Written by dandan

So three days of gloomy inquests have come and gone. It’s amazing how quickly hope turns to depression in the blogging world.

Leaving aside those sites that are used primarily by the doomers and verbal bovver boys to vent their spleen and whose anger is in many cases directed at clubs like the Arsenal. For them, it is simply a way to assuage the bile that chokes them, whilst they struggle to face the realities of a fast changing world they believe has no place for them.

Witness Rooney and his foul-mouthed rant at the cameras. He has everything that most young people could aspire to and yet still cannot handle the fires that consume him.

What chance then for those who really do have nothing, no job, no real role models, no hope or expectation of personal success?  Those supporters whose standing among their peers, associates and indeed life in general, is dependent on the bragging rights and reflected glory provided by the achievements of their chosen football team. Remove that success and the result, as we have seen, is predictable and inevitable.

But even beyond that, the contributors to respected mainstream sites of which ours is one, struggle to hide the anger and frustration that has come bubbling to the surface of our red and white world. That corner of every fan’s mind that is never far from his thoughts as he lives his daily life, among commitments to family, job and himself has taken over in a sort of collective disappointment that is thrashing around looking for a scapegoat.

We failed to win a football match on Saturday. No, worse than that, our heroes didn’t perform, they let us down. But did they? We all have bad days at the office, why not footballers? Do we expect those that support us to react so angrily when we have a bad day? No of course not, so why so hard on the team? Does the booing solve the problems? Does nagging solve yours?  Again I suspect not.

The clouds are lifting. Spurs have been well beaten by Real Madrid and the man who did the damage was ex gunner Adebayor. How that man loves scoring against the spuds. How they will hate the fact that he put them out of the CL barring a miracle. Will they finish in the top four this season or is that one appearance in the champions league in fifty years and out again?

Chelsea and Utd  have a very important first leg CL game tonight, they can’t both win. So one or the other is going to be feeling down by tomorrow. Will they raise themselves enough to bounce back for the weekend or maybe do an Arsenal and have an off day and re-open the title race? You see the imponderables have started again.

Football is like that, down one week, up the next. None of us knows what lies ahead, but the great guessing game keeps us fans  hooked and we will be back, pumped up again next week, next month, next season.

Ah!! Next season, not so far away is it? A new transfer window awaits. Fact and speculation will soon become entwined as myriad players are named and shamed as likely ins and outs at clubs large and small.

But we at The Arsenal, what do we need? Well, a goalkeeper of course, goes without saying, but a back up or number one? That’s anybody’s guess.

Clichy, is he away as per the rumours? Will Gibbs stay if he isn’t?Will we indeed play Gibbs or buy another full back? Everton’s Baines is flavour of the month according to the tabloids, but do we need or want him?

A centre half is a popular choice, now who could he be? The blogs demand a colossus, a man mountain of a player, a natural instinctive leader, so a captain as well perhaps. How is Cesc going to take to that? Will we lose Cesc? Probably. It’s almost a certainty if he loses the captaincy. But if he is fit and stays, is there a better midfield in the league than the Cesc/Jack combination with Aaron coming through? Maybe, as they say, Denilson is on his way, has he had enough of the constant flack, who else will go with him?

What can we offer Song to stay? We also need someone to lead the line and score the goals we missed this season. Fragile RvP is hardly a good bet to manage a full season; great player that he is, he will have to be nursed.

Who then is out there available to be purchased with Premier League experience? Will the other clubs sell us the missing link we need? I think not, so it’s abroad again for another foreigner to bed in, how long will he take to settle?

Do we perhaps owe our reserves and out-on-loan players a chance? Could those guys, schooled in the Arsenal way, do the job?

If they don’t get the chance, will other clubs faced with same dilemma descend en-masse to steal tomorrow’s stars at a bargain price from under our noses (Barca and Cesc anybody)?

Then there is Arsène: will he stick to his own beliefs regardless of what others think, is the club even bothered what fans think, providing he keeps us in the gold mine that is the champions league, do they know more than we do, are their deals already done?

Questions hundreds of them: just think, some fans are down now, how will they cope in the close season? No football, just the endless controversy. Will the blogosphere melt if clubs and supporters are at odds on the way forward and the clubs take a different route to the fans perceived preference?

Money talks they say – do we have the money? My word it’s going to be a great summer for cyber warriors. I see smoking keyboards and exploding irate fans. Bring it on, say I.

Written by Red Arse

Wengerball or Not Wengerball? That is the Question!

OK, so everyone is disappointed and frustrated by Arsenal’s recurring annual springtime aversion to winning games and clinching titles. The Blackburn game is just the most recent example of a flaccid performance leading to an unsatisfactory anti-climax.

Look, it’s not over until the fat lady toots her flute so let’s not give up yet, there’s many a slip twixt cup and lip, as you well know. That being said, what the heck is going wrong?

There is a pernicious and increasingly acrimonious split, verging on a gulf, emerging between Gooners with very different schools of thought as to what they see as an acceptable level of  achievement for the club, and we need to determine if there is anything to be learnt from this division.

A First up; In the pro-Wengerball camp there is a firm belief that Arsène Wenger, and his vision of playing an exquisite style of fast, technical football, is the right way to go, while also remaining within tight financial constraints to ensure the long-term financial and commercial viability of the club.
An important rider to this is that many of the slightly older supporters do not want to return to the days of unedifying clogging and exhaustingly dire football which blighted their lives in the past.

B In the other camp; there is a frustrated, angry and increasingly strident element whose impatience is leading them to declaim the manager and many of his players. Their mantra seems to be ‘we want trophies, at whatever price’ and if that requires more prosaic, ‘industrial’ football, as well as Wenger and several of his players going, then so be it.

The consequences of this approach calls for an end to Arsène’s derided youth project and the purchase of expensive established footballers and to hell with financial stability.

These are, of course, broad brush descriptions of the opposing camps views and there are many variants on these themes.

I fall, unapologetically, into the pro-Wenger camp, but with my own addendum. I firmly believe that playing wonderful football will, in and of itself, produce the longed for trophies, provided we can establish what has brought on this annual malaise and rectify it, as discussed below.

Watching the Blackburn and other games on TV, and recording them for more sober reflection, it becomes apparent that the Wengerball style has gone into hibernation. Gone is the fast, slick passing, high scoring, attacking game many of us so love. Instead we are being treated to a team of imposters who present a slow, cumbersome, poor passing game sadly lacking in guile, creativity or firepower.

Why has this happened? Well, if Denilson or Diaby had been playing recently we could have blamed our ritual scapegoats. But they were not. If Almunia had let in a couple more goals on Saturday, which he did his best to do, we could have blamed him. But he did not.

So what has happened to the team who have played so beautifully, earlier in the season, and have achieved success which leaves us a creditable second in the EPL at the moment?

‘Confidence has deserted a number of our players,’ I can hear many of you say, and that is undoubtedly true, but that is surely not the whole story. Good teams can overcome individual drops both in form and/or confidence and still come out on top.

Debates will surely rage about the ‘whys and wherefores’ of the team’s demise, but I will not attempt to engage in that discussion in this article.

What I can say, is that the team’s performances, however forensically we may examine the individuals or the tactics involved, will no doubt reveal various shortcomings, to one degree or another, but will not reveal the main cause of the problem.

I have been quietly watching our main competitors, both in the EPL and Europe, and also looking back at our successful teams of the past to discover the missing ingredient, and hopefully find the solution to our current problem.

And eureka I have arrived at what seems a blindingly obvious difference between success and failure.

The ‘old’ Arsenal teams, and the most successful contemporary football teams, had that va-va voom ingredient, able to pull irons out of the fire when things were not going smoothly.

That special ingredient, capable of turning a good team into perennial winners, is/was the possession of a very special player, or two, such as Ian Wright, Thierry Henry, Dennis Bergkamp, Paddy Vierra, Messi, Villa, Bale and, yes, Rooney.

Much though I treasure many of the talented players in our current team, Cesc, Jack or Samir, for example, I also believe we need someone special, in addition, to make us all tremble with anticipation. That player should be capable of grabbing the game by the ghoulies and changing a loss to a draw, or a draw to a win. That player could be a special centre back or a special centre forward or a special midfielder, or better yet, all three.

Note the deliberate use of that word ‘special’. We do not need another player with potential or an inexpensive journeyman who can ‘do a job’, but someone ‘special’.

I can already hear the yells of the financially aware Wengerball literati out there saying that we cannot afford the money such ‘special’ purchases would require. Others are, probably, yelling that they are not prepared to watch ‘pretty’ football any longer and go trophyless, as a consequence.
Clearly neither camp is happy with the current situation.

The paradox is that if we do not invest in special players because of the risk to our current financial stability, we risk losing our place at the top table which will affect both our prize money and our commercial income to the detriment of the club’s future financial stability.

It’s a tough call, but if we need ‘special’ players, and I think we do, with all that means financially, the club and Arsene have got to carefully reconsider their strategy and act accordingly.

My advice, Arsène, would be to trust your instincts, continue with the youth project, please carry on with Wengerball but also select and buy the right ‘special’ player(s) and he or they will repay you with trophies and be a self funding project to boot.
That will close the divide between the fans and you will rightly be a hero to all!

This year’s EPL trophy is still within our grasp, but following the above advice would make next year a sure fire certainty for success.

Go for it!!

You can count on one hand the amount of times Arsène Wenger has blamed his team after a defeat.

His usual patter is to put it down to any of the following:

Bad pitch.

Bad officiating.

Bad luck.

Opposition goalie being Man of the Match.

Opposition being too dirty.

Opposition being too oppositiony.

Tired players.

Injured players.

Tired players getting injured.

Sir Alex Faustuson’s pact with the Devil.

Mice.

Ok, he may never have actually blamed a defeat on the activities of mice, but if he remotely could he would.

The point being that, whatever he says to the players in private, for public consumption he never lays the blame on them.

Which makes his words after yesterday’s disappointing home draw against Blackburn quite significant:

“It was a flat performance with a lack of energy level, a lack of sharpness. It was quite a big concern to see what we have seen today. It is difficult to identify one special thing. I felt we started OK and after, our game became flat. Very few players looked to have the resources to put the pace up in the game. Part of it is down to the fact that Blackburn defended well but I don’t put the majority of reasons down to that. I feel it is more down to our poor offensive performance today.

“I am concerned about our performance today. Before we speak about the title we have to focus on our performance level, because it was not good enough today. That is our first concern.”

Watching him talk in the televised post match interviews I had the sense of a man grasping to understand what’s gone wrong – and not finding many answers.

Normally after a result and performance like this we can fall back on injuries and the usual scapedonkeys – players like Diaby and Denilson – as an excuse. But on Saturday we had our full complement of attacking options available.

We may have been injury-hit at the back, but we can’t shift the blame to that end of the park given that we kept a clean sheet.

The stark fact is that our first choice attacking line-up could not score against a team that has failed to keep a clean sheet away from home all season.

Man Utd put seven past Blackburn at Old Toilet.

Spurs put four past them at Wet Fart Lane.

Wigan and Villa also scored four against them at home.

Even Fulham and Sunderland hit three each against them.

We drew a blank.

If scoring against Blackburn on their travels is like shooting fish in a barrel, we ended up with a hole in our foot and the fish laughing at us.

I would hate to think the Arsène sceptics may be proved right, but his quotes imply that he has no idea why his team couldn’t perform and, by inference, he has little idea how to get them to rediscover their mojo.

That’s quite frightening, because it hints at the absence of a key quality that every successful team needs: call it heart, drive, mental strength, morale.

Whatever it is we don’t seem to possess it at the moment and, whatever you say about Manchester United, they have it in spades.

Worryingly, Arsène was hinting that he doesn’t know where to find it; he was admitting that he could not motivate the team (even though you would think players with a serious chance of becoming champions shouldn’t need any motivation).

I believe he has always felt that if he can get all his best attacking players on the pitch at the same time their technical ability will simply overrun the opposition. On Saturday the Ferrari was primed and ready, but it was packing a Reliant Robin engine.

Which brings me back to the question at the top of this post: when the priest loses his faith, to whom do you turn to bolster your own? When the writer hits a block, who provides the words? When the professor has no answers, who do you ask?

Is it possible that Arsène has realised that he does not have it in him to motivate this particular group of players?

When his previous teams won trophies, was he motivating them to perform so well, or were those teams full of players capable of motivating themselves?

We’ll never know the answer – perhaps it was a bit of both – but one thing is sure: Arsène seems to have realised that he is now staring at the biggest challenge he’s ever faced in football management.

RockyLives

Dear Angry of Internetville,

Yes, we know you’re frustrated.

It would have been good to have won the Carling Cup.

Knocking Manchester United out of the FA Cup would have been very satisfying.

It would have been excellent to have beaten Barcelona and progressed to the quarter finals of the Champions League.

Some trophies over the past five years might also have been nice.

Maybe some additional world class signings during that time would have helped too.

But none of those things happened and we are where we are.

By all means use the Blogosphere as a forum to discuss the merits and shortcomings of our players and our manager.

But please stop writing Open Letters to Mr Wenger, Mr Gazidis, the Board of Directors of Arsenal FC or all three combined.

THEY’RE NOT LISTENING.

THEY DON’T READ THEM.

AND RIGHT NOW THEY’RE TRYING TO WIN A CHAMPIONSHIP TITLE.

Of course, you already know they’re not listening, but it doesn’t stop you posting your Open Letter on the internet. So why do you do it?

Isn’t it just a way of trying to make yourself seem important?

But I’m sorry to have to inform you that your view is just as unimportant as mine, my eight-year-old son’s, the bloke with smelly feet who sits behind me at The Grove’s and every other supporter’s.

We are all amateurs. The professionals, thankfully, are the ones running our club and the ones who have performed the greatest miracle in modern football by keeping us seriously competitive while moving to a new stadium that will guarantee our future long after the Chelseas and Manchester Citys have gone into post-sugar daddy decline.

Yours truly,

RockyLives

Written by Harry

The inner workings of Arsène Wengers mind have for some 15 years, had the average Arsenal fan’s imagination captivated. We’ve been spellbound by the intricate passing and mesmeric breathtaking counter attacks, in awe of the array of attacking talent on show, which saw us reach the pinnacle with the Invincibles unbeaten run in 2004, a feat unliklely ever to be matched by another team………

Taking Arsenal and along with them the rest of the Premier league to another level, Wenger was arguably the catalyst (along with Sky) to really establishing the PL as the best league in the world. Wenger’s success challenged old red nose, who responded and their personal duel over a period of 6 years has hogged many of the back pages……….

Wenger as we know, changed established habits,  diets, routines, really shaping, maybe even reinventing the culture of the stereotypical British Player, whilst fully integrating the foreign players, sprinkling that grit of the bulldog with the finesse of the European pedigree…..

He has created a training facility to be proud of; moved us from our spiritural home to a state of the art super stadium that is the envy of many. Plaudits and admiration have come from around the globe, vultures circle on our playing staff , the manager himself and even the groundsman, as many of the worlds greatest clubs (equal to ours of course) have come calling……And not forgetting our Physio Gary Lewin was also po0ached by England and let’s not go into the injury situation since his cousin took over…

Along the way we have lost some of our prize playing assets, but always to the financial betterment of Arsenal. Anelka was transformed from 500k to some 23million pounds.  Other favourites departed for the greener grass, but Wenger is a canny operator who has managed his assets as if they were highly spec’d finely tuned racing cars…he instinctively knew when he could move them on and replace them with better more advanced models (Anelka really the only one moving ahead of schedule, his on board computer was playing up), in the meantime he cultivated his youth products to ensure that we had the talent already groomed in the Wenga-ball methods.

Some of these youngsters have moved on, Bentley, Thomas and I suppose the most infamous was AsSHcOLE, but slowly we have seen some make it into the first team, it has been a very slow and at times a painful process as we have came so close to winning silverware but falling just short each time often due to a lack of experience / squad depth and of course the gutter press, along with Hansen, Lawrenson and the rest of MoTD have completely milked the cow at every opportunity to have a dig at our expense.

The fall was from very high up, having been invincible in 2004, the fans expectation was extremely high maybe even lacking a touch of realism, many have criticised Le Boss for some of his decisions probably rightly so at times, there have been tactical errors, failure to make changes when required during games, and the slow or even complete lack of movement within the transfer markets, most notably in the mid season window for a couple of seasons we have had a hole that has needed plugging due to injuries and he has failed to remedy. Another season we needed a striker, this season we really needed another centre back……… but Wenger waits on the return of injured players….

So Wenger is not infalliable, he does make mistakes, but overall he has transformed our club and really changed it from the bottom up, the club now has a solid slab reinforced foundation now that will stand the test of time, when he does go, whoever does takes over will be a very fortunate manager.

But why highlight what we already know, well at times when things do go awry, and at the moment our season has hit a brick wall, some teddys have been thrown by some fans who I feel don’t appreciate fully what Wenger has truly given us  and just cannot see the wood for the trees. Hopefully if I am still walking this planet in 25 years time, when everyone looks back, we will all be hailing him as a Legend and all of us appreciating what he has done for us..

Coming back to the here and now, and the thing that prompted the writing of this and looking at the whole picture, is something someone had said on one of the comments a few days ago, is just what you would  ask le Boss, if you had time alone with him to talk about Arsenal…..

My top 5 questions for Wenger:

1. Do you feel looking back, that your over 30’s policy that has seen much experience walk out the door has in someway affected our chances of delivering silverware and leaves you with some regret? And of the over 30’s that left which one do you wish you had kept on for longer?

2. At one point we had an abundance of centre midfielders, with Silva, Flamini, Diarra all vying for a space, Diarra was the one we all had high hopes for, but Flamini made it hard for you to drop him, but due to this we lost both of them, do you think you should have handled this differently, as surely now we are very weak in this area?

3. Bob Wilson has been quoted recently saying that you tried your hardest to get Reina in before this season started, do you feel your inability to get a decent keeper in to replace Jens Lehmann has really cost over the last 3 or 4 seasons?

4. Invariably, you do not make substitutions at half time even when we are playings atrociously, why is that?

5. Who is the best player who has played for you at Arsenal and which one has disappointed the most?

What would your top 5 questions be?