Wasn't the Arshavin thing a hat tip to the fans when things were starting to look ropey? The "big name" but somehow on the cheap? It bought them an extra year at least. I was always surprised we had no competition for his signature. Something always bothered me about that deal.
Für eure Sicherheit
you know what i used to be in the wengers should never leave camp, and i used to give excuses such as 'the players would leave, we'd finish mid table, we are nothing without wenger'.
then i take a step back and ask myself is that really true? what difference does it makes if our players leave? we've had players leave for the past 10 fucking years so how much more can it actually affect us if a few others fuck off when wenger goes? cesc's fucked off, so has nasri, so this idea that everyone is staying because of wenger is down right crap.
then i used to tell myself 'well if the board are still here then bringing in a new manager won't help'. but i take a step back and ask myself once again, is that really true?
anyone with half a decent tactical brain can see this 4-3-3 bullshit with the players we have isn't working because our wingers DO NOT TRACK BACK ENOUGH AND IT LEAVES US EXPOSED ON THE COUNTER. not only that, we wouldn't see a manager take off the Ox and replace him with arshavin in a game where the ox was clearly our only threat. nor would a manager neglect the defense as long as wenger did, and maybe a new manager would actually TEACH the defense how to FUCKING DEFEND. and TEACH the midfield how to fucking HELP out the defense.
all along we've been mis-sold a vision; whether it's the youth project, a bigger stadium enhancing our power of winning a league, getting into the top 4. and every fucking year we're underachieving. NO-ONE and i mean NO-ONE is bigger than the club and this football club will be here far longer than the amount of time wenger, hill wood or any other cunt lives.
his time is up and he needs to go. im so fucking sad its got to this and i honestly sit here perplexed at how the FUCK we have got to this. with a bit more investment we could have been the most successful team in the 2000-2010 decade. if we had invested after our invincibles season we could have taken chelsea all the way in 04-05 and pipped them, if we had invested properly in summer 07 we could have won the league in 07/08. heck even the past few years we've looked somewhat close to winning the league, but now we dont even look that.
the board have missed a HUGE trick by not investing and going for trophies, the commercial revenue and merchandise sales they bring is beyond expectation. just take a look at man utd who still to this day are milking the success they had in the 90's.
its so sad its got to this and it nearly brings a tear to my eye.
but enough is enough.
this has george graham's final season written all over it.
I got that feeling from your rock analogy.Originally Posted by Niall_Quinn
Maybe I have interpereted it incorrectly.
But again, instead of buying 1 quality player, lets say a striker, for say £10-12m and paying them 90k a week who would almost ensure a top 4 finish, we buy 8 inexperienced kids and pay them 30k a week each.
Fucking brilliant post!!
In my opinion Wenger is both a miracle worker AND a stubborn incompetent in some key areas. It's like a brilliant brain surgeon who is also an alcoholic. You just can't believe an intelligent man would have such a fundamental weakness that undermines everything else he does. Mind you, he's not had much help. Everyone heard what that Gazidis bloke had to say. He's delusional in terms of football, a top grade bean counter maybe but totally unsuited to the job he has if what he says is true. He should be running a sporting goods store or something like that, where the sport itself is somebody else's affair and he is simply left to shift the merchandise.
I see Wenger's role as close to impossible in many ways. Picture a guy at the foot of a mountain. Somebody rolls a rock down the mountain (say the sale of Fabreags), it's Wenger's job to stop the rock hitting the bottom and push the thing back up. Meanwhile some other cunt rolls a second rock down. Now Wenger has to catch that too. He has to keep all the rocks far enough up the metaphorical mountain and he's done it for 14 years. That's the miracle part and that's why we shouldn't be trying to humiliate the guy just because the odd rock slips past him. I doubt anyone could do better given the circumstances.
However, he has this horrible tendency to ignore one or two rocks all the fucking time. He sees the rock perched, ready to be pushed. He sees it making its way down the mountain, gathering pace. And he just fucking ignores it. Why? There's some sort of blind spot. He certainly deserves criticism for that, but there are people blaming him for rolling the rocks down in the first place. It's the board doing that, not Wenger.
Those bastards took every last penny of the money Kroenke invested and they put it in their fucking pockets. Some of them have put fuck all into this club so even a tenner would have been a significant return for them. Not one of the cunts thought, I've done fucking well here, I'll kick half back. Even in terms of a long term, favourable loan. Kroenke takes a lot of heat but they sure made him jump through hoops and they cleaned him out for the maximum amount. That has put a lot of pressure on him to perform too, and he's a business man not a football man so he's going to do what he does best. That's why he loves Wenger, who else is going to faithfully push those fucking rocks up the hill that those greedy bastards rolled down? Kroenke might come good yet - he might. But he has a lot of damage to repair first. Like the fucked up commercial deals we signed just to grease the wheels for a stadium move that now turns out to have been about nothing more that a few greedy men cashing out. We know about those cunts and what they have done and they deserve to be despise for it. We don't know for sure about Kroenke yet, time will tell.
So the key goal to getting back on track is to burn the leeches off the club, stop them sucking blood. Get them out. Let Kroenke do his thing and see if that's worth a damn. He won't be going anywhere in the short term so we can only pray he has the club's interests at heart - not because he's an Arsenal fan but because he's smarter than the cunts he's replacing and realises that performance on the pitch will make it easier to perform at the bank.
I don't think Wenger is going anywhere either. Why would Kroenke remove one of the few foundations he can rely on? A replacement manager would have to be as good as Wenger at managing a much broader range of duties than most managers are exposed to. He'd also have to offer tangible advantages to the team on the pitch. Somebody like Mourinho could easily accomplish the latter, he's a much more astute manager than Wenger in that respect. Some of the other names suggested would be eaten alive though. Moyes, Coyle, the ultimate yes man Ancellotti. Give me a break. Maybe they could get the team played better right up until the team packed its bags and headed out the door. Those players are staying for a reason and I'm betting with 90% of them it's not down to the love of the club. More like the inflated wages we complain about. There must be individual deals with certain players in place while we wait to come out of the darkness. Is that why Theo plays all the time? Does her have a deal to keep him at the club? Is that why the captaincy is treated like a lollipop to be passed around? If true, that's what a new manager faces. A new manager could see us go from top 4-6 to absolutely nowhere fast as relationships break down. I'm speculating, sure, but there has to be something going on behind the scenes that explains the inexplicable failure to correct what we can see in public.
So the answer, purge the greedy fuckers that have robbed the club. Clear the path for Kroenke to see what his plan is. As unpopular as it may be, keep Wenger until this stage of whatever plan they have in place is concluded. And tough it out. Oh and everytime you see PHW or the rest of his cronies from now on - spit on them.
It's a good thread.
What are the main reasons for Arsenal's decline?
1. Other teams spending more on quality players than we are. Man City were nowhere near us and after their takeover they've moved up. Liverpool and Spuds have also taken risks on big name or expensive players - in the case of the spuds, it's paying off.
2. We are not getting the best out of our current squad. Even if we don't add more quality, we are not making best use of the talent we have. This is less the case this season than it has been in the previous to. 2009-2011 we had very good squads and we should have done better than we did. Maybe that would've spilled over into more progress this season.
3. Injuries. We are consistently topping the injury table list. We have been for years now. Some of it may be bad luck. I think it's bad luck that we had 17 fullbacks out at the same time. But the sheer quantity and persistence of injuries has to be looked at. Maybe the club are looking at it. There was talk of this GPS system shit for Van Persie and he's managed ok. But I'm a statistician and I cannot accept that it is likely the club are blameless. Luck has limits.
I think all of our problems can be grouped into these 3 categories. Wenger's tactical failings goes into 2. Letting star players go without replacement goes into 1. Any displays of mental fragility from players goes into 2.
I don't think there are easy answers to any of these (apart from 2). If there were, I think the club would've sorted them out. I'm going to leave the first problem because we've discussed it enough. Personally, I don't believe it is possible for us to know whether Wenger's hands are tied or whether the board are handing him money and he is refusing to spend it. The smart money might be on a combination of the two with a bias towards the board tightening things too much. But I don't want to get into that. There things that the manager could be doing a lot better that are independent of how much he spends on players.
With the injuries, again, it's difficult for us to spot an answer. But it's obvious something is wrong and I think it's irresponsible that enough weight hasn't been put on it. There have been murmurs but - as always - if there has been some research done into it, we've been kept in the dark. It annoys me too that the question is not asked more often by journalists to Wenger about this.
The easiest answer should be for '2'; a better manager would surely be able to get the best out of this current squad. I don't think our squad is good enough to challenge for the title but I don't think we should be near 7th. On the pitch, we keep seeing that Van Persie is the only one showing quality but I still think we have talented players on the pitch that are not doing enough. I think a top manager would get far more quality use out of Tomas Rosicky. I think a top manager wouldn't have waited until our league season was in danger of crumbling totally before introducing an obvious improvement such as Oxlade. I think a top manager wouldn't keep taking off the brightest spark on the pitch when he is in danger of winning us the game. I have some sympathy for Arsene because he watches these players train every day and he must know things about their fitness levels and ability that we don't.
But a series of recent decisions have been questionable at best and there are easy answers to such problems because the problems were easily preventable in the first place.
Last edited by Syn; 02-02-2012 at 01:26 PM.
They aren't net £10mill signings in the true sense though are they? For every £10mill signing we've had £20mill coming in, either on player sales or that 4th place finish. You sell a £20mill player and replace him with a £10mill guy and you are going to see £10mill go missing on the pitch.
Arsenal reminds me more of a political party than a football club these days. You see those dumb politicians on Question Time being laughed out of the room but they still hold the party line no matter how ridiculous they look. Wenger was on board with the stadium move. The ground rules certainly changed on that one. The emphasis was supposed to be world class stadium for a world class team. The financial downturn and the rise of Abramovich and now City are the excuses but there's one outcome that wasn't affected if it was the plan all along. The shareholders' exit strategy. And when you look at what's happened everything can be fit into that agenda. So now there's a new party leader, a new plan and Wenger as one of the senior party figures is going along with that too. Probably until his contract expires. It's ideal for Kroenke, no major upheaval, a financial safe pair of hands until he can take full control. That's what it looks like to me anyway. The timings all make sense. I don't pretend to know what goes on behind closed doors at the club. But I'm capable of looking at the end results, seeing who won, who lost and taking the few pieces we're offered and arranging them in a way that makes at least some sense. These people don't plan from day to day, they have long term plans and strategies. I don't disagree that Wenger must be on board with at least the core of the plan that has unfolded. He must have thought he could make his part in it work and in the main he has, he's kept the club stable in an environment of net negative investment on the pitch. Trouble he has is the success that went before, he's been measured against that (by the fans) which is correct. But the dramatic change in the environment he's operating in sometimes doesn't get fully taken into account. I also think people inside the game will be far more aware of the finer details of what's going on. This is why I don't believe Wenger's stock will have diminished when it comes time for him to leave.
Für eure Sicherheit
I cant help but thinking that the 2 great teams we have had under Wenger have just been so much better than the other teams around them it has covered up the lack of tactical nuance and mental fragility we have seen since 2004? I wonder if the likes of Henry, bergkamp and Vieira were just so good they managed to drag the team along even when they were down.
I certainly remember the bizarre substitutions and over playing of certain players as well as persisting with out of form players being apparent since Arsene first came to the club. I certainly remember "filler" type players in the squad and the less than talented getting games.
IIRC it's been documented that Henry and/or Vieira gave the HT team talk in THAT crucial 4-2 win over Liverpool.
The stats would argue that our great teams weren't actually that great. They won three league titles in ten years and failed miserably in the Champs League. We only had one team to beat in the league then as well.
Yes, I think there's something in that. In 2002-2004 there are numerous examples of us collapsing when we should have won trophies (2003 we should have won the league, was in 2002 or 4 when we went out of 2 cups in a week before the Liverpool game).
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote