we had that good run of wins at the start of the season and in many of those games we really weren't that good, a lot of those results could have been different. And Auba and Laca bailed us out a lot, Auba has continued to, mostly. Laca not so much.

I don't think our squad is that good but I don't think it's that bad either. We seem to be significantly less than the sum of our parts.