The experienced players have improved Arsenal.
Kids had nothing to do with it.
Look at Arteta, who spent eight years playing in tight games for Everton.
He knows how to graft in tight games, what to do to stay in a game when you’re always struggling to score the goal that wins it.
Even without Arteta, Everton are good at that. As a team they’ve learned enough to go to Sunderland win an FA Cup replay.
The Mertsacker effect was bigger than people realise.
The giant German moves slowly but thinks quickly.
Per Mertesacker gave shape to a defence that had shipped eight goals at Old Trafford.
Defending is all about good shapes, good habits and concentration. Since Mertesacker arrived, and since Sagna came back, and since Vermaelen came back, Arsenal’s defending has improved. Mertesacker got injured but Koscielny stepped up to the plate in a big way.
Wenger recently said : Our defensive form has coincided with our rise up the table.
In 16 years, he’s never said that.
Does he realise that until 2011 he’s never bought two old heads in the same summer?
In 2002, he signed the Invisible Wall, Gilberto, and the big Brazilian was a marvellous old head.
Like Mertesacker, Gilberto could read the game and intercept. Like Arteta, he could take up good positions and keep the ball moving.
Although Arteta and Mertesacker have been influential, Wenger stopped impressing me in 2004.
A more pragmatic manager would have won two league titles in the seven seasons since the historic move into the cash-machine we call the Emirates Stadium.
Oligarch or no oligarch, petrol people or no petrol people, there were opportunities, but Wenger never owned up, never gave himself the players to do the job. He’d rather play a five foot five Russian at centre forward than buy a striker. He’d rather bring back a thirtysomething legend on loan from the New York Red Bulls.
He used the stadium move to conduct a huge power-grab and become a dictator nobody dares to challenge.
And he’s the most unsporting loser we’ve seen since Bob Paisley, who won European Cups that the Frenchman has never won. For the last seven years the Great Spin-Doctor has always promised but never delivered. I’m sure of one thing only: He will sell the future next season and for a long time after that.
Last spring Nigel Bidmead wrote on ANR that the summer of 2011 would be the most important summer of Wenger’s tenure.
But, as it turned out, that summer was all dithering and denial. He totally bungled Arsenal’s summer and when the deadline arrived he was scrambling around, hijacking a South Korean who has hardly been seen, signing an overweight left back who had put on 5lb every time he came back to Turkey after playing for Brazil.
Wenger’s summer of denial was always going to impact on what Arsenal achieved this term.
And it has. Of course it has.
And winning every league game in March can’t disguise the follies of June-July-August, although it can confirm third place.
After a Premier League season of helter-skelter games and surreal scorelines, Arsenal are now defending efficiently and winning regularly. That’s a big relief for fans after all those autumn traumas.
If diehards think respectable failure is enough, they will rejoice and renew. They’ll buy the future again because they think all loyal fans should buy the future. Champions League football again? It’s not so bad.
Other season ticket holders will say : Another disappointment ! Not even close! How much more of this do I want to pay big money to watch?
The 60,000 stadium was built to take Arsenal to a new level but Wenger’s teams haven’t achieved that level.
In 2011–2012. Arsenal have not competed for the top two league places in the Premier League. At no point have they been top or second. And they haven’t got anywhere near the semi-finals of the Champions League. Arsenal didn’t even make the quarter finals this year.
If we look forward, what do I think?
JUST THIS :
From August 2012, Arsenal need to be competing at the top of the EPL, as Bayern Munich usually do, as Barcelona do, as Manchester United do.
The biggest club in Europe’s biggest city should by now be famous throughout the world as one of Europe’s most successful clubs. The richest city in Europe, which can host the Olympic Games, needs a big club that can win big trophies.
Unfortunately, and to the dismay of hundreds of thousands of supporters, Arsenal has become a super-middleweight club in a heavyweight stadium. We were told that Arsenal had to leave Highbury to be up there with the big boys. They’d move up a level. The new stadium was a colossal achievement and the capacity of 60,000 would improve Arsenal’s status.
But that hasn’t happened. It’s just improved the wages of the CEO, the manager and his vast squad of players.
Arsenal hasn’t achieved the kind of stature that was promised to the fans by the late Danny Fiszman back in 2006.
So, really, there’s only one question to ask.
Do you think Arsenal will ever achieve that stature while it’s being run by this French dictator and owned by the distant and Silent Stan Kroenke?