(THE SUN ARTICLE): "It's Time to Think About the End of Wenger"

Until the day I die. Piss on the Sun and all the rest of that cack. Clearly, the manager of Southampton is the answer to our problems, as is the manager of a team that just happened to recently beat us with a bullshit penalty in their favor. Not to mention Norwich; after all, they play JUST like we do. But never mind that the Sun is aiming low on our behalf, because all three managers are British, and the reason we suck is because we have too many foreign players, and certainly not because Walcott and Ramsey are sharing the load vis-a-vis recent inconsistency.

Ancelotti is too old to play the same role that Wenger does in running nearly every footballing aspect of the club; he wouldn't have the time nor the inclination to continue Wenger's philosophy, and frankly, I don't think the three managers listed above have the nous for the job.

As for retaining the "marquee players" Howard lists, let's see where they are now:

Ca$hley=no better than when he was here, except for his wages.
Adebuymore=such a fine presence at Citi that they just HAD to send him to Sp*rs to share some of that goodwill.
Fabregas=the ONE player I would argue that it was a shame to lose for his skill.
Na$ri=to paraphrase our Frimpong: #BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEENCH
Cli¢hy=see Ca$hley

The players he lists that we should buy in his considered opinion, with the exception of Shay Given and Leighton Baines, are just laughable to me. Never mind that Gary Cahill was grossly overvalued and Bolton attempted to run a game on us with his valuation, or that they eventually sold him to a richer club for just a million quid more than we were willing to pay. No, we lost out on the opportunity to piss money up the wall for someone with all of 2 England caps to their name, and who got sent off the match AFTER the window closed.

And calling Mertesacker "dross" and "a panic buy" makes me question if this fuckhead watches anything other than highlights of when Per does make a mistake.

I shouldn't even get riled up over this shit, because it's the same exact shit we hear every year from people that want to sell papers and don't give a fuck for the Arsenal, but I'm just in the motherfucking mood right now.

 

Steven Howard is a troll. He has been trolling for years.

 

fify

 

I'm with Darth. If, as some pundits/trolls claim, Wenger is the captain of a sinking ship, I'll be the guy playing the violin on the deck.

 

Althought one name being bandied about is Unay Emery and he'd be a great fit imvho. He deals with subpar budget in comparison to the two behemoths and he's doing just fine in procuring talent.

 

I like Emery. I'd be happier with Jurgen Klopp, but he's tipped to replace Joachim Lowe, so he won't be coming to Arsenal any time soon.

 

Now don't think I'm being a WUM or a troll, but from a neutral perspective, I think Wenger is stuck in a rut. He seems to only have one style of play, which when it comes off it is amazing. However, when it doesn't come off, it is frustrating tippy tappy nonsense. It is like Wenger just cannot admit that his 'philosophy' is sometimes wrong, and that a more pragmatic and direct approach will do the job of winning.

If Wenger is going to lead the club to trophies and glory, then perhaps new coaches, and/or assistant manager can provide new ideas and approaches. Ferguson has won with Kidd, McClaren, Quiroz and Phelan as assistant over the years.

Having said that, Blackburn are on their 3rd assistant manager this season.......

And as for who'll one day replace him, God knows. Wenger is so involved with all aspects of the club I can't think of anyone who'd take over smoothly. Unless the board go for a young yet very talented manager/coach who can grow into that role as Pep Guardiola did at Barcelona.

 

Well Arsene did buy Arshavin to ensure a top four finish. Now to the point. I think Arsene is going nowhere if he keeps us in the top four. Otherwise I can see him walking away at the end of the contract in 2013.

 

Attention Koz and Rewinder, your commenting services are requested.

 

That analysis is spot on. However, I think he was forced to revert to a more direct style of play with the addition of Arteta and infusion of Ramsey into the starting XI, and it's created problems between the midfield and forwards; RvP and Theo are more used to short fluid passing while Arteta and Ramsey are playing directly.

In short, his arrogance is excruciatingly frustrating.

Also, regarding your bottom paragraph, I think the best solution would be to put Wenger in a Director of Football position. He's already 'reserved' the role of manager for Dragan Stojkovic when he retires, and if the last 15 years are any evidence, the board will listen to him.

 

Very well said. Thank you.

By the way, i ONLY read THE SUN after we win a game just to sweaten the victory. They NEVER had anything good to say about the AFC anyways so i dont bother to read what they have to say about our beloved team.

 

Hey, with the amount of delusion Wenger permeates, it was bound to affect the fans, no?

 

Wow, that's a lot of crap to sift through every day. I usually just stick with the BBC.

 

Remember when many in the British press were calling for Owen Coyle to replace Arsene Wenger last season? It's so laughable. Now, they want Lambert or Rodgers to replace Wenger. It seems all the trash papers want is for a British manager will little success in the top-flight to take over for Wenger.

Notice the lack of criticism towards Ferguson and Dalglish when their clubs stumble, yet Wenger and Villa-Boas get bashed almost daily. Another reason they pick on Arsene is because of the lack of English players on our squad since he was hired.

 

I'm glad someone else said Wenger was arrogant before I did. I didn't want to appear provocative. I'll be straight with you all, I can't stand him for that reason, as well as the constant inferences that Blackburn are dirty ever since that dire FA Cup semi-final in 2005. The whinging whenever he loses does my head in too.

I think a DoF role would suit him, though I get the feeling he may still want to be the manager too after a while, and might get in the way of the new guy if he doesn't quite want to play the way Wenger does.

However, if he quit Arsenal tomorrow I'd have him on a long contract at Ewood Park in a flash, regardless of just how awful Blackburn's current situation is.

 

Hmmm....well I've been in favor of sacking Wenger since spring. The pro-Wengerites are right about a few things though. There's got to be a lot of things going on between Wenger and upper management that we don't know. It's also not obvious that if Wenger retires or is fired, that his replacement will immediately improve our results. And for all that I and others have criticized him for, there's lots of things that he gets right.

But in the end I don't think that any of that matters. Wenger is piggybacking the fan base on the back of his big ego ride, and I just find that to be completely unacceptable.

On that first point, I've been a bit amused at the direction of the latest transfer thread. Especially at how bigman has been basically regurgitating the Martin Daoust thesis from 3.5 years ago, except where Martin would write 5000 words bigman writes 50.

In any case, there is no real good way to handle Wenger, just bad and worse alternatives.

 

I have 0 faith in Wenger after this summer, but my position has always been that as long as we have CL football, Wenger has a job for life.

Finishing 5th or 17th is all the same to me. If we miss out on the top 4, Wenger should go. We won't get a great replacement, and will likely not finish 4th with that manager, but we are probably not bouncing back with Wenger at the helm either, and we might as well try something new. If a flawed strategy eventually fails after a few near misses, why would you persist with it?

The only scenario in which I'd want to keep Wenger around is if we finish outside the top 4, somehow get an injection of funds, and then I'd give him 1 year to prove what he can do with a significant transfer fund.

 

This is never a good argument about hiring a manager. What "top flight" success did Wenger have before arriving?

 

By and large, finishing 3rd - mid table is all the same to me. That's what I hate about the CL, it puts a premium on finishing 4th, which if you finish 4th out of the Big 4, well, that feels like failure to me.

If we do finish outside of CL qualifying, I definitely would be curious to see what Wenger would do, and just for the analytical fly-on-the-wall aspect of watching the season unfold, I would want to keep him. I don't think a cash infusion would matter to Wenger. We have had monies available over the past 6-7 years that he simply refused to spend. I'm betting he wouldn't change regardless on that front, but seeing what else he does would be fascinating.

 

Nah, I'm not KHAAAAAAAAAAAAN-ing on you at all. I just get so sick of this shit from time to time.

As for anti-Euro bias in the tabloids, they most definitely have it. Hell, there was no real need to bring up three managers who haven't been linked with the job in ANY way, either by their own mention or that of another media outlet, who all just happen to be British. Ancelotti saying he wanted to manage the club was just a convenient excuse for Steven Howard. Why is there no stick for Owen Coyle or Steve Kean, who are very close to getting their clubs relegated? Why is no one taking Mark Hughes to task for commanding a ludicrous salary to manage QPR, when he hasn't actually done anything as a manager besides collect his wage packet? I remember a comment Sam Allardyce made a few years ago about not being considered for the England job; he said that if his surname were pronounced "Allar-dee-chay", he might have been considered. I can't find the article, but it's a glorious piece of ridiculous self-aggrandisement and "little England" mentality from a man who hasn't actually won a fucking thing of note in his entire career, outside of the League of Ireland.

And talking of that ugly bastard, here's a lovely bit of hypocrisy: When we beat Portsmouth a couple of years ago, apparently there was not a single English player in that single matchday squad. Not an especially huge deal for us; it's happened before. Fat Sam took it upon himself to hold us up indirectly as an example of why England is starting to suck, vis-a-vis our large contingent of foreign players. Never mind that under his watch, he had Jay-Jay Okocha, Jared Borgetti, Stelios Giannakopoulos, El Hadji Diouf, Tal Ben Haim, Bruno N'Gotty, Henrik Pedersen, Ivan Campo, Bo Hansen, Ricardo Gardner, and of course, Jussi Jääskeläinen, to say nothing of his foreign signings at Newcastle and West Ham, including a certain Spanish Morris dancer. He would much rather bury us than admit that the reason England fails is because of shit managers like him who employ nothing but "hard graft", meaning defensive formations against technically superior sides in the hopes of launching long-ball counter-attacks, rather than trying to become more technically proficient themselves at the very beginning levels and throughout. If the responsibility for feeding players to the national side falls to clubs, as many people suppose, then it's incumbent on those clubs to train their players to actually be able to match players from Spain, the Netherlands, France and so on. Rather than that, a lot of today's managers and coaches seem to want to coach any hint of skill or imagination out of young players and keep that going into their professional years, so players are near-mindless drones employing the same rote tactics of kicking the ball forward and chasing it to goal, and maybe whipping in a cross for a header, or fuck forbid, playing for set pieces for the whole 90 minutes. It may be a decent survival tactic for a small club trying to hang onto Premier League TV money, but it's going to fuck England bigtime in years to come if they're relying on that mentality to fuel their talent pool.

But I digress.

 

I think he could have really only spent a little bit more than what he has so far, but not much. Our financial performance minus the real estate is merely adequate given our debt repayment schedule.

The squad really needs to be taken apart and be completely retooled, and I just don't think Wenger is up for that.

 

This is the one aspect where I do question Wenger's contribution. I feel like he is too loyal or stubborn and just isn't looking rationally at this squad to assess who is and who is not part of the solution for addressing our problems.

If a new manager came in, with no loyalty to the current crop, how many would he keep, even if he intended to carry on Arsene's brand of attractive football? Not many, I would wager.

We should be sitting on a f*&% ton of money from the high profile sales over the past few years? Adebayor, Toure, Clichy, Fabregas and Nasri (that list makes me laugh at Man City, no matter how much silverware they claim) all went cash cow on us.

I don't expect us to spend City kind of money but just address the obvious talent lack.

Wenger just won't spend it because he doesn't want to "kill" the current crop of inconsistent middling talents and that is where I see him being a detriment. Relying on the ligaments and tendons of Diaby, Gibbs and Van Persie or the form of Chamakh, Walcott and Arshavin is just foolish in the extreme.

And yet he clearly knows that players whose careers he doesn't want to "kill" with healthy competition are not good enough. Honestly, Park could already be fulfilling his national service obligation and I wouldn't know the difference. Is Miyachi a real person or a member of the Yakuza to whom we pay protection money by pretending he is a player? Could go either way.

Sorry, I love all the Wenger has done for the club but his behavior lately is just perplexing and I see the club in decline. I don't want this to be the legacies of Wenger and Rice but I fear that, should they leave now, it will always be the counter-point to the prior years of brilliance.