From David Hole : The Rabbit that is Wenger in the headlights that were Harry’s
Myles,
I look at your blog everyday and probably agree with 75% which is not bad in my book, as sometimes at the Emirates I think that I’m the only one thinking what I’m thinking.
I’ve watched the team since the early Seventies and wholeheartedly agree that some of the power football of the Invincibles was the best I had ever seen.
I went to the Spurs game and sit in the west stand where we have a decent view of the bench and can see 90% of the time what is going through Wenger’s mind as the game unfolds.
The Spurs game was very interesting as it is primarily the first time I have seen Pat Rice and Wenger disagree publicly during a game ,when at half time the teams came out for the second half with Defoe on for the Spurs.
Pat Rice obviously wanted to make a change immediately to counter what Harry had done tactically but Wenger waved his hand and refused, telling Rice to sit down.
When Spurs then scored it was obvious that Rice was not pleased with the goal and he beckoned for the subs to come back from warming up. Wenger again told him to sit down and Redknapp made another substitution which left Rice virtually in a rage with Wenger. I have believed for a long time that Wenger cannot change a game with Substitutions… apart from his “lets stick on a load of forwards with 5 mins to go” tactic that he stumbled on 4-5 years ago.
The whole Rice / Spurs debacle left me completely convinced that he has lost the plot and cannot see the wood for the trees.
Something you have been saying for a while I might add. He could not react to Harry taunting him with substitutions that he had no answer to whilst his No.2 voiced his disapproval.
I would be very surprised if Rice is there at the start of next season but more importantly out of hope, I pray that Wenger decides that 61 is old enough to walk away.We are on the verge of a good team but we won’t be a great team with him in charge.
Great site…..don’t get bored and walk away as I will have to find someone else to bore while drinking my morning coffee.
Myles replies :
I’m already as bored as I can possibly be, David.
But there is good news. Something MEGA will happen soon.
I wonder whether it will be in the papers tomorrow morning. I wonder how long something like this can be kept secret.
2011 will be a bit different for me too. To be fair, 2010 has been different. The time I now spend editing and posting emails like yours, and the time I spend reading ANR readers letters, is time that I once spent reading newspapers and blogs. So these days I don’t see newspapers or blogs at all.
I just read a few links that readers send me. I’m sure that people assume I read Arsenal stuff as avidly as they do. But I don’t and never have. I’m not an Arsenal suporter or an Arsenal fanatic. Many of you know more than I do about what’s going on and what’s being said. And the only blogs I read are your letters. That’s what I want to make clear today: I’m only in touch with ANR readers and nobody else. I learn a lot from you. But that was unplanned, like everything in my life. It just happened that way. And I don’t mind it being that way. Today and tomorrow. In the future, I don’t know how long I’ll be here. I have other priorities, other writing to do that’s far more important to me.
I was bored when Arsenal lost a 4-2 lead against Spurs two seasons ago. I started to give up on Wenger at half-time at home to Deportivo because I knew that at 0-2 the game was over. I knew that the great, wonderul goalscoring genius Thierry Henry had bottled yet another big game and would do zilch in the second 45.
It’s actually hard for me to interact sensibly with Gooners who get far more joyful, depressed, worried, ecstatic and angry than I do. But each day that I write, I do the best I can in the time I have.
I was back at the gym this afternoon for the first time in three weeks, following a heavy cold/sore throat/cough. I saw big Peter sweating profusely on the bike with no wheels. He said, “That last time I saw you, you said Arsenal would beat Spurs.” I had no good ripost to that. I recalled that particular Friday, November 19. I remembered Peter laughing and saying. ” I’ve never heard you so upbeat about Arsenal ever!” A long-time Gooner, he has given up on Arsenal.He stopped caring a while ago, as many did.
On the Spurs game, I was wrong. Arsenal were good enough to take a 2-0 lead and bad enough to then lose 3-2 at home.
Wenger can’t be good at everything. He’s not good at substitutions. We have known that for 10 years.
Peter also said, re FIFA, “I think they should give the World Cup to continents and leave the nations of that continent to sort out where each World Cup should be played.Then we wouldn’ waste so much time and money going round the world talking to corrupt people.
Managment is masochism. To manage a football club you have to be prepared to damage yourself. Wenger’s dream is to grow his own team but the team he has grown is full of average players and cheap makeweights. He has damaged himself severely by trying to grow his own team. It hasn’t worked and he has suffered a lot. He makes you wonder about the limits of his suffering and how much more he will inflict on himself.
Arsene Wenger’s situation reminds me of that Gatsby line : paid a high price for living too long with a single dream .
“He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about…like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Chapter 8.