Guest Article by Peter Ryde
Well, after yet another humiliation defeat you might think that the powers at Arsenal would be fuming….no chance.
I usually play a typical Gunner game with my Grandson(now 24). Before each match, like most other supporters, we try to second guess Arsene’s mistakes. Don’t get me wrong I love the man, but my belief is that he has stayed few years too long.
The game consists of a study of the available players and picking ‘our’ best team, then picking the one that would get us stuffed. Daft yes, but you would not believe how many times the team we pick to get stuffed is so near to the one Arsene chooses.
This sad state only proves that:
(A) either we are geniuses or
(B) that Wenger has become so predictable that anyone from another club can pick a team to beat us. Not only beat but humiliate us. Now as much as I may think we are most the knowledgeable Gunners in the world, I accept it may not be true.
Next, let’s come back to the post mortem, i.e, why does he do these stupid things and why doesn’t the board ask him to justify such basic mistakes? Martin Keown on TV was in a state of shock like I have never seen him before. He accused his old friend of making 3/4 very bad and amateurish errors in the team selection and tactics.
He was 100% correct. I do not know one manager in Europe who would purchase two top players and bench them for such a big match. AW does this on a regular basis. It is too simple to put it all down to selection and tactics. It smells of our usual ‘as long as we are making big profits, that’s ok’ approach. No other top club has that as its aim.
Finally, I would like to state the obvious and say that somehow the board and AW are 100% responsible for our demise. They, after a ton of criticism at the end of last season, boasted there will be BIG changes. We thought AW would go and possibly Stan K would sell out. No!
What the Arsenal board mean by big changes is:
(1)Have wholesale clear out good quality players that were either purchased recently or already with us(Gibbs, Perez, Gabrielle, OX etc), so they don’t spend on new players out of our massive money pile.
(2)Try to act the big club we once were by telling top players they either sign to their terms or go, and then wonder why they don’t perform as they should.
(3) Play our best kids in pre-season and then loan and many out as possible to cut wages costs.
It would be very interesting to see our daft game repeated by others to see if it’s just us who keep picking the worst team on the day or can others second guess AW’s weird thought.
I feel that AFC have known for 6 months that they were going to be blackmailed by agents of tapped up players(Ox, Sanchez, Ozil) and they should all have been sold in early July.
We now face a very nasty long season of embarrassing team selection and massive humiliation against teams that are far inferior. So we get what we deserve for turning up year in year out, letting the board sit and count the money.
That’s how I see this lousy weekend.
