Re: The definitive "Wenger in/out" thread

[6unner]

You obviously missed the opening 10 minutes then. They could not touch the ball. Then Coquelin pulled his hammy, Verm had to shift to LB, Squid came on and partnered Djourou in the middle and that was that. Then Squid got hurt being made a bitch my Sessegnon and Larsson, so Song had to drop back into CB. A team comprising of Song and Djourou at CB, Walcott as an AM (no idea who's bright idea that was) and someone in the middle. Who you ask? haven't got the foggiest. The team is so messed up and shuffled, i don't have a clue who's a first team starter and who's back-up anymore

Was curious if Ihad actually missed something. So just watched the first 6:44 that it took for Coquelin to get injured. the majority of our posession was on our side of the pitch. We were able to get it into the final third 2 times. Resulting in 1 corner and 1 free kick for us and 2 breaks by Sunderland. The result of the second one was the injury. It is not like we were actually knocking on the door ready to score or something.

[RealGunner]

we would have been, ultimately. Vermaelen provides 0 width from left back. Which means Gervinho 50% less threatning. Additionaly, Djourou n Vermaelen would have been solid as a partnership together but with squillaci coming on, Sunderland targeted him as they realised it was our obvious weakness

[waitressinthesky]

Honestly, until today, I was with Wenger. He's losing my trust. (As are many of our players.) Maybe I'm masochistic, 'cause I'll always be an Arsenal fan.

[KMD]

if it starts going back up, then no problem, but the trend is downwards... wengie is getting old

[Arsenalfaithfull]

Not sure who is to take the blame. The manager or the players? Parting with wenger will feel like breaking up with a girl you have been with for years. He just looks like he is out of ideas. Lot of it can be shifted down to the players not giving a shit, but he is the freakin manager. He was always known for motivating his players, but it seems as though, the players have stopped listening to him.

Song
Djorou
Walcott

all look half dead to me.

[waitressinthesky]

Yeah, Song makes some great passes, but the other half are to... NO ONE.

I feel like playing Benayoun, Miquel and maybe Yennaris might be the right move in the coming weeks...

Arsenal, you need a rebirth.

[Arsenalfaithfull]

If i had a time machiene and went back to 2007 and told myself (of the past) that Arsenal would feild Alex Song as the designated playmaker, wonder if Arsenalfaithfull of 2007 would believe it lol. Todays display was beyond horrible, it made me laugh. We struggled to even get on the opposing half of Suntherland during the first half.

[OLpower]

Feel sorry for wenger, He is managing probably his worst squad ever.

Worst than the Japanese team?

Wenger is still a great coach, but he should be blamed for not spending wisely and choosing himself to buy young and inexperienced players instead of confirmed winners.

Arsenal has a lot of hope as a lot of the players will get better but ultimately, if the best leave and a replaced by young, it's never going to be the solution.

[OLpower]

Feel sorry for wenger, He is managing probably his worst squad ever.

Why feel sorry for him he put the team together.

He was forced into buying them players. His targets always been M'Vila, Gotze and Hazard.

M'Vila and Martin, that's who I would target if I was Wenger.

[waitressinthesky]

I gotta admit, when Pepe Reina said he wanted to move to Arsenal sometime last year, I was kinda sad he hadn't. Think Szcz is a great goalkeeper, but he's still developing. (Let's not start in on poor Fabianski or Manone.)

You're right, we need to keep some young talents to develop them, but fielding Walcott, Ramsey, Szcz, the Ox and Djourou at the same time means your team is way too young.

Those are bench players who should be struggling to start, not shoo-ins.

[Raptorgunner]

Wenger, Stan, and all the dead wood can GTFO.

Wenger will never change, his philosophy is to turn young players in to WC players it only worked for few and now he wont stop.

We have Donkey as owner, look at his clubs, when he took over they all went down.


All Wenger is good for siging injury prone players and useless players to long term contracts.

[Jay29]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2012/feb/18/arsene-wenger-doubt-daniel-taylor?CMP=twt_gu

Arsène Wenger's achievements are so monumental it is not an easy thing to find ourselves at the point when we have to acknowledge, however reluctantly, he is straying dangerously close to fully fledged fantasy if he seriously believes restoring true greatness to Arsenal is going to be anything but a dauntingly long-term project.

The evidence was overwhelming even before their ordeal at the Stadio Guiseppe Meazza and the latest directionless effort at Sunderland that, once again, takes them out of trophy contention and makes it felt even more absurd that Wenger had begun the week expressing his belief that they had realistic aspirations of outdoing Milan, Barcelona, Real Madrid and all the rest to win the Champions League.

Nobody had taken it particularly seriously because, put bluntly, we assumed a man of this calibre was surely more in touch with reality and, if not, what happened at San Siro ("not a football match but a massacre," as La Repubblica put it) made the point with the force of a sledgehammer.

After that, if Wenger's judgment is skewed enough to believe it was simply one bad night, rather than the cumulative effects of a decline that has gone on longer than most Arsenal fans would care to remember, then maybe what we are looking at here is compelling evidence that even the greatest football men can lose their way, inexplicably and irretrievably.

This is not said lightly in an age when football's blame culture and unending demand for scapegoats can be incredibly wearing and Wenger has already revolutionised Arsenal to the point that, even now, it feels almost sacrilege to question his suitability for what needs to happen next. Yet how much longer can we offer the benefit of the doubt when it is so plainly obvious that much of the old magic is no longer there? The decline is year on year and when the man in charge appears to believe it needs only some fine-tuning it becomes increasingly difficult to sustain a legitimate defence.

Already this season we have seen open mutiny at the Emirates Stadium and the most voluble abuse Wenger has ever encountered from his own crowd. This frustration has been building since they won their last trophy seven years ago, and who can say it will get any better soon when they will surely lose their outstanding player, Robin van Persie, at the end of the season?

Wenger has already seen most of his better players picked off by predators. Inferior replacements have been brought in and you know things are bad when Sir Alex Ferguson starts referring to him with the kind of 19th-hole chumminess that could make you think they were Rotary Club buddies rather than embittered adversaries of old. Ferguson and Wenger could once have fallen out over a game of Pooh Sticks but, seriously, why would anyone at Manchester United be overly concerned now about the manager of such an ordinary team, 17 points off Manchester City at the top of the league?

The truth is Arsenal are in fourth position despite recording only one league victory of real substance all season. That was the 5-3 at Chelsea in October, when they came across a side enduring their own slump. Otherwise they have lost every single time against the other four other clubs with aspirations of challenging for the top positions. A good barometer of a team's competitive spirit can usually be found in their away form and Arsenal, on their travels, have conceded more goals than every other team bar two of the sides in the bottom four, Blackburn Rovers and Wigan Athletic. In truth, fourth place flatters Arsenal.

What we have now is a team regarded as such a soft touch that, before a ball had even been kicked at San Siro, the former Milan coaches Carlo Ancelotti and Arrigo Sacchi, with four Europeans Cups between them, could casually dismiss Wenger's men in a click of the fingers, and nobody saw it as the slightest bit impudent. Dennis Bergkamp, Martin Keown and Patrick Vieira have all weighed in from the Invincibles era. These are serial winners, as perplexed as the rest of us. Roy Keane, an old foe now on television duty, was still shaking his head as he boarded his flight from Malpensa airport on Thursday. This team, he said, were going nowhere fast. "The worst Arsenal side in 10 years," Sacchi volunteered.

This is why nobody can really blame Van Persie if, at 28, he wants to join a team that represent more than the elegant frustration Arsenal have become. This could be the first season under Wenger that they fail to qualify for the Champions League and will almost certainly be the only time in his tenure they finish below Spurs, currently 10 points better off. The deterioration has been nothing short of staggering and you have to wonder whether Wenger, already planning for next season, is in danger of joining the list of football greats who stayed too long.

[Lex]

I'll say it again, a back four of:

Sagna-----Mert----Kos----Gibbs

or

Sagna-----Verm-------kos-------Gibbs

or

Sagna-------Mert--------Kos-----Verm

would NOT have conceded those goals today. First goal was conceded from a free-kick Djourou conceded because his marking has all the grace and artistry of a sandcastle built out of shit, while the second goal was conceded from a break due to Song and Djourou not knowing how to defend

[Raptorgunner]

I'll say it again, a back four of:

Sagna-----Mert----Kos----Gibbs

or

Sagna-----Verm-------kos-------Gibbs

or

Sagna-------Mert--------Kos-----Verm

would NOT have conceded those goals today. First goal was conceded from a free-kick Djourou conceded because his marking has all the grace and artistry of a sandcastle built out of shit, while the second goal was conceded from a break due to Song and Djourou not knowing how to defend

'I am back in my position and I will show everyone my qualities' - Djourou ready to show Arsenal his true worth.

[boss]

Finally i don't blame Wenger just for 1thing ! He's not playing in field ! u know.LOL...but keeping needles players,signing improper pl.... but not quality ones ,sending on loan,or not giving much space @talented pl.. etc etc....He's convicted in a way!....but mostly n strongly i have to blame our players !
U're not obliged for +1 guys trololol..........dammit i'm going mental bcoz of "badderest" pl. performances! ....NO way...just kidding...simply it's not my fault....that's it.

[RealGunner]

Over the course of the next few days you will be
told that now is not the time to analyse the season. The line will be
that we’re still in fourth and there’s Champions League qualification to
fight for, so we must re-focus, bounce back, show some sort of reaction
and all that jazz. I disagree strongly. Of course I’d rather we
finished fourth, and it should go without saying that, from a financial
point of view, qualifying for the Champions League is better than not.
But even if Arsene does successfully pull another qualification rabbit
from his hat, it will be a mistake to view this season as anything than
what it is: failure.

Failure because, even if we do finish fourth, the difference between
this season and the others since we moved to the Emirates is at no point
have we looked like a team capable of winning silverware. And I’m not
just talking about the Champions League – the domestic cups have also
looked well beyond a team of our brittleness. Don’t misunderstand me:
I’m not saying we deserve silverware. Success on the pitch is not about
‘deserve’. But what I do think is that a club carrying the fourth
highest wage bill in the league, £40m higher than its neighbours, ought
to be capable of putting up a fight against its rivals.

And we aren’t capable.

Which is especially worrying with the visit of you-know-who looming. As Daniel Taylor notes in the Guardian – which
I urge you to read without getting your knickers bunched about media
bias – against the other four clubs realistically fighting for the
Champions League Arsenal has only won once this season – the 5-3 against
Chelsea, which now looks like an odd statistical outlier – and lost on
every other occasion. Even before you start factoring in losses against
Fulham, Swansea and Blackburn, it’s painfully clear not just that this
is a team that has regressed, as you’d perhaps expect after the sale of
Cesc, but one that’s been in regression since 08/09. If I had told you
two years ago that Tomas Rosicky* would be an integral part of the team
in 2012 you’d have been very astonished.

(*Not because I particularly dislike him, or think he’s awful, but we surely all know what he is and isn’t capable of.)

I’ve felt since the summer that this season
represents a moment of genuine existential crisis for Arsenal. Which
sounds poncey, but I mean it in the literal sense: what does Arsenal
exist to do? Is it just to harvest cash from the Champions League group
stages, thereby ensuring we’re a profitable far-flung outpost in our
American owner’s middling sporting empire? If so, how depressing.

There are several other arguments routinely trotted out to explain why Champions League qualification is vital for the club…

1) “Without the Champions League we’ll find it impossible to keep our best players!”
There’s
truth here: not qualifying will certainly make it harder to keep the
Van Persies and Vermaelens, but the reality is Arsenal has lost its best
players year after year while qualifying for the Champions League. I’ve
no doubt it’s a lure, but it clearly isn’t a magnetic enough one on its
own.

2) “Without the Champions League we’ll find it impossible to buy the best players!”
There
are a couple of responses to this. Firstly, we’ve never shopped from
the kind of shelf that players like Hazard and Götze currently sit on.
Either would cost in excess of £30m – more than double our record
transfer fee. Perhaps the penny has dropped, and this summer we’ll
embark on a vastly expensive buying spree. Ask yourself if that really
feels likely though. Secondly, many of the kind of players we have
signed I would argue would have come to Arsenal regardless – for the
wages, the history of the club, living in London, the chance to work
with Arsene and any other number of factors. Or do you really expect me
to believe we couldn’t have signed Santos, Koscielny or Squillaci
without the guarantee of Champions League football? Mertesacker was in a
team flirting with relegation. Chamakh was being realistically linked
with West Ham. Arsenal, even without Europe, was an upgrade.

(Incidentally, Suarez and Modric both signed for
clubs not playing in the Champions League. Deals can be done if you’re
savvy and willing to spend.)

I find it a depressing indictment of the amateur
accountants we’ve all become that when you start talking about the
importance of the Champions League no-one ever gives “because we might
win it” as the answer to why it’s so cherished. No surprise, perhaps,
given that in 14 years of qualification we’ve only been eliminated at
the final and semi-final stages once each. Valencia, with two sets of
runners-up medals, arguably have a better record.

No, the reason the Champions League is so important to us, is financial. On Monday the ever-diligent Arsenal Supporters Trust will
publish a paper setting out exactly how important qualification is to
Arsenal’s books. I don’t doubt they’re right (even if I will probably
have to self-harm in the toilets at work while reading it.)

More interesting, I suspect, will be the club’s
next set of accounts, which are expected to show significant profit. The
reaction to that is easy enough to predict. We can and should debate
the manager’s position, but the scale of rebuilding job – bear in mind
that something still has to be done with Vela, Bendtner, Denilson et
al(munia) – means we also need to start asking serious questions about
the owner’s intentions and commitment. Arguably we ought to have been
asking them forcefully much earlier.

For me, Kroenke looks like the wrong man at the
wrong time. We might have been able to muddle through with his sort of
ownership, which is seemingly based on not investing a penny and
assuming Arsene would work miracles ad infinitum, if Utd were our only
competitor. But this is a post Mansour/Abramovich world. We’re trying to
fight men armed with laser guns using a matchlock pistol. That plan was
never going to be sustainable in the long-term.

(For a start, I’d prefer we at least armed Pat Rice with a Kalashnikov.)

We live in a free market economy and Arsenal is a
non-quoted PLC, so my views on the ownership count for nothing more than
my ability to withdraw my ticket money. In fact one fan suggested
that’s what I should do if I’m unhappy and I suppose he’s right, but
again it’s depressing to be reduced to mere consumers whose only right
of redress is to reject the thing they love.

According to this year’s Deloitte Football Money League, we’re the 5^th most cash generative club in the world. We are almost entirely self-sustainable
fan-funded. But what happens if the team keeps declining? What happens
if we don’t qualify for Europe at all? And if the season ticket waiting
list really starts to shrink?

Does Stan Kroenke have the answer to these
questions? Is he even aware of the level of discontent? What kind of
manager does he think should eventually replace Arsene? Will it have to
be another nickel and dimer? Does Kroenke even watch the games? Could he
name our starting back four next week? (Trick question: no one could
these days.)

I’ve don’t know, because I know almost nothing
about the man. No club ‘deserves’ silverware, but Arsenal does deserve
an owner for whom Arsenal is their #1 priority. It should be the first
thing they think about in the morning and the last thing when they go to
bed. Given the breadth and location of his other interests it’s
impossible to think that’s the case with Kroenke. So I’m worried. That’s
what this is: me worrying about the long-term future of the club. It’s
not about trophies. I’ll still support if we never win anything again.
And it certainly isn’t a cry for Usmanov to come in either. But what I’m
trying to do with this brainspill is to say all this is the kind of
stuff we should be debating now. Politely. Logically.

I’m not interested in being told we have to wait
until the end of the season to have the discussion. Because after that
it’ll be, ‘Well, we have to wait until the end of the transfer window to
evaluate’. And then the cycle starts all over again. I’m terrified by
the amount of work which needs to be done at Arsenal and how long it
might take, especially if as seems likely we lose the skipper. The side
requires transformative change, not tweaking, but there is a kernel of
exciting young players in place. Wilshere, Ramsey, Miyaichi, Coquelin
and Chamberlain – the poor bastard who none of the seniors saw fit to
console either after the OG or at full-time. On Wednesday night I felt
embarrassed and numb. Now I feel worried. Because when this man is starting to make sense, you know you’ve really lost the plot.

– TDC
source

[MJ]

It feels like we know more about the problems facing AFC than the board does. But then again, we have no idea what they know as they don't speak about it or show it in their actions.

[Great Leader Sprucenuce]

Would you take Guardiola if i decided this year would be his last at Barca?

I remember some being against it even 18 months ago because of transfers.

BTW dont ask me why i think this but i think Guardiola only plays 70+ possession is because his players cant play any other way.......

I truly believe if he went to a club with a different crop of players he would adapt tactics to those players.

Again dont know why i think this but just a feeling from how he talks about Barcelona.

[RealGunner]

i am not 100% sold on Guardiola, At barca things are much different than they are at Arsenal

1) Barcelona 2nd string players are better than Arsenal 1st string, so what will he do with these players that wenger cant ?

2) No messi

3) La Masia gives him a huge advantage in terms of how players play and how well they know each other, at arsenal thats not the case

4) His tranfers doesnt fill me with confidence

[MJ]

I really don't understand where these rumors of Pep replacing Wenger emerged from so any help on that? Is it all just pure media speculation BS or could it be solid? Because I remember him refusing to sign long term papers at Barca.

[The Franchise]

He doesnt sign long term deals and I dont think he ever will.

He has said a few times, he is not comfortable signing for example 4 years and after 2 you realise you dont have the same motivation for it and the players dont have the same motivation.

Why cost the club so much money paying him off and why cause all that trouble when you can just sign 1 year at a time.

He doesnt plan anything for a longer period than 6 months, maybe 1 year max and I actually think what he is doing is a good thing.

[Jay29]

The media have always linked Pep with us because as a club we've a similar ethos to that of Barcelona. We try to play in similar ways, we have the players to play that way (albeit no where near as successful) and we give focus to our young players. Hell, we've been called Barcelona Lite in the last few years.

So they assume that it's a good match.

I just want someone who can, first and foremost, motivate the players, instill a better mentallity into them and not tolerate failure. Someone who is more ruthless than Wenger. Pretty football be damned. I'm fed up of this shit mentallity the majority of the squad has, and I'm tired of us sitting on this failure and expecting it to get better next time.

I can't give any names but that's the sort of manager I'd like to replace Wenger. And before his name is brought up, no, I would not like Mourinho. I'd rather my club not be left in a mess when he leaves.

Besides, it's not like we need to worry about identity or anything like that. Whatever positive identity we've had has been smashed to pieces.

[waitressinthesky]

I agree that the replacement should be more ruthless (but not Mourinho).

When you've got players like Walcott being given raises/starting spots and playing like the kid that he is, you're complacent and you're part of the problem. (Walcott's just one example... think about Djourou's recent multi-year contract extension.)

[MJ]

He doesnt sign long term deals and I dont think he ever will.

He has said a few times, he is not comfortable signing for example 4 years and after 2 you realise you dont have the same motivation for it and the players dont have the same motivation.

Why cost the club so much money paying him off and why cause all that trouble when you can just sign 1 year at a time.

He doesnt plan anything for a longer period than 6 months, maybe 1 year max and I actually think what he is doing is a good thing.

I wonder what his/the players motivation will be like if Barca lose La Liga to Madrid.

[The Franchise]

Indeed. I think their reaction to losing out on the title will be key in his decision to stay.

[DuringTheWar]

nice quote by wenger - 'At the moment I get many lessons from many people who have managed zero clubs and zero games and zero European games"

playing the - i am a football manager, you are not - card

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