From Graham : Geoff Cable’s post
I suspect that you won’t post my comments, as you tend to post the anti-arsenal and particularly the anti-Wenger comments, as that is where you are positioned.
Geoff Cable’s post is just plain wrong. Wenger has not underachieved in the last 7 years.
Yes, there are no trophies to speak about, but he has taken Arsenal to one Champions League final, 1 semi final, 2 quarters and the last 16 twice.
In the league we have one 2nd place, two 3rd places, and four 4th places. A lot of clubs would like this record. Look at Everton, a club similar to us in stature and historical record – they come nowhere near this.
And with regard to the Champions League, historically, we have never been in the final or semi final of the European Cup. In the league, we have never finished below a team with a higher wages spend except for maybe Liverpool on 1 occasion, when they finished 2nd (the Rafa rant year).
Last year, we finished above Chelsea, who had a higher wage bill and substantially higher transfer bill. The people who continually attack Wenger and his record and blithely ignore the huge amounts of money spent by City and Chelsea do it in a way that they somehow believe that the money shouldn’t make any difference.
The problem is that the small pool of the best players are simply not available to us. We were blown out of the water by Chelsea on Mata. We balked at the price for Cahill and Smalling.
The list is endless, and the effect of not securing the best players is two-fold – you are left to skirmish for the best players in the 2nd tier pool, and to then use them to fight the opposition, who have those best players.
People who now are demanding that Wenger should do better are actually demanding that he should be extracting more value than he is doing already from the market.
Well, given that he is hardly spending anything in net terms on transfers, this is a big ask ! I think people should ask that the club invests more, or should just wait until the commercial revenues ramp up, before slinging mud at Wenger.
To re-iterate, the pool of top class players is a very small, finite one. Every club has scouts posted now, not just in Europe, but worldwide.
The trick that Wenger pulled, when he managed to secure Vieira, Henry, Petite, Gilberto etc i.e. 4 world Cup winners !, will never happen again. Can you imagine, in today’s climate of information, news and awareness, being able to sign 4 Spanish players who had just won the World Cup ! – absolutely no chance.
So the goalposts have been massively moved.
We went to south america to sign Alvarez. Who was on our tail ? Inter Milan and Spu*s. Spu*s follow us everywhere. He went to Inter instead of us. We are linked to Holtby – oh, look who Spu*s have now signed. We are linked to M’villa. Wow – look who Spu*s have made a bid for. We go in for Vertonghen – he ends up at Spu*s because they feed him a line about playing permanently.
It is a global market that we once tapped into as an isolated customer, that has now turned into some wild west gold rush.
So you and Geoff Cable can write as much as you want, but there is no logic to your arguments when you talk about relative achievements.
We have not underachieved based on our resources. Period. You can argue that we have underachieved based on expectations about what we should be winning, but I as an apologist, will just say that that argument is about resources and the impact of the stadium move.
Whining that we don’t have a “winning mentality” is just pure nonsense.
Sorry. We need more investment, but the argument/debate is where from ?
The stance the club have adopted is that we should be self-sustainable, with plain vanilla economics. Unfortunately this is causing a lot of unhappiness with fans, particularly those pay a lot on season tickets etc.
Will we turn things around with a combination of financial fair play and better commercial deals. Who knows ?
Manchester United have managed to do it (stay in the mix) with their commercial deals and some leveraged debt, so maybe we can too.
Myles says :
United have always been a very ambitious club.
And there are more than 20 very good footballers available every year.
From Bert Wright : under-achievement
Geoff Cable’s recent letter hit the nail squarely on the head and gave the lie to those Wenger-apologists who insist on giving him a free pass based on the contention that since 2005 Arsenal have been powerless to challenge the oligarchs for purely financial reasons.
As Geoff points out, Wenger has failed on so many other levels and it’s only residual affection for him and the indulgence of a weak board that keeps him in place.
To Geoff’s key points — defensive frailty and mental frailty — I would add: the chaotic recruitment strategy which has enabled a gang of overpriced mediocrities to gate-crash the Emirates; the determination to persevere with such aquisitions long after they’ve conclusively demonstrated their uselessness; the failure to address glaring weakneses in key positions; and the failure of the youth strategy to produce mature players except Gibbs and Wilshere.
Throw in the fact that we have sold off any world-class player we’ve had in the past few seasons and it’s not hard to see why Arsenal are fast losing their grip on an increasingly slippery slope.
I also agree with another correspondent when he claims that Wenger probably has in him one more Houdini routine whereby we squeak in fourth and qualify for the Champions League, so enabling him to claim a unique record.
Sooner or later however — and most of us hope it’s sooner — Wenger will run out of road.
We know he no longer has the wit to save himself by changing course.
This is a man who would rather go down in flames proclaiming his own martyrdom.
It’s for this reason that, perversely, I almost hope we don’t secure that fourth position. Surely then, the board would be forced to make that call to Michael Laudrup.
Hey, we can dream can’t we?