See a photo on twitter earlier supposedly of PEA at Colney,since removed.
If Alec goes to Man u and there is a player exchange in the deal I would go for Smalling, not Marshall as I don't think he would come anyway, as we really need a defender, as Per is done, Kos is always injured, this is really where were struggling.
Real excited at the thought of PEA and Malcolm playing, got to be better than Welbeck and Iwobi! Oh and Wally Walcott.

This is a recurring Cazorla problem. We have Özil and nobody else is able to do the job. Don't know what I'm being accused of saying about Xhaka other than he's not a DM and his distribution is no better than anybody elses.

Whoever you have up front if there's noone to feed them then it's wasted money. We need neither of Welbeck or Iwobi we need a Mahrez or someone that can cross a ball.

We need to replace Özil or pay him enough to stay. No point in having forwards /strikers otherwise.

We are not far away from having a good team.........all we need is a new defence, oh and a keeper, and two central midfielders wouldn't hurt, plus a couple of widemen and a couple of strikers. Apart from that we are pretty well set.

Says the guy who was outwitted by a mouse

Just replayed the game. Not a very creative team performance. Still an improvement on last season. We only conceded 2. We are getting better.

Hoy this is a call to arms for you.

If we think the English refs are bad look at what they have to put up with in France. Ref is running to keep up with play, cuts across a defender also running back and trips up, then aims a kick at the defender and sends him off for a second yellow card. It was in the PSG v Nantes game

https://www.express.co.uk/sport/footbal ... Aubameyang

Article suggests Aubameyang will only move to Arsenal if Sanchez leaves to Utd or City; and City don't come in for him should they miss out on Sanchez.

Hi all

Just a quick visit,

Re: today, nothing really to add that hasn’t been said a thousand times over , other than it’s ever decreasing circles , just a magnification of issues some of us saw 8 years ago . Still we all have/had our own process to go through , hope the club can survive as a serious force in the future

Anyway for those that want to ( this time around) protests are back on for the Everton game 3/2, see attachments.

I unfortunately can’t make it , at the Amex for Brighton vs West Ham

Hopefully we can start getting our club back before it is too late

I’ll add I would of gone but I booked the Brighton tickets way back, everyone knows my current stance

What is particularly frustrating is that you could tell all 3 were players 5 years ago when they would have cost £35m between them. Mané shone for Senegal in the Olympics, Salah was Basel's best player by a distance, and half of Europe knew about Firminio. Quite apart from that, I genuinely think your average football manager geek could find better value in the market than a lot of managers, latter day Wenger included. The amount of players lots of people have known about from seeing on the game and then watching in real life puts many club scouting departments to shame. At least Mislintat's record as a scout suggests that he can find players before several million computer game players can, unlike Mourinho, current Wenger & Pep to mention just 3.

I agree re our principle focus, but if Mkhitaryan is going cheap enough, say £20m, I'd go for that in a heatbeat. Much better suited to us than Utd, despite his scummy agent pushing him there.

Ignore him. When it comes to this team, there is no rationality left or indeed honesty of debate.

French refs are often insane egomaniac incompetents with little pretence of impartiality, fairness or serving the game. They are (apart from one or two good ones) by some distance the worst of Europe's top leagues. So many decisions which have nothing to do with split second judgement that are genuinely shocking, and they act like aristocrats lording it over peasants. My largest problems with British refs as a whole is that most appear to have no playing experience at all in their judgement and are often more concerned with managing the game than applying the laws equally. French refs appear to often despise the game and those that play it - they are so often like the piss-take stereotype of the nightmare Parisian waiter who seeks to belittle and insult those who he should be giving service to.

Kroenke wants Wenger to stay so he stays. And yes, I will repeat for the 100th time. The 'Wenger out' and the 'board' this and that is a fruitless exercise. It doesn't matter. Gazidis cares I believe. He has a football background. Kroenke? Doesn't care one iota. Would he like to win? Sure, who doesn't. But he doesn't to win bad enough to do what it takes. Arsenal are a financial asset. That's it.That's what we are. We are the same as prime real estate or hundreds of thousands of shares Amazon stock on the NYSE. That's it. Accept it and get used to it. The ONLY thing for the future that may change it is what his son thinks. He is the one that will take over. Till then, the health checkup of Stan is my biggest interest.

I wonder how many of you who said no to Usmanov no matter what, would reverse that now if they could go back in time? Would you still accept Kroenke knowing what the future would be or would you go with Usmanov and the unknown? I know which one I would take gladly.

With regards to this 3 game ban of Wenger. He's a control freak so I assume he didn't allow Bould to have his own tactics. Technically, we can't blame Wenger since he wasn't on the touchline but in reality we know all the decisions from the starting XI, subs, tactics (if we had any) were his.

I ended the night happy. City lost. I'm never happy about Arsenal losing but I went to bed with a smile on my face. I really thought they would go the season not only unbeaten but in style. I still think they will win all the domestic trophies and its a matter of when not if they win the CL.

So the City run is over, that's a relief. A new run is on though, for Arsenal losing out on ECL. Wenger out !

where are you coming from I dealt to that mouse big time .... and the word's out ... non of his cousins have been back .

Mystifying ..... Arsene doesn't know where their goals came from .
Two Bournemouth players would be my guess .

Half the transfer window has gone with us as usual sitting on our hands .

Any additions now are going to smack of a panic attack because of the sh***t results at Forest and Bournemouth

In fairness I don’t know any manager with a touchline ban who will just hand over everything surrounding the match, preparation, tactics, subs etc to the assistant.
Technically, we can absolutely blame wenger

Looking at yesterday’s starting line up I ask myself how many of those players are proper creative players? Only Wilshere. Then how many of them are capable of beating or dribbling past a man? Only Wilshere.
So we have one creative player and one who can beat a man and it is the same player. So maybe wenger packed the team with pass masters....Xhaka supposedly is but he’s not exactly a metronome.
Did deeper and look at the players who are genuinely comfortable with the ball at their feet. Should be all 11 but I’d say it was only half the team.

7 defensively minded players and 4 attackers of which 2 are welbeck and iwobi. Welbeck and iwobi are the sort of players who will look good in a fantastic team, but they can’t take the mantle on themselves.

.
Cyril Regis dead aged 59 ... good old fashioned hustle and bustle centre forward one of the Three Degrees along with Cunningham and Batson ...... suffered a lot of racial abuse in the late 70's

That's not how I recall it.

After several nights of filling his belly and eluding your efforts to trap him he decided it was all too easy and moved on to find somewhere more intellectually challenging.

Great player. Very sad, no age at all.

The problem is that years of poor management/coaching and underinvestment have left us in the situation Liverpool were in for many years, on the fringes of the CL and unable to attract the very best players because a. we are not in the CL and b. they don't believe in the manager.

Alexis and Özil were supposed to be the players we built a great side around, instead we basically hung them out to dry.

I'd love to see what Bould could do over a dozen matches or so with a free hand to do what ever he wanted.

Wenger will only spend big money on attacking players. We got Vieira cheap. He inherited the back line. Sol came to us because he wanted to CL football, a title and to stay in London near his family and at the time we were the only London side that fit the bill. Čech came to us when he was excess baggage and Chelsea were going in another direction.

Wenger hasn't spent anywhere close to the same money the Manchester sides, Chelsea or even Liverpool has on defense. Even Tottenham went for a well known defender (Vertonghen).

Unless you are really into continental football, no one would have heard of any of Wenger's defensive buys save Pers due to his being on the German national side (or was, not sure if he still is).

Just like RVP who while he may have gone about it in a different way, left for what would appear to be very similar reasons.

And if Wenger's contract ends on 31st May 2019 then we officially have only 500 days until he's gone.

Is that bit about "the lowest points tally after 23 games" true? Or is it only relevant to the Wenger years?

See these are the finer points in life you miss

A quick exit and all his mates would be wondering what happened to Mickey , they'd invade the house looking for him

but no ....... the sharper cookies don't work that way ...string the little rodent along a little , let him brag to his mates ...then Wallop ... leave Mickey's corpse outside for a night .

They got the message .

I agree with your last statement completely.

Does Wenger realistically expect this collection of players, bar a few, to challenge for major honours? And what does he do to make them better, both individually and collectively? I do not know about his work on them individually, but collectively, it is clear for all to see. Wenger is way way way way way past it! WENGER OUT !!!!!!!!!!

https://le-grove.co.uk/2018/01/15/insid ... ture-date/

Who has Stan's email? Send this to him. Let him know how much of the payroll is going to waste. American bosses wakes up when they know they are wasting their payroll for nothing.

Kev nails Wenger again

http://www.onlinegooner.com/article.php ... lx4_9GnyhA



This bit I raised a week ago...

You set yourself up for that kind of thing when you start erecting busts of your current first team coach and celebrating him in your stadium with the likes of hanging chain divides in Club Level with his head on putting him on a par with Herbert Chapman (a man who won three titles in a row at one club and started an identical sequence at Arsenal before dying halfway through the job, at a time when the top flight was far more competitive).

When we get to 40 points there will be mass celebrations. Generally you don't go down if you reach 40 points. It's as good as a trophy. Our expectations have altered.

Without googling I'd say .....we collected far less points when we got relegated around 1912 and think we had a few lean years after Henry Norris pulled his master stroke before Herbert arrived .

Wouldn't think we would have collected that many in 1973 -74 ... of course back then it was only two points for a win .

F365 today ......


Granit Xhaka
At some point Xhaka will realise that receiving mild applause for spraying a pass out to the wing doth not an effective central midfielder make. Reputations are forged when in tough times. Xhaka is usually nowhere to be seen when Arsenal are capitulating.


http://www.football365.com/news/premier ... -losers-88





.....

More from F365.......
If you’re after a metaphor for every one of Arsenal’s issues combined, hear this:

– Arsenal loaned out Wojciech Szczesny in 2015 and let him stay at Roma for two years.

– Over those two years, Szczesny transformed from a boy (with occasional disciplinary problems) into a man. So, the loan worked perfectly.

– Over that same time, Petr Čech’s form declined badly to the extent that David Ospina was occasionally picked. Ospina was also largely terrible.

– Rather than welcoming Szczesny back into the arms of the club and making him their No. 1 goalkeeper, Arsenal sold him to Juventus. Juventus made it clear that Szczesny would be the heir to arguably the greatest goalkeeper of all time, Gianluigi Buffon.

– The fee Arsenal commanded for Buffon’s heir? £10m. That’s less than West Brom paid Southampton for Jay Rodriguez in the same summer. Rodriguez is a year older.

– Čech has got worse. Szczesny has got better.

Thought this nailed it:

Wenger spoke this week to deny that he will walk away from the club before the end of his two-year contract. He is addicted to the light that blinds him.

21 goals in 17 away games. Take out the 9 scored v BATE and Everton and it is 12 away goals in 15 games.

Considering we always look like conceding 2 goals to anyone, are rarely look like scoring more than once away from home you wonder where we can possibly win away all season?

By the way if we do sign Aububayang then it's purely a big name to appease fans. It's rather an illogical signing as working on the assumption we sell Sanchez but keep Özil we need

2 new central defenders
2 new wide players
1 new central midfielder
1 new keeper


... minimum still. It's rather illogical we have a different striker stood up front scratching his head at the collection of bog average talent stood behind him.

Interesting to see Man U continually exercise the year extension clause in the contracts of so many of their players. Stops the panic of being in the situation we are in even if the player wants to leave, it buys the club time to get rid on their terms.