Your comments imply you think that the players were doing fine until Wenger stuck his oar in - as though someone who knows what they're doing was in charge for the first half and then Wenger came along and messed it all up. A more balanced assessment is that it was a good result, very good first half and disappointing second which we didn't sustain the pace of the first half but overall job done, on we go.
That's not a balanced assessment at all, not in light of what we already know after years of experience. Firstly, it hardly takes a genius to select and deploy the starting eleven. We have very good players at our disposal. The only impediment to using those players effectively has been Wenger and his favouritism and repetitive persistence with what doesn't work. Nevertheless, he selected an obvious but decent starting eleven on Saturday and he deployed an obvious game plan - use our superior players all over the pitch to dominate and attack. I did not criticise him for his selection nor did I criticise the style of play in the first half, apart from the defending which was woeful as usual. Neither did I leap up and down celebrating Wenger getting these obvious things right. We expect him to get such simple things right, surely? As a most basic element of his job.

The second half was a depressing replay of what we have seen so many times in the past. Mr Bare Minimum was satisfied with his lead so he introduced his now regular negativity and sat on that lead. The impetus of the team was dampened down, his substitutions killed our play and as usual it left on on the back foot looking shaky and risking throwing away a comfortable position. We were very fortunate to come out of the game with all 3 points. Wenger does this regularly and never learns that the way we defend is not conducive to sitting on a lead. But that aside, his general disrespect for the game itself is horrifying. The fans pay big money to be entertained. We rightly criticise Maureen for his anti-footballing approach to the game. Yet Wenger has become every bit as bad. At least Maureen is honest about it, he doesn't pretend to be the bringer of football fantasy. Wenger, on the other hand, goes on about style all the time. Yet he stamps it out at every opportunity. And we know where it all leads because we've seen it season after season. His negativity and lack of ambition will be our undoing yet again.

A more reasonable assessment would be - Wenger out. We need a manager who can either set up a team to defend properly so if we want to see out games comfortably then we can do that, or we need a manager that understand the game lasts for 90 minutes and the whole 90 must be played in order to obtain the most possible from every match. Not just for the sake of the league table, but for the hard pressed fans who pay a fortune and currently have to endure Wenger Boreball most of the time.

The Invincibles season was 2003/4 btw. That's more than a decade ago. How Wenger has managed to take us from that supreme height to here, especially in terms of the football we play, is shocking and still in many ways a mystery. Many excuses can be deployed in his defence, and certainly have been. But there's no excuse for the steady decline in the style of football we play and the ambition of our game.