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This piece is being written a few hours after the absolute shambles that masqueraded as a game of top-flight football at Villa Park. Watching Arsenal is always a highlight of the week. but today was two hours of my life I will never ever get back. We’ve now fired four blanks in thirteen league games. In fact, we’ve only scored seven goals in our seven away games, and, if you take out the anomalous spanking of Southampton, only seventeen in twelve. Not good enough by a long shot, especially for a team that quite commonly needs to score at least three goals to win a game.
The performance was all too familiar, with a complete lack of tempo and support for Giroud when we actually managed to get the ball forward. Villa are a team short on confidence, and desperately devoid of real ability, and the disillusionment of their fans hardly makes it the most daunting away trip. However, just as with Schalke, Sunderland, Stoke and Norwich, we rarely (if ever) looked like scoring a goal, making them look like a dangerous and dynamic team for periods of the game.
Worst of all has to be the substitutions, which were made far too late in any case. Why on earth was Wilshere on the bench if not to try and inject some quality and tempo into an insipid performance in order to try to stop us throwing points away? Bringing Gervinho off the bench to stumble around the pitch giving the ball away was embarrassing. The final two fingers up to the fans was bringing off Giroud for Coquelin, as though it was a point well-earned and we should protect it.
It seems patently obvious to any Arsenal fan I have ever spoken to that we need to play with two up front at least some of the time. Giroud has made rapid strides but gets isolated far too often. Even Chamakh prospered from playing with a partner at Reading, and Walcott or Podolski could well make effective partners in certain games for Giroud. Wenger unfortunately hasn’t learned from his lesson of forcing square pegs into round holes with Arshavin, as he seems insistent on banishing Podolski to the left wing when his talents really could be used up top.
Our squad is nowhere near good enough, with the obvious deficiencies that existed before the season started manifesting themselves for all to see. Rosicky did well for about six weeks last year but how can a lucrative two-year contract be justified when viewing his stay at the club as a whole? Especially, when you think that we forced Pires out by refusing to give him longer than one year. Our only useful left-back gets injured at the blowing of the wind. Diaby can’t be factored in when assessing the strength of the squad, such is his propensity for injury. We have one striker who is doing a good job in his first few months in English football but clearly can’t carry the burden alone. Our defence is as bad as ever.
What has Wenger done in the last seven years to convince the fans that he deserves to be the man commanding the supposedly-increased resources from 2014 onwards? The sponsorship money won’t be directed sufficiently towards transfer-funds anyway, Wenger treats the money as if it was his own, and who in this day and age could possibly find “super quality” players available? Llorente, or preferably Huntelaar, is desperately needed in January, and are available on the cheap, but chances are we’ll watch them go to somebody else.
Even the most delusional optimists would have been hard-pressed to genuinely foresee us as title-contenders this year. given the past few seasons and the departure of our best player (again) to an ex-rival. So how can Arsène Wenger stand in front of the cameras when we are more than ten points off the top already and still talk about the possibility of our winning the league? Surely even the most ardent AKB (for want of a better term) must feel their intelligence is being insulted. Nobody else on the planet thinks we are still in with a shot of winning the league.
It’s the same old story from week to week and season to season. We are told Wenger has done brilliantly on limited resources, but look at our turnover and, moreover, wage-bill and it shows us as far closer to Manchester United than it does to Everton and Spurs. But we’re competing with the latter two while United are yet again at the summit.
Wenger has filled the squad with overpaid underachievers and put his faith in the wrong principles and people. He is becoming an old man and blinded by his arrogance and stubbornness. In his entire 16-year reign we may have qualified for the Champions League consistently, but one final and one semi-final, where we were outclassed by a team that was subsequently outplayed in the final, is a dismal return given the number of teams that are in the bloated competition merely to make up the numbers. If Wenger thinks he’s been successful in the circumstances of the last few years, then it shows that he strives for mediocrity. There is no coherent argument based on the evidence of the last few years to say that we will ever go forward under Wenger. The sooner the man leaves the club the better. Even the fans have realised this with boos and chants of “you don’t know what you’re doing” audibly aimed at Wenger at Villa Park, although the home support is somewhat more passive to say the least. Unfortunately we’ll probably scrape fourth place this year, and he’ll be rewarded with another contract on more money than any other Premier League manager.
