Match Reaction: Newcastle 0-1 Arsenal

[Niall_Quinn]

I agree we need to pick up but if Chelsea are contenders after their bad start then we surely are

You have blind spots, don't you? The chavs have a bollocks of a bloke in charge, but he's a top manager. We have a bollocks of a manager who is a top bloke. Hence, yes, the chavs will be challenging and no, we won't. For confirmation please see previous nine seasons.

[Letters]

You know full well that the previous 9 seasons are increasingly less relevant the further you go back.
By that logic we can't have won the Cup for the last 2 years because of the previous 7 seasons.
The new level of signings have made a difference, we were winning games last year which we wouldn't have won in previous seasons and while I wish we'd done more in the summer we should be good enough to compete.

Edit: I agree there's little evidence of that so far in terms of performances but you could say the same for Chelsea and we know they'll be up there come May.

[Power n Glory]

I'm not convinced it matters what competition it's in. Pressure is pressure, and the City game was in the league.
And last year when we got going we got as many points as Chelsea, not over a short run but over 26 games in the league
And we had that run of 9 wins in a row. After our start though we'd made it impossible to compete. Are we off to a slow start this year? City are sweeping all before them thus far but of the other teams who you may considers contenders our start is the same or better than all of them. You can cherry pick bad results from last year, I can cherry pick good ones. End of the day all we have to do this year, for now, is stay in touch. Last year we sorted ourselves out but it was too late. This year the performances may have been poor but the results have been good enough to keep us in contention. I agree we need to pick up but if Chelsea are contenders after their bad start then we surely are - as much as anyone can be considered a contender or not after 4 games.

Would you consider us contenders had we won all 4 games or would you just think we'll mess it up anyway?
If we're there or thereabouts with 10 games to go then we have a chance.

Of course it matters. The opening day was a pressure game and we lost. What other teams do doesn't matter. The focus is on us and whether we've actually learned anything from the past few seasons and it's looking like we haven't.

If we'd have won convincingly won the 4 open games and I'd seen something in the side I haven't seen before then I'd be convinced. Think back to the 2013/14 season where we had that discussion on our title chances and I was convinced we had a shot. We only needed to sign a striker. The squad looked more organised and we had a boost in confidence with that Ozil signing. This year, there isn't anything to go on. We have injuries already, shaky defensive displays, disjointed midfield play and no goals. Besides that, Wenger still doesn't know how to utilize his squad, makes odd subs, we still have no answers tactically for a well organised defensive team we've already got injuries to key players. It all sounds very doom and gloom but there isn't anything on offer to make me think we'll have a different season. A long way to go but it's not as if I haven't been watching the pattern and trends for the past decade or so.

[Kano]

Last season we picked up a paltry 14 points from the teams in the top 8. That's a total of 14 from 42.

Talking about beating City and Utd sounds great in isolation but set against a wider context of our performances against the better teams in the league, immediately above and below us, and it looks less impressive. There is an argument that you can win the league and still perform poorly in the top 4 mini-league but I'm sure that doesn't extend to almost half the league too.

[Niall_Quinn]

You know full well that the previous 9 seasons are increasingly less relevant the further you go back.
By that logic we can't have won the Cup for the last 2 years because of the previous 7 seasons.
The new level of signings have made a difference, we were winning games last year which we wouldn't have won in previous seasons and while I wish we'd done more in the summer we should be good enough to compete.

Edit: I agree there's little evidence of that so far in terms of performances but you could say the same for Chelsea and we know they'll be up there come May.

The new signings haven't made a difference, because Wenger doesn't know how to use them. Stick Ozil and Alexis in any other club and it's an instant improvement - here they just get drowned in Wenger's tappy sewageball. How many more seasons are you going to bang on about progress and improvements when such things simply don't exist? So what if we had the odd decent game here or there, you'd expect at least that wouldn't you, considering the money sloshing around the place and the facilities and the operation as a whole. What, 10 decent performances a year tops? Where you can come away and say we really played some decent stuff there (regardless of the result). And 50 lumps of shit for the rest of the time, the players jogging around playing pretty triangles and running into brick walls. 1 day for Wenger to bring in a couple of players that can work with the likes of Ozil and Alexis to overcome the ongoing and extreme deficiencies of our manager.

[GP]

Do you know what will make things better?

Crying about it.

[Power n Glory]

You know full well that the previous 9 seasons are increasingly less relevant the further you go back.
By that logic we can't have won the Cup for the last 2 years because of the previous 7 seasons.
The new level of signings have made a difference, we were winning games last year which we wouldn't have won in previous seasons and while I wish we'd done more in the summer we should be good enough to compete.

Edit: I agree there's little evidence of that so far in terms of performances but you could say the same for Chelsea and we know they'll be up there come May.

Rubbish. We've had seasons where we've beaten Chelsea and City. Beat the breaks off Chelsea 5-3 in that season. Seasons where we've beaten Milan and Bayern and it's gone down as some landmark as a testament of our 'growth and belief'. This is before our new signings. It's not about who we beat.

[Niall_Quinn]

Do you know what will make things better?

Crying about it.

What was the unedited version?

[Letters]

What other teams do doesn't matter.

What?!

[Letters]

The basic argument boils down to "we can't win the league because Wenger is a bumbling incompetent ™".

If you believe that then why bother watching? One of the great things about sport is its unpredictability. Go and see a concert or show and you're pretty much guaranteed to have a good time, with football...FY may be there and thus ensure a limp home defeat and you may have an awful afternoon - and to cap it all you'll have had to meet FY before the game (love you really, FY - no homo). One of the things which had made football rubbish is the ever spiralling money and the inequality in its distribution which has made football predictable. That is a bad thing in any sport. If you look at the league tables in the 60s and 70s you'll see a lot of different sides winning the league and a side may win the league one year and finish 8th the next. Unless Moyes takes over the reigning champions that is pretty much impossible now and only one of a few teams can realistically win it, and they're the same teams every year. All that said, we are one of those few teams IMO. Wenger has his flaws but he's not incompetent - no-one outside the Arsenal fanbase believes that he is.

It's not unreasonable to think that Wenger can't win us the league but stop trying to dress the argument up as "we can't win it because or our bad performances so far" or because we haven't won every game like City have, that argument doesn't wash because if we're out of it already then so are Utd and Chelsea. If we stay in the hunt and are there or thereabouts with 10 games left then we have a chance IMO. The performances have been poor so far but we know they're capable of much better, right now it's all about results.