In the end he signs the players, so if they're not good enough or lack motivation it's down to him. I agree players earing 100k shouldn't need motivating, but half of these guys haven't had to work to get a big pay day, it's been handed to them on a plate so it's not hard to understand why they don't think they need to bother too much, the money still keeps rolling in, again all down to Wenger.
If a player isn't performing then you need to put him in his place and if it doesn't work move him on and find someone who will work and perform.
Too many freeloaders, premadonnas and untouchables in Wenger's team, noone is allowed to say a word against them because in his opinion the effort and spirit is spot on, praise someone when it's deserved but criticise them when the time is right too.
What a useless mod.. time to make some changes at the top tbh.![]()
Arsene Wenger, the only football manager that got paid 8 million quid to do nothing but sit on his arse..
Of course all problems stem from Wenger but so do all the good things too. And as sour as the mood has been recently let's not pretend there is nothing good about how things have gone over the last couple of years. The new level of signing did start to look like it was making a difference, 3rd and the FA Cup was a good platform to build on. We've failed to push on and that's why Wenger should go, but he's hardly leaving a car crash behind.
I agree our hypothesis - or hope, really - that Wenger would push us on with the new money was wrong. But that doesn't mean I need to revise my opinion that during the previous 8 years he basically did a pretty good job keeping us in the top 3 or 4 while all about us threw money around trying to unseat us (as many predicted repeatedly they would). And it doesn't mean that he is suddenly a bumbling incompetent and everything he does or says is wrong. He is not a "fucking tool" or "the biggest cock in football" as you were calling him in the match thread (while we were 2-0 up). There's a pretty big middle ground between thinking he's no longer the right man to push us on and thinking he's "the biggest cock in football". He clearly isn't.
It is possible that had we sacked Wenger 2 years ago we'd be in a better position but it is not a given. Utd hired the 'genius' Van Gaal to rescue them from the mess Moyes made, he spent a load of money in the summer, has Utd playing awful football and they currently have 9 fewer points than they did at this stage last year (for balance, I should add we have 5 fewer). It's unfair to judge Klopp this season but when he arrived amid much fanfare some of the more excitable people on here were all but declaring them title contenders. They were 10th when he took them over, now they're 9th. It's only fair to give him a couple of years to see where he can take them but his last season at Dortmund showed he's not the towering genius some have made him out to be.
So yes, we need to move on from Wenger. We're all but guaranteed to finish below Leicester and that isn't good enough. But we're fairly likely to finish above most if not all of the other clubs who are usually there or there abouts so he's not doing as much wrong as some make out and it's not valid to think that any idiot could take us over and we'd immediately improve.
We need to replace Wenger but we need to be careful about it because pick the wrong man and you're in mid-table and as Utd are finding out it's not easy to buy your way back in when you're there.
There has been a gradual build-up with the grim realisation nothing was going to change when we fucked up against West Ham on opening day. Then we were so ravaged with injuries in fucking August that a very average Liverpool team looked world beaters. Nothing AW shouldn't have learnt from.
In the CL, Giroud's petulance cost us against Zagreb and Ospina conceded his second goal in a few months standing behind the goal line, proving that was never coached out of him. There have been near-misses since. Nothing AW shouldn't have learnt from.
Then the complete fool Gabriel took it upon himself to stamp on Costa and get himself sent off against Chelsea and we all knew then Costa and Mourinho would rub our noses in it, albeit the worst Chelsea team we've faced in years. We managed to beat Leicester comfortably after that and got our heads down a bit and things went right for a while, but then the wheels came off when AW sent out too many youngsters in front of a baying crowd at Hillsborough and we got dicked by Sheff Wed...
November was a typical Arsenal November. Dicked by Bayern, winning one solitary game against Zagreb, and contriving to fuck up against WBA and Norwich, games we should be winning if we have pretensions of being EPL winners. We also got a losing home draw against Spurs, where they played us off the park at home for the second year running...
Got our heads down again in December and did what was expected, excepting a complete fuck up against Southampton...
Everything else has been in recent memory, but the straw that broke the camel's back for me was when a player as poor as Routledge equalised for Swansea. I knew another donkey would go up and get a winner for them so turned off.
And no, I'm not fucking psychic.