John Evans
I do find it funny when people start to talk about who we can possibly find to replace our current leader when he finally decides to call it a day. It seems to be the latest topic of the month as we currently have no football to talk about. It does pose the question though of how big are the boots the newcomer will have to fill?
I have pointed out before the fact that AW has only managed to win one more trophy in his fifteen years at the club than we managed to collect as a club in the fifteen years prior to him taking charge. Is that a massive swing? Not in my eyes it isn’t and when you also consider the fact that all of those trophies came in the first half of his reign then the problem of who replaces our current manager seems a smaller one to me than what some people seem to believe the case to be.
Let us be honest with each other we are not talking about Alex Ferguson leaving United here are we? AW inherited a solid as a rock backline at a time when the English game was just about to take off after the influx of money started to pour into the game when the Premier League kicked off under the wing of Sky Sports cash. There were few foreigners plying their trade in England and when the continentals started pouring in to cash in on the money coming into the game in this country AW was on hand to sign the players that at that time gave us a winning mix. We then had both English tightness and grit at the back blended in with attacking pace and flair from overseas purchases such as Overmars and Anelka etc.
Ever since the English tightness and grit at the back has been lost as players of that era have either left the club or retired for good we have won nothing. AW has failed to replace that mentality with anything other than mediocre Frenchman at the back who have very little ability and zero balls for the fight that is required to win many EPL games.
A lot of the ideas that AW arrived with at the time were considered revolutionary, nowadays they are all common place at most clubs. Should it come as a surprise to find out you can’t play at the top of your game if you spend most of your spare time in pubs, clubs and hanging around kebab houses at 3am? Also if you take on more water you will stay hydrated for longer and if you take some vitamin supplements you will feel stronger and fitter. All solid good advice but if someone came in to our game now and used these ‘techniques’ you would ask what all the fuss is about as you should be doing all those things as a professional sportsperson anyway. Were AW’s ideas at the time really that revolutionary or were the then current day training regimes just so damn ridiculous that a four year old could have improved on things?
The truth is AW came into our game at a time when it was easier for him to be successful than what it would be today. So in my opinion if someone else comes in when he leaves and manages the same level of success they would have performed better in comparison. Our levels of ambition as a club have sunk so low now that if we manage the holy grail of fourth every season we are as happy as Larry to wait for the bank account to start totting up all over again at the start of the new campaign. So if that is all you set your sights on as a club then why worry too much about who you get into replace AW?
When you factor everything into the equation a record of three EPL titles out of a possible fifteen is not one that should be met with such words as remarkable or great when you take into account all of the factors that contributed to the timing of those successes. It is a bit like someone starting off a cake recipe and then someone else coming into the kitchen midway through the baking process to take the cake out of the oven, sprinkle a few hundreds and thoushands on top of it and claiming the whole cake was their idea to start off with. Credit where credit is due George Graham had quite a lot to do with AW’s initial burst of success in this country as did the timing of his arrival.
Should the question therefore not be turned on its head from who is good enough to take over into one of who is not good enough to do the job to the current standards being set?
When you scale around the names being banded about you would be forgiven for believing that it will be a mission impossible type scenario for whoever happens to walk through the door after AW Has cleared his desk for good. Mourinho, Villas-Boas and Guardiola have all been touted around lately as possibilities. But in reality who else out of the current Premier League managers can we throw into the hat as well as these more celebrated names?
For example if Harry Redknapp can manage to get Spurs finishing fourth and fifth in respective Premier League campaigns could he not manage the holy grail of fourth year in year out at Arsenal? Sure Spurs are much better than what they have been for sometime but we are still above them in the pecking order for the time being. He would only have to nudge us one place higher than what he managed at The Lane last season and we are bang where we are with AW in charge.
Owen Coyle seems to have done a very good job with Bolton Wanderers and Burnley before that. He does seem to play a more technical game than what Bolton are renowned for so with the added ability of our squad of players compared to that of Bolton’s why couldn’t he have managed to secure us a top four spot over the last few seasons or so?
There is one obvious candidate for the potential vacant position that would fit the bill 100% as he is used to working for a club that offers him zero financial support whatsoever in the transfer market year after year. David Moyes of Everton has done a more than good job with the resources he has had at his disposal and he even managed the holy grail of fourth on one occasion not that long ago so surely he could do as good a job as AW with the players he would have at his disposal. Who knows we could even get Jagielka and Arteta on the cheap as well as the possibility of scoring from a corner or two if we could get him to bring Tim Cahill with him from Goodison.
From my point of view you can even look outside of the EPL and find managers that have over performed in recent seasons that would be well worthy of a mention when bigger jobs become available. If you look at the jobs the respective managers have done at the likes of Swansea, Blackpool and Norwich then these managers have to be shown some respect and some may well perform even greater successes at bigger clubs than those they have already managed.
Football has changed so much over the period of time that AW has been in charge at our club and we have failed to move with the times in my opinion. The only real constant in our game since 1996 has been the fact that Manchester United have dominated things at the top of the tree consistently which suggests old red nose deserves all the credit under the sun for that achievement. You can suggest the fact that on occasion he has bought that success but in reality have United spent any more money than what they used to in the earlier years of AW’s reign? They have always been paying the top dollar required to bring in top names since the days of Ince, Keane and Stam etc. So buying top quality players has not changed for them since AW has been here. We have fallen away as they have gone onto bigger and better things. In the early days of AW’s reign we were the ones competing with United every season but as we have fallen back teams like Chelsea, Liverpool and more recently Man City have caught us up, overtaken us and established themselves as United’s major rivals.
People continue to mention the ‘fact’ that we cannot compete with these so called financial superpowers but in reality is our wage bill that much smaller than that of Chelsea’s? I wouldn’t have thought they would have anywhere near as many poor quality players who happen to be on 50-60k a week than what we do. Sure they pay out top money for the top stars but the average earnings of their players across the whole of their squad can’t be that much higher than ours that is for sure. When you look at our match day revenue and compare that to Chelsea’s why can we not compete to a bigger degree than what we are currently managing? We are being told it is because of Roman’s millions but for me this is true to a much smaller extent than what we have been led to believe.
In reality the money men at our club have fed us lies to increase the value of their own shareholdings and have now cashed in on those lies by selling those shares to an American who paid top dollar for them. What are we left with as fans? Zero trophies in six years, higher season ticket costs than all of our rivals and yet another new kit that looks exactly the same as the last one with a larger badge on it. Has the move to the new stadium seen us competing with the best for the top names across Europe and beyond? Unfortunately for us the clear answer has to be no. We don’t even try to compete with the top teams for any potential signings as we are scared off by United, Chelsea, City and even Liverpool. It will very soon get to the point where if we are interested in a player and Spurs declare an interest we will go running in the opposite direction, so why has it come to this? The only real truth to the answer of this question lies in the share price of the club we all support so loyally.
So when the time does eventually come for the money men at our club to decide who the next manager will be don’t be overly surprised if it is another man who fits the bill financially rather than someone simply being the best man for the job. This approach is not too different to the way the club operates on the field of play either as the players we go for are clearly not the best men for the job but they do often fit the bill in a financial sense.
Ed’s note – Need to slip this in somewhere! Ian Henry has emailed to say that the second guess Arsene competition he is overseeing is still open for entries, in spite of the signing of Carl Jenkinson yesterday. He says ‘In my role as adjudicator, I will say the competition is still open on the basis that he has not been awarded a squad number of 32 or lower yet.’ – interestingly, the signing has been filed under ‘reserve news’ on arsenal.com So don’t bother putting Jenkinson as one of your predictions (only one entrant so far has, although they will get a point for that) but feel free to have a guess at who is arriving. Guess this will finish with the first significant in or out)
