The Hampshire Gooner
The last time I wrote an article, we were sitting ten points behind Spurs and struggling to see ourselves being above Chelsea as we faced a tough run of matches against other top sides. Since then, we have beaten everybody we had expected to struggle against, and lost against two teams who we were expected to roll over with ease. This cycle seems to be becoming the norm these days.
Here we are with four league games remaining, five points ahead of both Spurs and Newcastle with Chelsea a further two points behind those two. All three of our Champions League rivals have a game in hand of us after the recent shambles against Wigan. Would we have taken that situation a couple of months ago? Damn right we would have done.
It is so frustrating to lose against teams you know we should be beating on a regular basis, but, at the same time, it is very satisfying to see us finally starting to roll over the big boys again. It has felt like years since we could go into games of that stature with real confidence of picking up all three points. Why has this become the norm? I personally feel it is down to the type of personnel we have, both coaching the squad on a regular basis, and the type of personality we seem to have in spades within the squad itself.
The mentality of any football team comes from above. Just look at how Mourinho’s sides act up all over the pitch whoever he happens to be in charge of at the time. This approach does get the man results though, so who can really argue with it? Alex Ferguson’s United sides have always followed a similar pattern in terms of his steel and never-say-die winning attitude, and this has been the main reason why the trophy cabinet at OT has always been bulging over the past 20 years or so.
Sadly for us in recent seasons, Arsène has resembled something of a spoilt child more times than not. Arsène throwing bottles of water around the touchline is the one regular sight we have all witnessed in recent seasons. The attitude coming out has been one of ‘How can they do this to us? We are the good old Arsenal battling against the evil powers of the mega rich’ blah, blah, blah. It doesn’t really gel the team together with steel and grit does it? As soon as other teams get stuck in, as is their right to do so, we cry off like a little child and complain about the referee, the state of the pitch or the opposition’s goalkeeper wasting time at goal-kicks. Where is the backbone in any of that? What are we going to learn going forward with that kind of attitude?
When things go wrong it is never any good to look at others. You need to own up to your own shortcomings and improve on them to have a chance of getting better results in the future, and that is certainly one area in which Arsène has failed miserably. This spoilt-brat attitude has spilled over on to the field of play in recent seasons. Just look at how big Mr Song’s ego has become over the past 24 months. The guy struts around the field of play like Diego Maradona at times. Please remind me of how many winners’ medals he currently has on his mantelpiece? Where does this superiority complex come from then, if not from above? Aaron Ramsey has been talked up so much over the past three seasons, yet in reality he has not shown much on the field of play over a sustained period of time for any of us to get duly excited about. Hype does not win trophies, nor does technical ability alone.
Until we rid ourselves of this mentality, I can’t see any trophies coming our way anytime soon. It is this fact alone which is making us ultimately inconsistent, and inconsistency does not win titles, the last time I checked. Sometimes you have to take a step back to be able to move forward again. This is where I see Arsenal as a club at the moment - just at the very beginning of ridding the club of this poor mental attitude. A good start is to offload players of the ilk of Bendtner, Denilson, Almunia, Eboué, Diaby, Arshavin, Song etc and slowly but surely replace them with players who don’t instantly think they are the dog’s gonads simply because their bank account balance has more digits in it than an overseas telephone number. The players we bring in must realise that, until they start to win anything, the only people that will remember them after they hang up their boots is their own agent.
Who out of the current squad has this ability already? For me the candidates to stay would be Szczesny, Sagna, Vermaelen, Mertesacker, Koscielny, Jenkinson, Arteta, Wilshere, van Persie and Oxlade-Chamberlain. So that is a total of ten players from the current first-team squad that I would be sad to see go. The rest for me would not make much of a difference if they went now, as they are all replaceable, and the overall attitude of the squad would actually improve if they did go. Even taking into account one or two promising youngsters that we have coming through the ranks, it still represents a sizeable task to rid the club of this apathy towards to creating a truly winning mentality.
Even if the club go about this in the right way, it will take time. It won’t happen all in one summer. We are looking at a two-to-three year plan at best, in my opinion. We did make a promising start to this process last summer, but it must continue with gusto for some time to come before we really start to see the benefit of it all.
Is the current management team at the club brave enough to do all this properly and see it through? Time will tell. If not, then you can only see the tension between the fans and the club getting back to what it was a couple of months ago, and then getting even worse from there.
