John Gray
By now most, if not all, Arsenal supporters will have seen Arsene’s Official Manager's email. I am not one for contributing to the general AKB/AMG debate but I am a season ticket holder and a fan of some 24 years and I have my opinions, which I generally express in my tight knit bunch of friends. However, the situation we are currently facing is one upon which I feel compelled to put my thoughts to paper (well, email anyway) and it’s the continual repetition of nonsense being spouted by the great man occupying the manager’s seat at this great club we call The Arsenal.
Having read this week’s Managerial Missive, let’s dissect this and comment as necessary.
I am proud of the spirit we showed on Saturday. It shows we are ready for a fight.
We are ready for a fight. Where was the fight in the first half at The Hawthorns and why was it necessary to be involved in a scrap with a team, whilst resurgent in the last few weeks under Roy Hodgson, who are still at the lower end of the table and should be vanquished with ease by an Arsenal side ready to push on for a shot at the title. I’m not saying West Brom are a bad side, just that we should be better and these are the games we should be winning. Perhaps not with ease, but certainly easier than we’re making it for ourselves!
We made things difficult for ourselves with the second West Brom goal and we faced opponents who were very well organised. It was a little bit 'attack against defence', like a training game, and the pitch was very difficult for us, it looked difficult to get our passing to its top speed.
We made things difficult for ourselves because of the crass stupidity of our disaster between the sticks, which, frankly, is where he should have been, instead of 25 yards from his line! What possessed this imbecile to engage with Squillaci (who, also, did not cover himself in glory in his attempts to clear the ball under nominal pressure from Odemwingie)? And why, when he started running out from his box, did he not just keep on running, straight down the tunnel and out of the ground never to be seen again? I’m sure many Arsenal fans would not be disappointed if the Spanish Waiter simply did a “Lucan”.
As for Arsene’s excuse about the pitch! Does our esteemed manager consider the Arsenal faithful, generally, to be fools? Is it not within the skill set of such highly paid and obviously extremely talented players to be able to play a decent game of football on a far from billiard-table surface? And what, pray tell, was wrong with the West Brom pitch? The West Brom players managed to cope with it and if they can, surely the quality players Arsenal tells us repeatedly we have should be able to also. And if that’s a bad pitch, thank goodness we don’t have to return to Molineux this season!
I think we were far too nervous and tentative in the first part of the game. They played with more freedom than we did. We were a bit nervy and you could see that the recent games had an impact in our mind.
If we were too nervous and we allowed West Brom to play with more freedom, then what does that say about our, much vaunted by Arsene, “mental strength”? Surely a team supposedly challenging for the title should be fired up by the manager to start the game with speed and precision and to ensure we didn’t allow The Baggies to gain a foothold in the game. And what about our manager’s tactics? I, for one, am delighted to see the return of Aaron Ramsay, but surely Le Boss didn’t seriously put him out there to be marking Steven Reid in the middle of our box and on the 6 yard-line? Shouldn’t our taller “defenders” should be in that area? I know West Brom are a team with height and are considered a threat at set pieces, but we’ve been vulnerable at set pieces for many a season and it won’t improve until we get a decent defensive coach in (why oh why is Martin Keown not still a key member of Arsene’s coaching staff?) and Arsene allows others around him to tell him when he’s getting it wrong tactically (as he seems to get it wrong so often it worries me!).
In the end it was more down to character and resilience, and we have shown plenty of that. Mathematically we have lost two points in the title race but psychologically we have gained a point because when you are 2-0 down with 20 minutes to go, you are not too unhappy to come back.
Character and resilience? Yes, we came back to 2-2, but we should never have been in that position. What about the character and resilience at Newcastle? Or against the Spuds? Or against Wigan etc, where we’ve held a lead only to lose it? And why do we allow ManUre to play against us in exactly the same way for the last 5 seasons and we haven’t learned from it and have no response to it? This shouldn’t be about character and resilience, this should be about management, leadership, tactics and the right players to do the job. Sadly, the management is lacking as we don’t have anyone on the coaching staff willing to stand up to Le Boss, there is no leadership on or off the field (when we see Arsene prowling the touchline in his giant sleeping bag, what is he actually doing to change things and shake the team out of their morass?) and we all know (and Arsene admits) there are no leaders on the field. We all know who the “wrong” players are and, it’s been mentioned within on this website time and again who the culprits are and there is no need for me to regurgitate those arguments here, but suffice it to say I would welcome a wholesale clearout in the summer with the purchase of 3 or 4 quality signings, the sort of signings we should have made last summer or, at worst, in January (Gary Cahill, anyone?)
What was good was the reaction the whole team showed. It will be interesting until the end of the season, we are ready to focus and ready to fight.
The reaction was shown by a few, not all, and the manager has to face up to the fact that not all his playing staff are willing to pull their socks up and get stuck in. We don’t have a team of fighters and this needs to be addressed. And if there are some who aren’t willing to fight, then recall Henri Lansbury and Kyle Bartley, if not others, who have certainly shown during their loan spells elsewhere that they will give their all for their teams and if they can for the teams they are loaned to, I’m more than certain they will for their parent club.
As far as the title race is concerned, I felt that it would not be over whatever happened on Saturday. But for the team it was important not to lose. Considering what happened to us recently, you wonder how easy it would have been to recover if we had lost the game.
Important not to lose! Arsene, you must be instilling in this team the necessity of winning, not not losing! What sort of message is that to your players, and to the fans? It’s alright to play and draw? That is not good enough!
Of course it's frustrating to see us make mistakes but that's the Premier League this season. It is the least predictable season since I have been in England so from now on it will be down to consistency and character.
It’s frustrating to see us make mistakes, but these are mistakes that have been occurring with boring regularity since the Invincibles season and the emergence of Almunia between the sticks and Arsene’s own chosen defenders (against the superb back four/five he inherited). And it would and could have been so easy to eradicate those errors by taking some advice from people who know better (such as Bob Wilson, Martin Keown etc) and not pretending that it’s okay to leak goals and not beat our main title challengers ever, as we’ll score more goals than other teams some of the time. That attitude does not win trophies, as we have seen. Arsene clearly identified the need to bring in a goalkeeper with the overtures paid to Thomas Sorenson last January, Mark Schwarzer in the summer and, by all accounts, Pepe Reina. Then there was the surprise admission by Le Boss In January that we needed a central defender. But what happened? Well, we’re still waiting to find out and perhaps we never will until Arsene’s autobiography is published in the years beyond the tenure are Le Grove.
Thanks for your support.
It is right that we, as fans, should be thanked for our support. The support at The Hawthorns was fantastic, as it is at every away game. It is frustrating that it can’t be like that at The Grove and I would urge every fan to get behind the team from now until the end of the season. And if that means foregoing the usual exodus ten minutes from time then please, please, please do so. I’m sure it would mean so much to the players to have 60,000 fans applaud them off at the end of the game, rather than 37,000 (we could have stayed at Highbury if that’s the genuine number of true fans we have!). But the board have to accept that there must be a reciprocal appreciation. We are not simply a cash cow for the board to milk dry. We must be listened to and our input appreciated and when the vast majority of fans (and media) recognise that something is amiss, then the board must persuade Le Boss to address those issues and give him every assistance to put them right.
One can only hope that the recent results against Sunderland and West Brom (forgetting ManUre in the cup) will bring about the change in emphasis required from M. Wenger and that we go out with a steely determination to win every game in the run in, and that we ensure our opponents are given no opportunity to derail our, hopefully, title winning campaign. I travel from Ipswich for every home game, and attend a few of the away games, but the trip I’m most looking forward to is to Islington Town Hall come May. Until then I’ll be singing my heart out (as always) and doing what I can to help the players, and manager, achieve a long overdue league title.
