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.

Sad to hear the news about Cyrille Regis...dead at 59. I remember one Boxing Day over Highbury he destroyed O'Leary...WBA were three up ....we fought back...think it was Hollins and Brady scored (though I wouldn't swear to it) but we couldn't get the equalizer.

I just heard about him on BBC. Having never heard of him, I had to "youtube" him. Wow. Sad news. Wish I had been around to see him play. So young.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaCVze6H9B4

The deal between Alexis, United and Arsenal is ready...

€28m + Mkhitaryan for Arsenal

£350k per week and United's number "7" for Alexis.

Now the only thing preventing the deal is that Mkhitaryan isn't convinced about joining Arsenal. Would you honestly blame him for having doubts

If that's the deal it's a no brainer. Not sure how Mhkywotsit fits with Özil but who cares, we need quality all over the park so it's a start.

If that's the deal it's a no brainer. Not sure how Mhkywotsit fits with Özil but who cares, we need quality all over the park so it's a start.

I wonder if he's going to be a big enough dick to appear at old Trafford tonight.

Man United v Stoke team. No Mkhitaryan.

Not even on bench,

Ed Woodward has got him locked up somewhere waterboarding him and pulling his toenails off one by one until he agrees to sign our contract. So far he's gone without food or water for 24 hours and he's still refusing to come to us

As Alexis Sanchez emerges covered in *%^@ from the sewage pipe that leads from Arsenal with nothing more than a bag of toiletries, spare clothes and a £350k a week contract.

Agree we need quality all over the park but my fear is this will be all we do. When Sanchez goes it could be argued our only two top class players are Özil and Lacazette.....aren’t Aubameyang and Mhykitarian almost copies of these two?

Hopefully the mantra is world class players find a way of playing together is true because I don’t think Wenger has a clue anymore

If arsenal can get 28 million plus Mkhitaryan then that will have been far more than I thought we could squeeze out of the deal. The whole episode is a disaster for Arsenal but Mkhitaryan cost Man U £26m 18 months ago and that was a knock down price based on his ability and goals/assists output in Germany.

If we get Aubameyang (£55m) and Malcom (£40m) and get £25m plus Mkhitaryan for Sanchez and offload Walcott (£20m).....and we add all that to the £40m profit we have made in the market so far this season, we come to a grand NET spend total of £10m.

Now a club of our income, and with our needs, should be spending £100m NET this season to restructure the squad.

Arsenal too often just replace but don’t improve. If the club really want to show ambition use the remaining £90m (of my worked out budget) and buy a couple of CB and a holding mid. £30m for each gets you some decent players.

I appreciate that is a lot of figures I’ve made up but I don’t think any are far from reality, particularly the amount Arsenal should be spending on reinforcements each year.

Martial starts so that one looks highly unlikely.

Hey Niall, Aubameyang looking likely at this point. I've already come around from the reservations I had, with losing Sanchez to Man U we need to show we're still a club for top players. Aubameyang and Malcom in for Sanchez and Walcott would be a decent turnout from a monumental mess we've made for ourselves.

We need to ditch the back 3, far too many players who don’t add anything in terms of attack or passing ability. It leaves us short in midfield and no more secure at the back.

Go back to 4-2-3-1. If you have enough talent in that front 6 you don’t need your full backs to be bombing on. How often did Liverpool’s full backs get in to the final 3rd against City?

Arsenal u23’s beat Man U 4-0. Nketiah scores 2 and Mavropanos made his first start

Agree about the back four, but the concern for me with that formation would be our midfielders. I just don't see an effective two man combination in our squad, that wouldn't leave our back four too exposed.

But it’s just two players out and two players in. It is just replacing players and standing still. This is what arsenal do, start in a weak position with fans crying out for strengthening of the squad, arsenal then lose some players and replace them with a late trolley dash. The signings are then dressed up as arsenal having ambition but the reality is it just took us back to where we were when the squad was still in need of strengthening

Staying in the league is bad enough but Mourinho and Man Utd? Of all the clubs? This sucks %&$.