I've always wondered about Arsenal training methods but if Wilshere is being slowed down by a blob of chewing gum then things are worse than I thought.

Well that's certainly ticked all the boxes without saying anything at all .

Recorded attendance was 59,374 but I reckon there were no more than 45,000 in the ground yesterday. Maybe less. That's maybe 15,000 season ticket holders who chose not to attend. Big gaps all around me with loads of regulars missing.

I only went because for the second home game running (Stoke was similar), I couldn't get rid of my tickets - literally couldn't give them away! There hasn't been a 'sell-out' for weeks so the Ticket Exchange isn't an option.

More worrying for the money men, Club Level was only about 50% full while at the same time, the pitch-side advertising boards were urging the Corporates to 'SECURE YOUR CLUB LEVEL SEATS NOW!! Best of luck with that campaign. Even worse, almost half the boxes were empty and those that were being used were only sparsely populated.

The support is voting with their feet.

Really happy to see the improvements in Welbz, Iwobi and Elneny, also shout out to Ramsey and Čech.

Credit must go to AW for their improvements unless anyone knows different?

It goes to show how difficult a manger's job can be when he's relying on players doing their best.

Pep is now seeing what AW has had to deal with in the past ie being involved in so many big games in between playing some of the best teams in the league. It ain't easy.

Credit to AW and my best wishes to him on his retirement on a high when we win the Europa League.

Please AW don't drag it out, you deserve to end as a legend..............

Before watching refwatch on sky I expect Elneny's card to be reduced to a red for stopping the free kick from being taken or maybe a yellow which is all it merited.


*Dermot Gallagher agrees yellow card, no more.We must appeal.....................

It says I think he'll leave. It also says I don't think Wilshere and Wenger rate or even like each other. I do however accept I have no evidence for it.

What do you mean "reduced to a red"?

It was a soft red card. But you are looking for ways of volunteering to be sent off for not much of anything, El Neny really did put his hand up. He a) interfered with the taking of the free kick, b) shoved his opponent and c) knocked the ball away. It was a neatly calibrated display of petulance and cynicism. So not much sympathy from me although it was undoubtedly not fair.

He did say something. He's got a feeling he doesn't know whether it is his gut instinct or merely dose of the claptrap.

a red but not for foul play eg ungentlemanly conduct. Your a and c apply but not b ie a singler match ban.

Could get very messy from here in the financial area.

If a corporation takes clients to games they might very well be tempted next season by a new stadium in another part of North London. They throw in a few free prawn cocktails & no telling what people might decide to do.

I am not sure how the catering works at our stadium but I think a few retailers might be ringing up asking for some financial compensation. You can imagine having purchased a franchise to sell food in the stadium where 60000 fans will come & consistently the crowd is down 20%. I expect the financials to come under some real pressures. Maybe then Kroenke might get worried.

The club totally misread how much good will they destroyed by reappointing Wenger. If we win the Europa cup( I don’t think we will) I would not put it beyond Wenger to try & sign an extension to his contract at the end of this season. He is wily b******.

Did Wenger mention in his press conference that it was Orthodox Easter so that would explain the crowd being down. Next home game it will be one of the supporters birthday and that will explain why the crowds are down. Simple really.

Thanks. Makes sense now.

I have four season tickets. I did not go to the home match v Stoke, neither yesterday. Could I get rid of tickets. Nah! Could not give them away. So many mouthy fans saying they can't get tickets and desperate to go. Yet you put yours up for grabs and like many others that also do, no one buys them. They want us to give them for about £15 or nothing, that's how desperate they are to go. Fans who have no intention of ever setting foot inside the Emirates telling ST holders how they should support? Madness!

Doncaster, Norwich, WHU and Chelsea in the Caraboa Cup we no where near full and they are open to everyone. Arsenal have 13.5m followers on Twitter and yet a tiny fraction of that will ever see a live Arsenal match. While Mr Chang from Beijing and Brad from LA, mouth off to why Arsenal fans don't create an atmosphere inside the Emirates and put on their twitter profiles "Die Hard Gooner"

Fact is, like me, many fans are fed up of our boring football. After a 25 pass move against Saints that ended with the ball being passed sideways, backwards and all the back to Čech, the crowd booed and suddenly Arsenal started going forward. Wenger simply rested players to save his arse. he knows the main way to keep his job is to win the Europa Cup. Might have been a bit easier, if he had not told his team to put the handbrake on at 4-1 v CSKA and beat the 6-1 and make 2nd leg irrelevant.

What's exciting about Arsenal? Like I said boring football, Boring sick of listening to our manager, Lie, Spin and make excuses.

The gates are going to get worse in due course. Surely the club are watching this closely and realising that the manager has to go. I also noticed that v CSKA about Secure your club level seat right in front of a half empty club level. The club have no shame. That's embarrassing at any level.

that is interesting ... I said to someone the other day if I did pass through London on the way to see the son who lives in Denmark , there is no way I'd attend an Arsenal game . I'd trot around and have a peer at the Emirates , check out Highbury but the prospect of watching Chambers, Bellerin , Mustafi exchanging three hundred passes at a live match would be just too much to endure .

Which neutral in their right mind would want to watch us when as Gaz says .. there's quality entertainment a few miles across town for less money .

The stupid thing is in Aubameyang Mkhitaryan Özil Lacazette Welbeck Ramsay Iwobi Maitland Niles we have the quality to play a high pressure game ... if only the moron in charge would wake up and smell the f**** roses .

Statistically, seasonal variations notwithstanding, only about 219 people will be having birthdays who would otherwise be attending on any given day. Even assuming that all have parties (and many of the supporters are over 12 years old so that might not wash), we would need an average of 100 other fans to be attending each of their parties (certainly more entertaining than watching Arsenal play--but still a stretch) to explain the dip in attendance.

Of course, people sometimes don't have parties on the actual date but wait to the weekend. We might get a clumping of parties on weekends which might have important policy implications (for example, it might make sense to schedule matches at 3am on Tuesday mornings when there is unlikely to be party activity). But I will leave investigation of that possibility to other researchers.

About 5 years too late for that.

Blocked!

I don't go anymore and haven't been this season. I miss the experience but not the football Wenger serves up.

I hypocritically attended the league cup final and was angry at myself at doing so due to a shambolic performance which underlined why I no longer go to the Arsenal. The biggest problem is I have 2 sons and I really should be taking them to get them interested but I simply can't stand the sight of Wenger and won't endorse HIS Arsenal anymore (we are his club now)

The crowds will get worse the longer this goes on and also the player rotation will get worse with players trying to jump ship. I genuinely think he will be with us next season which is staggering all things considered.

We've been mid table before but Wenger seems to be doing something different which is damaging the fabric of the club and it's support

Pains me to say this but the club seems to be falling apart. The football is woeful - deeply boring with no semblance of a spark any more. This constant and ponderous passing backwards and forwards across the field is awful to watch. Nobody in our midfield seems capable of beating an opponent and our wide men don't seem able to hit a first time cross. And all the while, our 'defence' invent new variations on chaos and absurdity.

Time-served season ticket holders like you, me and Steve – thousands of us - have just stopped going. I think I’ve been to 4 or 5 games this season. I have loads of personal and professional friends and mobs of family, all of whom used to bite my hand off for spare tickets, but not anymore. Better things to do. It’s the all-pervading apathy that’s the real killer.

And all this needs to be placed in the context of our nearest and greatest rivals being a genuinely exciting team that any football lover would pay to watch. They’ve opened up clear water in the league (13 points so far) and I can’t see us getting close to them for some time. They are clearly and demonstrably better than us in almost every aspect of football, and all this has happened in the space of 2 or 3 seasons. More to the point, they’re a well-run club while we look like a shambles – a bunch of ditherers whose figurehead has lost all credibility and is rapidly becoming a figure of fun.

Looking back the Cologne game where we didn't sell out and 20 thousand Germans turned up was an indication of what was about to happen.

It's a bizarre phenomenon at Arsenal. Wenger did a great job but for his 3 titles seemed to convince our fan base who weren't adverse to success that he was some kind of Demi god and couldn't be questioned for some time. That simple thing has driven the club astray. Wenger is the best and worst thing that ever happened to Arsenal in my lifetime and *%^@ knows how we will view him in the future

Don't they count how many actually go thru the turnstyles ?

It did indeed only look about 3/4's full.

I would have thought they were obliged to under Health and Safety regs.

The Club know exactly how many spectators are in the ground but they choose instead to publish the number of seats that have been sold - a very different figure.

They used to announce the 'attendance' midway through the second half but stopped when it became so obvious that there were nowhere near that number in the ground. A couple of years ago, someone lodged a 'Freedom of Information' request to the Police (I think) who keep records of the actual attendance. The number was up to 10,000 smaller that the announced gate as I recall, but the difference will have increased markedly in recent times.

"Arsenal announce attendances 6,000 higher than official Met Police figures"

I don't understand - why would they not want people to know exactly how many ... oh wait.

After a bad spell six wins on the bounce, 18 goals scored and four conceded. Whatever criticisms can be levelled, that is a good run. Averaging three strikes a time hardly speaks of boring football. Anyway, better form than all the teams currently above us in the league. A little credit where it is due to the guys, I say.

I thought both keepers did well in the Soton match. Some pundits have blamed Čech for the first goal but surely that was all down to Mustafi clocking off?

Deaf ears Hoy, they do not want to listen..............

We have, as usual, been beating inferior opposition for the most part quite easily. However no progress has been made in improving our defending, which was very poor against both CSKA and Southampton. As we all know, the better teams will exploit our defending more ruthlessly and also make it more difficult for our attack. So we will continue to come up short when it matters, and fail to even challenge for the major trophies.
I think it's called 'groundhog season'.

Of course it’s a good run of form, but there are a few mitigating circumstances:
5 of those games have been at home
The football has generally been boring (Moscow first half aside) goals are obviously great but the general sideways pass stuff for the rest of the match is mind numbing. The first half against stoke was as poor as I’ve seen for years
Finally, the fans have seen these mini revival runs before, we’ve even had them before in this season.

If Wenger stays next year we will almost certainly have a patch where we win 6 games on the bounce, and it will have followed and be followed by some crushingly bad performances and defeats

Has anyone seen Harry Kane trying to convince everyone he touched the ball for spurs 2nd goal at the weekend?
“I swear on my daughters life I touched it”......how old is he!?

Yep, if chris wants to hold the ‘legend’ torch that’s his right of course , but like many others I won’t be joining in , given a choice I’d prefer him to be chased with pitchforkes down the Holloway rd but I’m bitter and twisted with hate as exiled once told me. These days i’ll Take it any which way such would be relief

Very slowly hoy/chris so you geddit!

Because we’ve seen these runs against average teams when the pressure is off many times before in the last decade , it’s what Wenger’s teams do , before it used to make the top 4 , because others weren’t good enough now they are

And 5 of the 6 have been at home , this weekend is the first away league game since brighton , let’s see what happens

Xhaka had another good game against Southampton. That's five or six on the trot now.

He was ok nothing more. People are over egging his performances cause he hasn't made a cock up recently as we have been playing crap teams

Just saw this

2016-17 Arsenal wage bill was £200m, Spurs was £127m.
So Arsenal spent £2.67m for every PL point while Spurs spent only £1.48m.
Arsenal's manager was reportedly paid £8.3m for this, while Spurs' manager was paid £5.5m.

Sorry he was better than "ok nothing more." He was at least good and arguably worth more than a simple good. I realise paper scores out of ten are at best unreliable but the one I noticed gave him an 8. In my view it was either 7 or 8. That's better than ok.

He was ok but a decent shot aside didn't blow me away.

Bernard just watch him and our whole midfield disappear like Lucan the moment we play someone good. That's all I'll say

For me being blown away by a performance would be worth a 9 or 10. To get a 7 doesn't mean he has to blow me away. He has to be good which is better than ok. Against Southampton he was at least a 7, but I wouldn't argue with someone who wanted to give 8.

You may feel determined to undermine his performances to support your view of him. But in my view he's played well lately.

We obviously need to strengthen our defence this summer but we really need a Cazorla replacement. When you watch old games when he played in that deep position compared to games he’s now when he isn’t there the difference in just getting the ball from back to front is staggering.
Cazorla was the plan, possibly the only plan against the high press. We have players at the base of midfield who are decent technically but nowhere near Cazorla two footedness and speed of thought, dribble and movement.
Being genuinely two footed speeds up the passing so much.

Ultimately this is another of Wenger’s inactive moves where he puts all his faith in a seriously injured player coming back quickly and as good as before rather than signing a replacement/competition.