Arsenal on the slide?

[Joker]

We are definitely on the slide. We only need to look at results in the last 5 years to see that we have stagnated, committing the same mistakes season after season and losing steam in the title race around March/April time. Every season we don't take the FA Cup seriously and go out in the 5th/6th rounds. We did well in the Carling Cup this season, but again, when it came to the crunch, we failed again. The Champions League shows we are not good enough against Europe's elites, and it's relatively predictable that we will go out in the Quarters every season.

You could argue, how can we be on the slide if we're simply stagnating? The thing is, teams like Liverpool, City, Spurs are looking to improve on the back of impressive seasons (end of season in Liverpool's case). The teams above us are not sitting on their laurels and are continually looking to improve themselves. While we have a squad of spoilt, overpaid footballers, many of whom have a higher opinion of themselves than their performances justify. Quite a few of our first team players are looking to leave (Clichy, Cesc, Nasri), while others have made noises about leaving (Denilson, Bendtner)

I'm not that concerned about the players leaving, because IMO they are cowards who were as responsible for our underachievements as anyone else. However, the lack of incoming players is a worry, and the fact that, in that article that you posted, the author claims that we offered Phil Jones higher wages than United (and a higher transfer fee) shows how far we have fallen in status, and the detrimental effect of this is that we are much less competitive in the transfer market. To put it in language that Wenger and our corporate board will understand, our lack of success has reduced the "brand value", making it harder to entice potential "customers".

I agree with the article in that a complete culture change is needed. We need players who can combine quality with substance, who are willing to run through brick walls and who do not rest on their laurels, and are intelligent enough to realise that a few good performances doesn't make you the dog's bollocks. Those players are available on the market, and do not have to cost the earth (look at Sagna and Vermaelen for instance) If Wenger took his head out of his arse, perhaps he'd see that.

[Coney]

We are definitely on the slide. We only need to look at results in the last 5 years to see that we have stagnated, committing the same mistakes season after season and losing steam in the title race around March/April time. Every season we don't take the FA Cup seriously and go out in the 5th/6th rounds. We did well in the Carling Cup this season, but again, when it came to the crunch, we failed again. The Champions League shows we are not good enough against Europe's elites, and it's relatively predictable that we will go out in the Quarters every season.

You could argue, how can we be on the slide if we're simply stagnating? The thing is, teams like Liverpool, City, Spurs are looking to improve on the back of impressive seasons (end of season in Liverpool's case). The teams above us are not sitting on their laurels and are continually looking to improve themselves. While we have a squad of spoilt, overpaid footballers, many of whom have a higher opinion of themselves than their performances justify. Quite a few of our first team players are looking to leave (Clichy, Cesc, Nasri), while others have made noises about leaving (Denilson, Bendtner)

I'm not that concerned about the players leaving, because IMO they are cowards who were as responsible for our underachievements as anyone else. However, the lack of incoming players is a worry, and the fact that, in that article that you posted, the author claims that we offered Phil Jones higher wages than United (and a higher transfer fee) shows how far we have fallen in status, and the detrimental effect of this is that we are much less competitive in the transfer market. To put it in language that Wenger and our corporate board will understand, our lack of success has reduced the "brand value", making it harder to entice potential "customers".

I agree with the article in that a complete culture change is needed. We need players who can combine quality with substance, who are willing to run through brick walls and who do not rest on their laurels, and are intelligent enough to realise that a few good performances doesn't make you the dog's bollocks. Those players are available on the market, and do not have to cost the earth (look at Sagna and Vermaelen for instance) If Wenger took his head out of his arse, perhaps he'd see that.

I don't agree we are not good enough against Europe's elites. We can and did beat manu and chavs and I don't see people making the same comments about them. We did better (4-3) against Barca - who are almost in a league of their own - whereas manu managed only 3-1 and were just as much pushed out of the game as we were - possession stats for manu and the Arsenal against Barca were similar at about 2:1 ratio. We got bounced out of the CL this year because we drew Barca in the first knock-out round. Had manu or chavs drawn them they would have got crapped on two (yeah - ignore the fact we came second in the group stage - the point is when you draw a team like that in whatever round, you stand a high chance of being screwed.)

As Letters said earlier, we have stagnated but the other teams have not stormed ahead really. Not only in the PL but also not in the CL. Again, had the ball not fallen to Bendtner in the second Barca game but to Nasri or VP, we might well have gone through 4-4 on agregate and a lot of the verbage we have seen on GW would not have happened. Barca might have dominated the games we played against them but they did not put us to the sword by scoring 10 goals against us. If that had been the Arsenal, we would have had a ton of comments about us dominating play but not converting it into goals. Well, against us, Barca did not score anything like the number of goals they should have in proportion to their possession. Same was true when they played manu, if it comes to that.