THE WENGER THREAD

[Bendtners Drinking Buddy]

so we can dismiss Wenger's contribution in the CL groups, we get out of the groups because they're easy

Not dismissing it but being realistic about it. They are not easy par se but we do get out of them because so many poor teams are in them due to the bloated overinflated nature of the competition. As I said, when we get away from these shit teams and face good teams we are quickly exposed as a quite average team. We are not shit, we are not brilliant, we are.... average.

And for a club of our stature that is not good enough.

I enjoyed reading that, but I dont think we are "average". We have consistently finished in the top four in England - that isnt average, many clubs in the premiership would kill to have the problems we have - and i think that perspective gets lost in all the anger / bile (which i totally understand btw).

What i do agree with, is that we havnt pushed on when we should (post-2004 and, id say, post 2008 where we were a leg break away from the title) - and THAT is unforgivable because it was right there with the right shrewd investments that we all agreed on at the time.

We should be better than we are, but injuries are killing us (and have done for years - so thats not coincidence) and id say that whilst we are not the level we should be, we are not "average" - id say "underperforming"

This week has been hard, and i wldnt put my house on winning tomorrow - we are in a bad place right now - i said at the time, i can take losing, esp when we have key players out - its the attitude of the current team thats worrying me more than anything.

[Its Up 4 Grabs Now]

There's lots said about his flaws: he can't buy players, can't develop young players, pays way too much money to existing rubbish players, has no tactical skill or ability to change the course of the match through substitutes.

I'm genuinely interested to know what posters here think Wenger IS good at...

I've said before I can't think of a single aspect of football management that Wenger excels in these days - and in many of them he's now abysmal IMO. I wouldn't say I'm the most ardent Arsene Rapes Blind Penguins With Baby Elephant Tusks member either so I don't say that out of blind rage, I genuinely can't think of a single thing he brings to the table. So to turn that around... I'm curious as to what attributes do you (as, presumably, someone who thinks he should keep his job) think he currently offers as a football manager?

Cos for all his defenders I've never once heard anyone offer a compelling argument as to what he's actually still good at! All you usually get is a generic argument about how Liverpool, Swansea, East Dulwich have all outspent us in recent years but he still keeps us above them – as if football suddenly arrived out of a vacuum 5 years ago with everyone starting equally from scratch.

I don't completely dismiss his record of qualifying for the CL, but for me (like many others) it's the last 4-5 years that I take issue with, and in that time I don't see that we've finished above so many good teams that his record should be lauded in the way it is.

- The closest we've finished to United is 10 points behind. The rest of the time it's been more like 20.
- We finished above City the first couple of seasons but it was always going to take their project a few years to kick in (hence the scum finished above them both those times too) and since then they've well & truly pissed off into the distance (somewhat understandably).
- Furry muff we finished above the Chavs a whole one time, in a season when the scum & Newcastle did too and when they were pre-occupied with winning the FA Cup & that other trophy. Fail to see what's so amazing about that!
- People talk about Liverpool but it's universally accepted Benitez & Dalglish pissed ridiculous money away on dross so does Wenger really deserve enormous credit for finishing above them despite being outspent? Seems equivalent to bragging about beating up a retarded one-armed man.
- As for the scum, I don't know the figures but given their wage policy & Levycunt's ability to recoup transfer fees I'd be surprised if they've massively outspent us all things considered. And either way, while we've finished above them so far surely no-one could deny they've considerably closed the gap in that time. Is that really such an amazing achievement of Wenger's?

Put simply our finishing positions these last 4 seasons have been nowhere near good enough to outweigh & negate all the flaws in Wenger's management. It's been the absolute bare minimum we should have expected & no more. Just because others are even worse and/or just had a long way to go to catch up to begin with that doesn't mean he's doing a good job. Is Charles Manson really a nice bloke cos he only killed about 10 people & Pol Pot killed millions? I'd rather judge him against what he realistically could and should have done. Honestly, what attributes does Wenger actually offer that makes him a top manager still worthy of managing Arsenal football club?

[supergeorgegraham]

Lots of reasons but the biggest mistake he is constantly making is signing and keeping injury prone players. Our biggest waste of money is Rosicky but I will list all injury prone players here.
Diaby= Constantly
Sagna= Constantly
Rosicky= Constantly most Constant
Wilshere= 17 months !!!!!!
Walcott= Frequent
Ox= to early to tell
Ramsey= Broken Leg
Gibbs= Constantly
So if you add that the players coming in are the quality of Santos and Ramsey then you can see why we are falling behind every season. Wages for these players is massive and apart from Wilshere who needs to be assessed when he gets back and Ox who has been fairly injury free the rest will continue to break down as will our chances of anything

[Tomáš]

Article in the German KICKER sportmagazin
http://www.kicker.de/news/fussball/intl ... l-weg.html
maybe over the weekend I'll translate it...so far some key points:

1. doch die Klubführung um Arsene Wenger ist sich sicher: Die Zukunft gehört Arsenal.
=> The club management leaded by Arsene Wenger are sure: The future belongs to Arsenal
2. Dieser Weg hat eine klare Maxime: Finanzielle Gesundheit geht über alles
=> The way of the club has one key argument: Financial health is the most important thing
3. Doch was ist dieser Kurs wert, wenn seit sieben Jahren kein Titel mehr gewonnen wurde? Die Jahreshauptversammlung am Donnerstagabend offenbarte mal wieder den Graben zwischen Klubführung und Fangemeinde
=> But what is a club worth that has not won any title within 7 years? The annual meeting at Thursday showed against that there are fundamental differences between the club management and part of the fans
4. Wenger erfindet kurzerhand einen neuen Titel: In Wengers Augen macht das Arsenal zu einem ganz besonderen Titelhamster: "Für mich gibt es fünf Titel: Der wichtigste ist der Premier-League-Titel, der zweitwichtigste der Champions-League-Titel, der drittwichtigste die Champions-League-Qualifikation. Der viertwichtigste ist der FA-Cup-, der fünfwichtigste der Ligapokal-Titel."
=> Wenger created a new title. If you ask me there are five titles: PL title, CL title, CL qualification (thats the one he created), FA Cup, League Cup
5. Arsenals Hoffnung besteht aus drei Worten Financial Fair Play
=> Arsenal hopes consists of three words: Financial Fair Play
6. Geschäftsführer Ivan Gazidis am Donnerstag und frohlockte: "In den nächsten zwei Jahren werden wir die finanziellen Ressourcen haben, um mit den weltweit führenden Klubs mitzuhalten."
=> CEO Gazidis said on thursday: In two years we will have the financial resources to compete with the top clubs#
7. Gazidis. "Wir sind jetzt in der Lage, diesen großartigen Klub zu neuen Höhen zu treiben."
=> Gazidis: We are now in the position to lift this great club into a new area
8. Gazidis lobt: "Arsene macht im Wettstreit gegen die Ausgaben, die unsere Hauptkonkurrenten tätigen, einen ausgezeichneten Job."
=> Gazidis prays: Arsene is doing with respect to balancing the spending a great job, espacially if you compare that to our competition.
9. Die Geduld der Fans wird da billigend weiter strapaziert
=> The patience of the fans will be approving stressed

Sorry for any bad translation and like I said maybe I'll do it for the entire thing...but I think you've got the key message !

Cheers,
Thomas

P.S: Why the hack is the squad flying for 170 km travel to Norwich?
'Am vergangenen Samstag stieg der Arsenal-Tross in ein Privatflugzeug, um in 14 Minuten ins knapp 170 Kilometer entfernte Norwich zu jetten'

[arseofacrow]

Nice one Tomas

By the way, do you know any nice places to drink in Gelsenkirchen?

[northbank123]

Not really sure about the translation for point 9 but apart from that very well done. Think the flight to Norwich was due to alleged rail/road problems. As had been said before it's a bit of a non-issue really given the vast expenses football clubs endure in the PL. The problem wasn't flying, it was that we failed to turn up in Norwich.

To be honest it's easy for anybody outside the club to applaud and say "what a fantastically well-run club" and pay homage to the board's crazed dedication to the 'self-sustaining model'. The truth is no other fans in our exact position would be happy to see us slipping further and further away (whilst getting ripped off) while trotting out the same FFP fairytale all the time. And if anybody mentions Rangers or Portsmouth fans I'll twat you

I see fans of clubs like United and City saying stupid stuff on forums. Fans who continually mock us and laugh because we ship in stupid numbers of goals and haven't won a trophy for X years, but then when there's some discontent expressed at the way the club is run preventing us from challenging for trophies the same idiots (ironically) make us out to be spoiled glory-hunters.

Fans of every club moan and wish they had more investment, but unlike Everton etc we actually have the capacity and generate serious profits (albeit largely stemming from player transfers) and refuse to invest it.

[arseofacrow]

The problem wasn't flying, it was that we failed to turn up in Norwich.

[Its Up 4 Grabs Now]

so we can dismiss Wenger's contribution in the CL groups, we get out of the groups because they're easy

Not dismissing it but being realistic about it. They are not easy par se but we do get out of them because so many poor teams are in them due to the bloated overinflated nature of the competition. As I said, when we get away from these shit teams and face good teams we are quickly exposed as a quite average team. We are not shit, we are not brilliant, we are.... average.

And for a club of our stature that is not good enough.

I enjoyed reading that, but I dont think we are "average". We have consistently finished in the top four in England - that isnt average, many clubs in the premiership would kill to have the problems we have - and i think that perspective gets lost in all the anger / bile (which i totally understand btw).

I'm sure some 8 year old kid would kill to be getting paid more than 10p a day to stitch the crotch on next year's pink & aubergine polka-dot -mankini Herbert Chapman inspired away kit in one of Nike's Indonesian sweatshops. But does that mean someone being paid below minimum wage here doesn't have a right to be given a fair wage just cos someone somewhere else is worse off?

How many of these clubs who you say would kill to have our problems could realistically expect to be in our position? Their concern should be are they in the best position they realistically could be as a football club and are they doing everything reasonable to ensure that they are? As should ours be. I've no idea if Wigan, or Fulham, or Villa are, but I'm convinced Arsenal aren't.

[northbank123]

so we can dismiss Wenger's contribution in the CL groups, we get out of the groups because they're easy

Not dismissing it but being realistic about it. They are not easy par se but we do get out of them because so many poor teams are in them due to the bloated overinflated nature of the competition. As I said, when we get away from these shit teams and face good teams we are quickly exposed as a quite average team. We are not shit, we are not brilliant, we are.... average.

And for a club of our stature that is not good enough.

I enjoyed reading that, but I dont think we are "average". We have consistently finished in the top four in England - that isnt average, many clubs in the premiership would kill to have the problems we have - and i think that perspective gets lost in all the anger / bile (which i totally understand btw).

I'm sure some 8 year old kid would kill to be getting paid more than 10p a day to stitch the crotch on next year's pink & aubergine polka-dot -mankini Herbert Chapman inspired away kit in one of Nike's Indonesian sweatshops. But does that mean someone being paid below minimum wage here doesn't have a right to be given a fair wage just cos someone somewhere else is worse off?

How many of these clubs who you say would kill to have our problems could realistically expect to be in our position? Their concern should be are they in the best position they realistically could be as a football club and are they doing everything reasonable to ensure that they are? As should ours be. I've no idea if Wigan, or Fulham, or Villa are, but I'm convinced Arsenal aren't.

Quite a bizarre analogy but I think if you read what was said by DBD in the light of the whole post it justifies it. It's not a defence to the way the club is run and our performance but is very much a defence to the statement that we are 'average' in the context of the PL.

[highburyJD]

so we can dismiss Wenger's contribution in the CL groups, we get out of the groups because they're easy

There's lots said about his flaws: he can't buy players, can't develop young players, pays way too much money to existing rubbish players, has no tactical skill or ability to change the course of the match through substitutes.

I'm genuinely interested to know what posters here think Wenger IS good at...

Personally, I think he USED TO BE good at spotting the diamond in the rough. The Henry’s, the Anelka’s, the Pires’s, The Freddies, the Vieira’s, the Petit’s - and to a certain extent having faith and taking a chance on players that had either not performed at other clubs or been wrongly and prematurely written off like Bergkamp and Overmars and Kanu. Whatever we think of these players overall, at some point they all made huge contributions to the club’s success. I also think he was good at motivating those players and making them believe in their ability (which now ironically is one of our main problems with shit like Denilson, Flappy, Benny etc etc believing they are world beaters!!).

Your question “what posters here think Wenger IS good at...” (and the way you qualify it beforehand) implies that you might think because Wenger was once right on a lot of things, he must always be right and we must now always have faith in him even after he has been proven wrong in most things since those days. Not having a pop at you but it smacks of blind faith, head in the sand type belief.

Wenger was the best manager in the world for brief periods between 1997-98 and 2001-2004, but that Arsene Wenger is long gone. He has not kept up with developments in the game, refusing to move with the times and bull-headedly insisting in believing blindly in his own (now flawed) philosophy.

amazing what you can infer from “what do posters here think Wenger IS good at...”
it's a question FFS, a direct question (that not one person has answered incidentally)
WTF do you get "Wenger was once right on a lot of things, he must always be right and we must now always have faith in him" pure fantasy. Nobody has posted that anywhere, ever. DB10 I think of you as the rational, reasonable face of the WOB - I don't know where this particular flight of fancy has come from...

Here are a couple of my actual opinions, I've posted them (too) many times
1: A massive chunk of our wage bill is wasted on no-marks - obvious calls are Squillaci, Denilson, Chamakh, Bendtner, Park etc
2: Wenger has never (or rarely) really been able to change a game with substitutions
Neither of those are controversial (are they even disputable?)

But here's something that is also indisputable - we've qualified for the CL basically since Wenger arrived.
Many many teams have failed to do that, some have spent millions and millions AND STILL FAILED TO DO THAT
We should, and do, expect more. That doesn't make it realistic or logical to dismiss what we have achieved.

My question is how do we achieve it? If Wenger is as terrible as is made out here how do we do it?
Year after year, qualify for CL groups, get out of them.
We see many bigger clubs fail to do it, super clubs in the UEFA or dropping out of CL at group stage.
Dismissing top 3/4 Prem and getting out of the groups is bizarre. A manager as bad as Wenger is painted simply could not do that.

Also saying its because opposition are rubbish is meaningless. We dont chose the opposition.
The Liverpool Alonso/Gerrard/Torres team might win the league most years
but they didn't.
Porto got an easy run through the CL after they robbed ManUre. So what they won it.

[Its Up 4 Grabs Now]

Quite a bizarre analogy but I think if you read what was said by DBD in the light of the whole post it justifies it. It's not a defence to the way the club is run and our performance but is very much a defence to the statement that we are 'average' in the context of the PL.

Yeah possibly, but I thought DB10's point before that was talking about us in the context of the quality of teams we face in the CL & then BDB responded by talking about teams lower down in the PL, which to me looks/looked like changing the goalposts slightly (not necessarily intentionally) to say hey look there's always someone worse off, we can't be that bad. I mean, judged in the relative context of every player in every division of the football pyramid (and women's amputee pub football) Gervinho's almost not totally and utter shite. But he really is though.

Either way I'd agree we're above average (whatever that's worth) in premier league terms but average as far as champions league quality.

[Tomáš]

9. Die Geduld der Fans wird da billigend weiter strapaziert
=> The patience of the fans will be approving stressed

Maybe a better translation:
The club is still stretching the patience of the fans, willingly

[Tomáš]

Nice one Tomas

By the way, do you know any nice places to drink in Gelsenkirchen?

I only have been to their ground once...for an ACDC gig in 2009 !
The stadium is not close to a city so it is kind of hard to find good pubs...
If you check it on google you will find for example:
http://www.destille-buer.de/index.php
but not sure how it is for away fans...
Maybe you get drunk in Düsseldorf, take the train to the ground (as many Schalke fans will do), get a 4:1 win and go back to Düsseldorf

Cheers,
Thomas

[northbank123]

9. Die Geduld der Fans wird da billigend weiter strapaziert
=> The patience of the fans will be approving stressed

Maybe a better translation:
The club is still stretching the patience of the fans, willingly

Ah that's what I thought you were getting at. Either way it's fucking true!

[DarylAFC]

I replied to this thread a while back but I dont remember if it was pre-positive signs or post.

Either way, after the way the See You Next Tuesday talked down to fans in press conferences, AGM etc and all the shite about "Youll miss me when I'm gone" I can confidently say that regardless of what the tosser does, he can go fuck himself.