SteveO 35 wrote: ↑Mon Oct 28, 2024 8:55 am
I tried to get over this years ago!
If anyone thinks < 18 months was enough time I just urge them to go back and look at the squad and wages inherited under Wenger and ask them how long they think any top manager would need to resolve that.....especially when your first transfer budget was a whopping £40m
For the record - Debuchy, Mertesacker, Koscielny, Mkhitaryan, Ramsey, Lacazette, Wilshere, Ozil, Giroud, Ospina, Auba, Walcott, Holding, Iwobi, Nacho, Mustafi, Chambers, Welbeck, Bellerin, Mavropanos, Xhaka, Maitland-Niles, Kolasinac, Akpom, Cech, Coquelin, Elneny
There you go Mikel - inherit that lot, spend £40m and achieve world domination playing wonderful football
No point arguing what might have been - anyone with half a brain knows <18 months to sort that bag of shite out wouldn't have been enough for Pep, Klopp or anyone.....even with £200m. It would have taken anyone 2 years to even be half competitive and in that time its nothing short of a miracle that he got us within 1 point of the CL and to a major European final
Any of those players you'd take back today.....even in their prime?
Wasting your time buddy - people have their minds made up on dick regardless of how well he is doing with villa, and in same way they have convinced themselves that the cone boy is a miracle worker and beyond reproach
Nobody wants to look at the bigger picture and that baffles and frustrates me tbh -
1. In his ONLY full season at AFC emery led us to 5th place just failing to get top 4 by 1pt - he made mistakes which contributed to failing to get top 4 no doubt (his tactics away v victims angers me still), but look at the teams we finished behind for context here too. City won league (no surprise) and two of other teams that finished above us played the champs league final (scum and victims) and the chavs were the other team to finish above us and they also won europa league after we collapsed in second half. That premier league was a strong league that dominated europe that year as well - contrast that to last season where english teams were that poor that no premier league team got beyond quarter final in any european competition
2. Shockingly enough for some reason the cone boy gets credit for ridding the club of the older high earners who were coasting along at the time and this grates on me for few reasons. Firstly these were the same players who undermined emery in his latter days, but back then the fans and club backed the players and not emery - why ? Secondly we all knew that most of those players had to go, but surely getting rid of them is only one part of the issue - why is there not more focus on the replacements that edu and the cone boy brought in to take their places cos they for most part have not been good enough ? We have spent almost £800m and have won nothing since edu and the cone boy got rid of those "bad eggs" and that needs to be highlighted imo
3. Everything is relative - I get that you can only beat the teams in front of you, but with exception of the geordies and maybe villa, I dont think any premier league team is as strong as it was 5-10 years ago. Finishing second in this premier league might look good on paper, but on closer examination it wont stand up to the eye test - under the senile french fool we finished second a number of times in a stronger league that would have been a good achievement, but when you look at the quality of our so called rivals, finishing above them at their current level is no big deal. Even yesterday when we were missing as many as we were we faced a victims team with a midfield that wouldnt excel in the league of Ireland ffs
I never thought emery was going to be any more than a bridge manager for us, but I do still believe that he should have been given more time AND more backing at AFC. We are now in my opinion going down the same road we did with wenger for his last decade with us, where we talk down our ambitions and that allows us to inflate our "achievements" - the cone boy isnt good enough and we will never win a premier league with him, but he still has the support of the majority who seem to think we should be grateful for what he has brought us, and that spending £800m and more than his rivals is irrelevant. I lived through this with wenger for too long, and like you Steve O, I am fast losing interest in going through this shit again - we are AFC and supposedly one of the biggest clubs in the world, but like any big company we can only improve and progress when we are willing to have a proper look at our own performances and not just focus on perceived persecutions against us from outside sources
