Greg Tyndall
During the summer there were many who were concerned on a macro level about the appointment of Conte and Guardiola. The widely held view was that these two managers would make potential title rivals (cough) stronger in the league. This has certainly already been proven correct in the case of Conte and once Pep gets his defence right city will also be much stronger.
My bigger concern, and one that I shared with my Dad at the time, was that with Guardiola came yet another manager that our great leader simply cannot defeat. He gets added to the list of Mourinho, Klopp and Koeman. Effectively this means that under this manager we might as well post out the 24 points at the beginning of the season. We may get the odd one back in return but on the evidence of this week it will very much be the odd one.
You can even possibly now add Pochettino to this growing number of unbeatable managers. As far as Conte is concerned, let's not pretend that Arsene might have a plan to deal with him. We caught him cold early on in the season, I think we all know this will not be repeated at Stamford Bridge.
Now, you can point to tactics, Wenger not being an elite manager, him and his teams being out thought or out fought or simply being "not up for the fight". Ultimately the reason is irrelevant - big data suggests that whatever the cause, the record is shocking.
Would another manager be able to lift this current bunch of players to the levels required to beat one of the above managers? Who knows? I think however that we have now got to the stage where we have to take the plunge and find out.
There has been talk of psychologists working with the club this year, something the manager was keen to play down. Unless the psychologist is working with Wenger to overcome his performance anxiety when it comes to playing these managers then it is irrelevant. You can't tell me that the players don't know how bad his record is. It looked like they had given up again after City drew level.
When a team is fighting for its life and trying to stay up, they look at games against top opposition as the possibility of getting a bonus point or two. Their efforts are concentrated on "beating the teams around them". I think we need to be realistic and accept that we fall into the same category now, games against the above managers exist as nothing more than bonus points. Our fourth place trophy is earned by beating the so-called lesser teams.
A final point, when a striker has a good first season, this is often difficult to repeat. Footage exists of their movement, the way they like to receive the ball etc and smart managers will analyse this and adjust their defences accordingly. There now exists two decades of historic evidence of how we play and the above managers probably don't even bother doing any current research, why bother when all you need to do is watch any Arsenal game from the last ten years? You don't even need to watch a single previous Arsenal match to know when the subs will come on!
We have seen the film now hundreds of times, maybe just maybe there might be a different ending this year?
A quick question to finish. Would you rather have both Alexis and Ozil on long term deals with Wenger signing a new two year contract or lose both players if it meant we got a new manager?
