From Rhys Jaggar :
1. PHW was mumbling, almost said we were still in the 20th century and looked to me like he was struggling with his words. I’m surprised.
2. Ivan Gazidis’ speech was what you’d expect from a CEO.
Focussed on last year’s results, talked about bringing in people from other industries. I’d like to read the annual report when it comes out to see who, precisely, they are. If they so important……
3. Stan Kroenke spoke like he had jet-lag and was half asleep. Perhaps he was. He spoke as if he were doing a Wall Street presentation to institutional investors. He thought the ‘I could have had anyone but I chose you’ was the right pitch.
The right pitch would have been: ‘I expect this club to win a domestic trophy before 2014 and the Champions League this decade and I intend to see it happen under my tenure. All the resources of the club will be dedicated to those over-arching objectives.
And I expect my management team to take full responsibility if that does not happen or cannot happen due to future circumstances rendering that impossible’. Then he’s set the standards,the targets and assigned the responsibilities.
4. Wenger’s speech was quite interesting actually.
He reckons ‘this team are up for the fight’. Does that include Vermaelen telling Wenger, through the Press, that he’s fit for Saturday and he doesn’t need lots of matches to get up to speed mentally?
I agree with him that the performance against Barcelona was the best at the Emirates. I’m not sure it’s better than everything at Highbury, but as I only saw a handful of games there I’m not the person to judge that.
The 1,000 years of Arsenal made me burst out laughing. Only Hitler used such allusions!! That’s quite non-PC!
The thing that rankles is that he demands unity without first addressing all the frustrations and issues.
Leaders do that behind closed doors. Because they know that unity comes from having objections, frustrations, issues dealt with responsibly, professionally, empathetically. Asking for unity when emotions are inflamed is silly.
He needs to ask what it is that he needs to understand and what he needs to say to the shareholders/supporters to bring them round. Maybe the real world doesn’t work like that, that if you’re really capable of doing that you, can’t be a top manager of your players any more.
But if I were CEO, that’s what I’d be making sure got done.
I must say if I hadn’t detoxed the past 6 months, I’d have been fairly apoplectic listening to that.
Now I just say: ‘they have their reasons for saying what they say’. No money invested after all. And emotions can be brought back to harmony simply through detoxification.
But the remaining supporters may still feel as I felt last year.
Wenger and Kroenke and Gazidis are being very silly if they don’t realise that………