Joe Fitzpatrick 
If you are happy with Arsenal finishing in third place, let me warn you straight off the bat that this piece is not going to be your cup of tea. If you are completely content with merely qualifying for the Champions League each and every single bloody season without so much as a snowball in hell's chance of actually winning the top prize in European football, I don't want to rain on your third-place trophy parade or anything, and I do sincerely hope that you do so enjoy the upcoming open-top bus tour of Upper Street where all of the Arsenal superstars will be brandishing the aforementioned third-place trophy in all of its beautiful shining glory but, sadly, I won't be in attendance myself because, unfortunately, I have a thing called a brain.
Call me old-fashioned, maybe a little bit too romantic and even a "Roy of the Rovers"- style dreamer, but I just can't get excited about finishing third, not when we are the most widely-supported team in the largest city in Western Europe. I dream of another FA cup, and I'd like us at least to mount a serious challenge for the Premier League title. To set our targets below that standard would make the legendary Herbert Chapman spin furiously in his grave. We are the Arsenal, and we can always be in the mix for honours if we really want it enough. Third place is really only a very sanitised way of saying "The second-best loser" anyway, and if you want to celebrate being that, then you and I are never going to agree on anything.
I want Arsenal to win, and I firmly believe that we are capable of winning something again but to continually bury our heads in the sand and pretend that everything is going to be sweet and rosy is nothing but sheer madness and utter folly. We are clearly going backwards and are in obvious decline as a football team, even if we are indeed in good shape as a football club. I don't want to get into complicated finances today, so I'm only going to talk about the footballing side of things and how we are underperforming as a team in all areas apart from one position. I will also reference a few transfer targets that even the most cynical amongst you will agree were easily within our modest means in the summer and winter transfer windows.
The mighty Moroccan hot-shot, Marouane Chamakh, appeared 19 times in an Arsenal shirt this season and scored just the one goal. Scorching South Korean assassin, Ju Young Park, appeared in just six games for us this season and also managed to score only a single solitary goal. Tim Howard, the Everton goalkeeper, also managed to score a goal this season and that perfectly sums up just how very over-reliant we have been on our beloved Robin van Persie this season. Our second- and third-choice strikers for this season were just about as lethal as the first-choice Everton goalkeeper, and God only knows what would have happened to us if RvP had picked up a serious injury this season.
Arsenal scored 74 league goals this season, of which RvP scored 30 and assisted in 10; subtract the Dutchman's contribution to at least 40 of our goals this season, and we are left with the meagre tally of 34 goals. Of course, some might argue that, without RvP in the team, someone else would have then stepped up to the plate and banged in a few more goals for us but I would then have to counter with the one word question... Who?
We've covered the lack of contribution from our so called "strikers" already but can you honestly tell me with a straight face that Ramsey, Walcott, Gervinho, Song, Rosicky or Arteta would have scored the necessary goals in the absence of RvP based on the evidence of the season just passed? Think back and remember the number of goal-scoring opportunities that were wasted by all of those players this season and your own memory should answer the question for you.
You will notice that I'm not including Benayoun or the Ox in with that other lot as I believe that they were both criminally under-played this season on the evidence of their direct running and obvious goal-threat so I'm absolutely certain that they both would have scored a fair amount of goals with more playing time. The fact that the manager has decided to stick with his oh-so-rigid and established pecking order, regardless of the form of certain players this season, has infuriated Gunners everywhere and left even the most die-hard of Arsène Wenger fans shaking their heads at various times during this season. The obvious example of which is that of the substitution of Oxlade-Chamberlain for Arshavin, when Walcott was having a nightmare, against Manchester United. Even Robin van Persie was shaking his head at that ingenious decision.
I'm reluctant to say that we are a one-man team but, when one man scores 30 and assists 10 of your 74 league goals, you can't help but start to feel that way. I can't help but wonder what might have been if we had managed to have signed any combination of Scott Parker, Chiek Tiote, Juan Mata, Leighton Baines, Clint Dempsey, Gary Cahill, Phil Jagielka, Papiss Cissé or Nikola Jelavic instead of players like Joel Campbell, Gervinho, Eisfeld and Park. Come on, it's not that far-fetched; we could easily have signed any of those targets early in the transfer-windows if we really wanted to. It's just that Arsenal just can't do negotiations properly anymore.
Speaking of strikers and goals scored, what about goals scored against us? What about our p*ss-poor away-form? I would now like to draw your attention to our very poor away-form and the number of goals we conceded on our travels this season.
Arsenal conceded 32 goals on the road this season in only 19 away fixtures. The mathematicians amongst you will have already worked out that that's an average of 1.68 goals conceded per game, meaning that, in order to win the vast majority of our away games, we would have needed to score at least two goals, The days of one-nil to the Arsenal have well and truly gone now, haven't they? Our attack didn't shame us too badly this season though, as they managed to score a respectable 35 goals giving us an away-goal difference of +3. It's simply not good enough all around, really, especially when you consider the fact that the Premiership champions, Manchester City, scored 38 goals away from home and conceded only 17.
Roberto Mancini has been criticised for being too negative and pragmatic in his approach to away-fixtures this season, but the indisputable fact remains that Manchester City still managed to score three more away goals than a much more gung-ho Arsène Wenger team. Arsenal are no longer the attacking force that they once were, and it is fortunate that the mainstream media don't emphasise the sad fact that our offensive work is also in the toilet at the moment along, with our urine- drenched defensive efforts.
There is only one person we can blame for the current state of affairs at the club at the moment, and it is very unfortunate indeed that he is a truly loved and revered figure at the club. Sometimes it kills us to criticise our heroes, but there comes a time when you must figure out if you are more in love with Arsène than you are with Arsenal, or then again, maybe not.
Arsène Wenger is no longer playing in the style that won him so many trophies for us, and there is a direct correlation between our change of style and the amount of trophies that we have won. We used to play with hunger and desire in the middle of the park when we had players like Vieira, Petit, Gilberto Silva and, to a lesser extent, Mathieu Flamini, but now we play a system with no designated holding midfielder as Alex Song is now encouraged to bomb forward at every available opportunity and that. in my opinion, is the biggest flaw in Wenger's current team.
The second major design flaw in this 4-3-3 system is that, because the midfielders are not instructed to cover for our marauding full-backs, we are often left with two at the back at best if Vermaelen, Mertesacker or Koscielny aren't playing as an auxiliary centre forward as is often the case. Our wide forwards, on either side of van Persie, are encouraged to stay high up the field and tuck in to support him so the only way to get enough width in the team is for our full-backs to perform 50-yard shuttle-runs for 90 minutes and, in my opinion, only Bacary Sagna is fit enough and positionally aware enough to actually do this properly 90% of the time.
The defensive and organisational flaws are obvious to most people, and opposition managers have worked out how to contain Arsenal's predictable and pedestrian attacks by parking the proverbial bus and then hitting us on the break with remarkable success. If you disagree that Arsenal's attack has become both predictable and pedestrian then I encourage you to go and dust off your old DVD's and watch the clever movement of Pires, Henry, Bergkamp, Ljungberg, Cole and Vieira that completely bamboozled the opposition at every turn. Henry drifted out wide, Bergkamp dropped deep, Ljungberg made late driving runs into the box alongside Patrick Vieira, while Pires and Cole provided an awesome threat from the left. Those days are long gone now, but we all remember them like they were yesterday. It's just so baffling and bewildering that Le Professeur seems to have forgotten about the magic formula that made him a legend. We haven't forgotten though, Mr. Wenger, and we would like our caviar football back now please because we are so sick and tired of this bangers-and-mash football.
