What Arsenal have lacked, where Spurs and Leicester have not?

Our club have struggled to keep tabs on Premier League leaders Leicester City since the turn of the year, and Tottenham secured a cushion between themselves and the chasing pack this weekend also. So why have Arsenal been left behind?

Some of you simply believe there is an easy answer to the question, with many wanting to blame Arsene Wenger for reasons A, B and Z. In some sense, the buck does have to end with the manager, but It would be naive to concentrate on what we cannot change however, and we must look at where we must improve to overtake the leading pair next season.

For me what has stood out for Leicester and Tottenham is their leading man, who have both notched up over 20 league goals each, and this is top of our list ahead of a busy transfer window. Everton’s Romelu Lukaku has near-matched the goalscoring of the duo while his side sit in the bottom half of the table, so we cant stop analysing on this one point, although if Giroud and Walcott had continued their form of the early season, I have no doubt we would be topping the table at present.

One point which has rarely been mentioned is the fact that Leicester have not had to juggle European football, whilst exiting the FA Cup at the third round, and a similarly tame attempt at winning the Capitol One Cup, therefore keeping their players much fresher and fitter, and have gone relatively injury-free for the entire campaign because of it. Spurs of course entered the Europa League, but shuffled their squad players around heavily, and tamely gave up their assault on winning it when drawing Borussia Dortmund in the knockout rounds.

Our club on the other hand fought tooth and nail just to get past the group stages, having lost the opening two matches, had to scrap for three wins from the remaining four in order to qualify for the round of 16. This no doubt took a lot out of our players, and a number of injuries started to rack up.

I believe our European exploits did the damage on our overall fitness levels, as well as being mentally tough, and we lost a number of key players including Alexis, Coquelin, Cazorla and Ramsey at crucial points in the season.

Have we simply felt the dues of a tough European campaign? Do you think we are simply a top striker away from greatness?

Tags Arsenal Champions League Leicester tottenham

15 Comments

  1. What Arsenal have lacked, where Spurs and Leicester have not?

    1. A board that cares about winning trophies and not just making money.
    2. A manager that openly sets targets for his team to meet (ie. Ranieri set a target for Leicester to meet get 40pts this season).
    3. A manager and board that dare to use the transfer market to do some transfers.
    4. A captain that carries the team.
    I could go on and on.

    1. WHAT! Sadly it’s a privately owned club. Of course they are in it for profit

      Board is compelled at law to maximize shareholders dividend and profit. Therein lies the conflict of interest of privately owned clubs

      1. Yeah, except where the owners of Leicester and Tottenham most likely put their money earned from the club back into it, Kroenke went on and bought himself a ranch to 250 million dollars, insisting on continuing with the moneyball strategy.

  2. Some say it is a striker
    Some say it is the defence
    Some say it is the midfield.

    Tbf I am buying neither of those things.
    This spuds team reminds me most of our squad of 2013/2014 season where we really bullied the smaller teams but came short against the bug guns .

    The real reason why we have not yet won a title when we should have won it during
    2008/2009 2010/2011 2013/2014.
    Is how we treated our opponents.
    We kept on using the same style despite of who our opponents were.
    We kept on relying on our attacking passing football and whilst our defense was left bare.
    We are really lacking the tough tacklers.
    Our defenders are mostly people who read the game and intercept the balls but a tough tackling beast is whats lacking someone who nothing gets past.
    We also rarely take advantage of loose ball situations as the stats even say we have won just 52% of our duels thid season.
    So the real thing we are lacking is that person who adds steel to our team a no nonce person like what we had in the past.
    Remember players like gilberto, vieira , sol campbell, kolo toure adams and lauren.
    Unlike the soft team we have now which was easily bullied by southampton

  3. Arsene Wenger I am sure is looking for a personal assistant who can come with more pathetic excuses…you sound an ideal candidate!

  4. Anyone seen how Vardy left the Sunderland defender for dead for Leicester’s second goal? That’s the kind of striker we need: strength, pace and aggression. He might be 29, but looks like he’ll be good for the next 3 seasons. Do it Ivan.

  5. What is to say if we had stuck with giroud like Leicester and spurs have stuck with Vardy and kane then we might have had a 20 goal striker in the league.

    When kane and Vardy were both failing to hit the target, did their teams drop them?

    Whether us fans like him or not, the fact is giroud is the best no 9 at the club. Until that changes he should be our main striker. But let’s just hope that wenger or whoever the manager is realises that we need at least 4 signings this summer.

    We will end the season with 29 players classed as overage, 5 of them are goalkeepers (of which 2 min will not be part of the squad) whilst 4 others are arteta, Debuchy, flamini and rosicky who will surely leave, I also don’t expect Sanogo or wellington to be part of the first team next season as they are simply not good enough.

    That gives us straightaway the room for a new cb, new dm, new rw and new cf. Then it should be a matter of look at the squad that is left.

    1. @atid you don’t know your Giroud, that is for sure …
      Personally, I prefer Welbeck at least he give some headache to defenders …

  6. (S)tubborn
    (P)athetic
    (E)goistic
    (C)unning
    ( I)ndenial
    (A)rrogant
    (L)iar
    ( I)rresponsible
    (S)tagnated
    (T)rophy-less

    ( I)ndespicable
    (N)egligence

    (F)ailure
    (A)nnoying
    ( I)ncompetent
    (L)oser
    (U)nderachiever
    (R)ubbish
    (E)nough-is- Enough

  7. new design to maybe help change things at Arsenal. please share..

    can provide artwork for full sized banner if anybody wants!

    HTeeTeePeeS://i.imgsafe.org/b4cf181.png

  8. I think the problem is that Leicester and totts picked up the pace in the second half season whereas we never really tried to amp things up. The European football is obviously a factor and anyone who thinks otherwise has not being paying attention. Tott rested players and Leicester had free rein to rest players, but we can only blame ourselves for not doing the very same thing. We would have understood if Wenger said right, I’m going to prioritise the league. In fact I think we all would have been happy with that. We might still have lost it and if that happened Im sure there would have been more than a few in here to say how wrong he was and ask why are we in the CL if we are not going to try and win it ..but that’s just the way some people are.

  9. Wenger doesn’t sign player’s with character hence the lack of leader’s in the team. He doesn’t want player’s challenge him. Player’s like Zlatan, Arturo Vidal and Vincent Kompany have a certain madness to their leadership hence their relative success. We have gentlemen in our squad and none of them would take the bull by the horn when the going gets tough, instead everyone looks to everyone else and our manager is more silent than the dead on the touchline.

  10. Things LFC and Tott both have that AFC lack:

    1. A summer transfer window
    2. New outfield options (last season failed miserably, so why would this be any different?!)
    3. Top striker
    4. Less games to play
    5. Luck with injuries (or are we so accustomed to multiple injuries decimating our squad that we call it luck when other teams don’t have long periods of time without 3-5 1st team players out?)
    6. Ambition
    7. Heart
    8. Balls
    9. Tactical flexibility
    10. Consistency
    11. Board that isn’t solely focused on profit (call me stupid, but is it not more profitable to actually win titles, as opposed to achieving the bare minimum lol)
    12. Less pressure
    13. More help from refs

    I don’t even want to continue! What a disappointing list lol and the fact that most of it is self imposed makes it even worse!

  11. One thing Leicester have Arsenal can do without is some adolescent sobbing on his mothers
    shoulder because he didn`t get a ticket……PATHETIC!

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