Guardiola had one year managing Barcelona's B team before he was made manager of the senior team. Didn't turn out too bad.

He should be fined.

I suppose that’s a fair point and true.

Little bit easier to learn on the Job when you have Messi and Ronaldinho in your squad than Xhaka

Yes great idea

Let’s make our environment so hostile that any remaining decent player wants to bugger off

That's very true, Gunny, and I suppose every great manager has to start somewhere.

Make no mistake, though, this is a mammoth task. This isn't Guardiola taking over at Barca or Zidane at Madrid, this is a humungous undertaking that would test the abilities of even the greatest manager.

This sums up precisely how I feel after yesterday’s game. This is bang on the money


https://www.onlinegooner.com/articles/view/4921

He couldn't really throw on the young players against City, though. A completely disfunctional central midfield AND central defense at the same time pretty hard to fix. We just need to somehow shore things up at the back and hope we can outscore enough teams to keep our heads above water until the January transfer window.

I think that it pretty unfair.

Those pictures of Hector.

You'd never see anything like that back in the day when men were men and...er...

But he did.

Fairness is irrelevant.

Olympiakos. Could be worse. They tend to be dire away.

These 2 can go do one. LA Rams are their priority for success.

Little known fact

The wife of our new manager is an actress who features in CSI miami. How cool is that


https://youtu.be/sKGeOxskaWE

What did you make of yesterday’s game DHD if you don’t mind me asking.

Can’t get it out of my head, the horror the horror

Let me spare him the trouble of replying. It was embarrassing.

I don’t want Aubameyang, Lacazette or torriera sold, just that I think they will all need to be for various reasons.
Pépé, Tierney, Bellerin, Guendouzi, Holding I’m ok with, but at the moment The first two have barely started their Arsenal career and the later 3 haven’t convinced me they are ready to be a starting 11 for an Arsenal team that makes the top 4. Two of them coming back from really bad injuries. None of those 5 were mentioned by name in my post as players who need to leave.
Xhaka, premier league quality, yes - for a mid to lower table team - which is why we need to get rid of him.....ditto the others I named. I don’t see it as an over reaction to say we need 10 new players to properly challenge for the top 4. 2 CB and 2 CM, a ramsey/Özil replacement, a new RB, kolasinac replacement.....that’s 7 and we’d still not have great depth of quality at CB and CM

To be honest the most shocking thing about appointing Arteta is that he sat on the bench yesterday and watched the entire 90 minutes and still wants to be our manager.

Must be a sado masochist

Well TG, since you ask, the first point to make is I didn’t go. I posted the tickets on the Exchange but there were no takers; my fault I know but that’s £400 down the swannee. I offered the tickets free for the asking to my extended family and circle of mates and acquaintances but zero interest. I was truly surprised at the apathy – even my own – but when I saw the great swathes of empty seats, it made more sense.

On the game, we looked great for the first 45 seconds but after they scored, it seemed to me it was just a question of how many they wanted. Mercifully, they took their foot off the gas. Pep said they played better last week against Man U and lost. I didn’t watch too much of the second half so I can’t say much more.

Overall, we are an utter shambles. The least said about our defence, the better. Collectively, we must have the worst set of defenders in our history – and I grew up on Jeff Blockley and Gus Ceaser. Our midfield is now equally worthless. They don’t defend, press, create, shoot or dribble; both individually and as a group, they are pointless! Martinelli apart, yesterday’s attack was toothless and dull. There seemed to way too much distance between the defence and midfield but then at the same time, there looked to be miles between midfield and attack. That’s some trick.

And Özil! Offski, please with extreme prejudice. He has not re-invigorated himself in the slightest. He is the same inconsequential player that was rightly excluded from the squad in the early part of the season. He exudes the same air of privilege and entitlement. Emery was right to drop him and he was wrong to bow to the pressure to re-instate him. In many ways, Özil got Emery the sack although there was plenty of help from Xkaka, Sokratis, Luiz and Mustafi, the difference being that those are 4 poor players. Özil is – was – a proper talent, though that bird has long since flown. He’s only going through the motions now, with us for the money and to give him a platform for his views.

Only Leno and Martinelli emerged with an iota of credit. The rest were just dross. And Kolasinac DID duck. I doubt he could have stopped De Bruyne’s shot but he chose self-preservation over any sort of possibly painful attempt to save a goal. Xhaka did the same against West Ham. Luis regularly turns his back. That’s this team’s attitude. Would that be what you’d expect from Tony Adams, Martin Keown, Ashley Cole, Lee Dixon?

Yesterday, before all the current rumours broke, I saw a close-up of Arteta and I wondered, regardless of my views on his qualities as a coach, why the *%^@ would he wish to be associated with such a poor and tactically inept team? What can he do with a squad that’s currently ravaged by injuries with limited funds in the transfer window? Why leave vibrant City amid rumours that St Pep if off soon, only to join a moribund and leaderless club where the rock-bottom moral of the players is only matched by the apathy and outright scorn of the support?

Cheers DHD,

Only reason I was asking really was that I knew you were a season ticket holder and I just saw stuff yesterday that I’d never seen before.

The atmosphere is just dead and there were empty seats which I’d obviously seen before but at half time saw tons of people leaving.

Then during the 2nd half there was 2 guys Sat to the right of where I was sat giving dogs abuse to ....... Bernd Leno of all people ! (Amongst a couple of others)

My dad who was sat on the other side of the ground and is an old school hardcore wont leave till full time type fan text me to say he was off to the duchess of Kent with 20 minutes to go. He had enough and obviously tons of people left early but the feeling in the crowd is a combination of apathy and anger.

I can’t explain it but it just feels ... dead. Like end of days and people have had it. Arteta is the next sacrificial bunny so that Kroenke can increase the value of his shareholding. It must be a nightmare to play in front of however the performance was just shocking

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQwSUGNKyj8 ...

He wouldn't have stopped the shot ... it was too high .
.... but he certainly shrunk away from the possibility of blocking it which isn't something you expect a committed defender to do .


I watched the extended highlights on my Premier League channel ...... we didn't feature at all in any of the action .

So in Queensland, the health authorities have given new advice that people should be restricting themselves to 1.4 standard drinks per day of alcohol. Obviously they can't expect Arsenal fans to comply at the moment.

No man can serve 2 masters.

...although I must admit the stadium looks like its going to be very, very nice when I drove past it.

Palace got a point and are now above us in the league. Great

Look at the 3 teams above us. We are falling at a critical rate now.

They are going to need to do something in January to stop the rot. Swap player or trade to reinvigorate the squad as they are flat.

Just read a theory that Özil released that statement as a tactic to stop arsenal being able to sell him to a club in the Chinese super league (the only ones who could afford him)

Would make sense. Ie make it untenable

As much as I am intrugued by the possibility of Arteta I really do think it is an almightly gamble, and really one that a club the size of Arsenal should not be taking at this point.

Man U did much the same with Solskaar but only after an amazing start to his caretaker role when he became the darling of the fans and he was at least an actual manager who had managed before in the PL, albeit unsuccessfully. They probably feel now that they may have acted in haste. Time will tell on that one.

This feels a lot like when Brian Kidd was the no.2 under Fergie and everyone lauded his coaching skills and expected him to become a top manager. He went to Blackburn and just couldn't make the adjustment from coach to manager.

I hope Arteta is the real deal.

I've been almost looking forward to relegation.
I thought "That'll be one in the eye for the Kroenkes!"

But here we are, deja vu. Arteta is going to be our new manager. Yes, really definitely.
Oh, but maybe it's too much of a risk. We need someone with experience. Who's won things. Things that would get us into the big money CL again. Without having to win lots of games against good teams. Someone with experience of doing it with a not very good team. Maybe there's another one of those around this year.
We'll see. I won't believe anything until it's all signed and sealed.

I think we are focusing too much on the quality of the individual players. Yes, most don't seem that good or motivated. But why?

One of the characteristics of very good managers is that they improve players. Klopp does it. Guardiola. Poch. AW did it for most of his time here - and many players looked worse when they left.
But I think we can look across the whole of our current team and see players who seem worse than they used to be. For me, that's the proof that Emery was a bad manager.

We need a manager who can turn that round. Won't be easy or fast because of the scale of the decline, but also because of the psychological scars they must be carrying by now and that any playing style they had accumulated has been systematically dismantled. And with no coherent normal pattern to fit into.

Özil maybe being an exception. He seems more interested in Muslim/Turkish politics than football. And whatever is going on in his head seems to have been gradually building up over quite a few years.

Equally focusing too much on the managers when trying to understand what's going wrong. Ljunberg hasn't seemed that great, but he's had a set of players, out of form shall we say, plus injuries and no support staff. And the no support staff was always telling him what he needed to know about the club's intended next step.

I think Emery was a bad manager, but I'm not sure what involvement he had in signings, with the exception of the lamentable Suarez.

And AW gets a lot of flak over the current crop, but one of the things I noticed is that the types of players over his last few years didn't really fit the types of players he liked. We could see he wanted Sanchez. Özil was just picked up in a last day 'bargain' sale from RM. To show we were still a big club. After years of AW apparently being starved of funds for new signings. We know Gazidis had a plan to reduce AW's control of football processes. Hard to know the truth from outside, but I think the odds are many of those buys being more influenced by the new club 'processes' than being AW choices.

I saw AW saying that the club had 70 employees when he started, but 750 when he left. Looking at the results I think it would have been much better if Gazidis had been kept away from football matters. Not that he seemed to be doing as well on the financial and contract sides as other big clubs either.

It was supposed to have been his casting vote to choose Emery over Artetà last year. Because he so impressed them at the interview. Emery? Impressed at an interview. In English? Just a story, of course. Doesn't seem that it could be true. And Gazidis claimed the decision was unanimous.

The one thing we can all see is that the whole contracting side of the club has performed abysmally for ten years or so. Paying too much, wages too high, selling too low, slow to make decisions. Some of that might have been Wenger, but all of it can't have been. And from a strategic point of view, it's got worse not better.

Last summer seemed like a potentially exciting success. or a lot of fans thought so. Pépé so expensive, and young; exciting and successful. But did we really want a winger that much? Saka starting to come through. We bought Saliba as a CB. Did we need a CB? - obviously we did. So our new signing was loaned out for the year. Presumably the only way we could sign him, but the outcome was we didn't have a new CB. Except a last minute 'bargain basement' Luiz. Mmm. That can't have been planned. And whoever thought Luiz would be a good buy to plug holes in a defence? He had often been a loose cannon in an otherwise very tight Chelsea defence. Aubameyang and Lacazette? Tierney was a gamble. Not paying off yet, but maybe he'll get less injury prone. Not that we've had much success with players getting less injury prone. The one outstanding success is Martinelli; I'll assume that's down to Edu since that brings hope he might find a few more. It's all total chaos.

He will not be heading to China anymore. His tweet killed all chances.

I don't recall Arteta displaying any leadership on the pitch and don't think he has the gravitas to re-arrange the current lazy bunch.

Terminating Ozils contract would be the strongest message Arsenal could send to the squad right now.

Martinelli is a great prospect. I'd hate to lose Aubameyang but Martinelli has super start written on him.

Yes

Like i said; it makes his position untenable and might be deliberate. He’s trying to get a pay off

That’s fine but that involves paying Özil another 10 million to cancel the contract

The only message it sends is that if you act up you can make a fortune if they can cancel your contract too.

Look at the stats

The midfield is non existent

https://www.thesun.co.uk/sport/football ... ield-ozil/

No player can be sold against their will.....as long as their will is strong enough. You can’t fine a player for refusing to leave, all you can do is make them train with the kids and not pick them. Özil doesn’t seem overly bothered by that. If he was bothered he’d surely show a bit more in games.
If Özil wants to stay and see out his contract then he will

I think Aubameyang is off this summer. He is clearly not renewing, and even if he did would it be sensible for a club like ours, one that is rebuilding, to have a superstar striker on £300k per week on a deal that takes him to he is 34?
Sell him for £60-80m to one of the big Spanish two and invest that money in defence

Or he might be someone genuinely interested in highlighting the greatest mass incarceration since WWII. It is not always about money.

I wouldn’t trust his character as far as I’d throw it.

If it was another player maybe