CanadaGooner
I don’t know what the commotion is all about? At the beginning of this season, I consistently commented and uploaded articles comparing Arsenal to the top teams in the Premiership and concluded that the only way for us to win the league would be by beating the smaller teams, and hoping they nick points off the top teams, as we wont stand a chance against any of the teams around us. Then came Ramsey and the easy 2 - 0 win at the Emirates against Liverpool, who were doing well at that point in the season, and everyone came on this website to say I was wrong and the Arsenal team will do well against the top teams around us (especially after the narrow win against Spurs, along with beating Liverpool). Well, where are all those wise guys now?
It was very obvious from the beginning of the season that the team we have, minus the brilliance of Ramsey at the time, was simply not good enough. All debates aside, Arsenal is not a team that should be losing by margins like 8 - 2, 5 - 1, 6 - 3 and now 6 – 0. It makes a mockery of the club. We are spending enough on wages to be able to prevent such calamities. We can all blame the manager all we want, and goodness knows, he deserves the blame (if for nothing else, not starting Flamini against Chelsea), but at the end of the day, the players have been a disgrace in those matches. At 3 - 0 down, was it not time to shut up shop, pack the midfield and choke the game? Chelsea came to the Emirates and we had nothing to offer, so their players closed ranks and decided to choke the game and leave with a draw. At 2 - 0 down on Saturday, experienced players in the Arsenal side should have passed the word around (regardless of what the manager has told them) to dig deep, park the bus and limit the damage.
I had a moan about Alan Shearer and others on MOTD for their disregard of Arsenal, and even when Mancini was commenting about the Premiership some months back, he didn’t even mention Arsenal at all, when he discussed the title. I was livid, but you can now see where those pundits were coming from. Arsenal was never (in their opinion) a genuine title contender. I thought we were 'title contenders' until we dropped points at home against Everton, away to Southampton, and the Stoke game pretty much spelt it out loud & clear. For me, we only had a shot at the title if we won ALL our games against teams lower than us in the league, then the losses against Liverpool, Citeh or Chelsea wouldn't have been enough to damage our title hopes.
Wenger is yet to apologize to the fans (and I'm sure he won't). In his mind, he is above the club and he is so great, that he can do as he pleases. The fans mean nothing to him. He is Arsenal (and from some of the fanatical Wenger supporters on this site, you can see why he has been misled into thinking the club is all about him).
A lot of us on here have always seen the FA or League Cup as our only chance of getting back to winning trophies, and perhaps winning one of those will galvanize our players back into believing they can actually win the Premiership. That is still where we are. Can we beat Wigan and either of Hull/Sheffield Utd? From how we've fared against lower teams this year, this should be do-able, unless Wenger decides to stick Flamini on the bench again in those games. We can’t afford to understimate those teams.
If Wenger is still at Arsenal at the start of next season, then we are a club with no purpose, and his departure will create a situation worse than that Man Utd are facing right now, as our leadership are obviously more clueless than the Man Utd heirarchy (as they at least had their 'chosen one' lined up; albeit, it hasn't quite worked out for them). With Arsenal, we do not have a plan. A sad state of affairs, for sure. Wenger should have left after 500 games in charge; it's become a tale of two halves of his reign as manager, and there isn’t anything else in store, other than several more years of disappointment.
Finally, for those who are saying Mourinho is right in calling Wenger a 'specialist in failure', grow up you numpties: do we need Mourinho to come and tell us that? It is stating the obvious. Mourinho is an idiot who just uses the press to manipulate referees and the rest of you. There isn’t anything clever or revealing in what he said; we all already know that Wenger's last nine years (which is half his career at arsenal) have been a failure. Wenger ceased to be a football manager the minute he started to dictate issues off the pitch (new stadium etc); he should have been put in his place years back; this is a results oriented business, he can only be judged by his results, and the recent disgraceful results are there for all to see.
