There is no doubt that Unai Emery’s honeymoon period as Arsenal manager has come to an abrupt end with Thursday’s depressing defeat in Belarus. The Spaniard has been tinkering with the players and formations ever since he arrived and he still hasn’t got a cohesive unit that looks like they know what they are doing. The ending of Ramsey’s contract negotiations and the even more public spat with Mesut Ozil has not helped matters, with the German making it clear that he was going to stick to his contract at the Emirates.
Somehow we are still only one point behind the top four after crashing out of the League Cup and the FA Cup and we have now made it harder for ourselves to progress in the Europa League. The ex-midfielder Steve Sidwell, who started his career at Arsenal, thinks that there are real problems at the club, despite that incredible 22-game unbeaten run at the beginning of the season. “I’ve watched Arsenal a lot this year and I think that run papered over a lot of cracks in their performances.” Sidwell said in Goal. “It hasn’t been great, there were plenty of games where they could have lost. They rode their luck on a few games, they weren’t blowing things away at all.
“It was only going to be a matter of time before that came to a halt, and they’re on a bad run of form at the moment.
“It was always going to be a tough transition, but they’re doing better than I thought they would, I thought they were going to be around the mid-table mark, I really did.
“And then you’ve got the politics going on upstairs with transfers, the ownership, directors and sporting director and all that now – there is not an alignment from top to bottom and it really needs to be restructured or they could be in real trouble.”
It certainly doesn’t look it going to get much better soon unless something drastic happens like Emery getting the sack. The club seems to be imploding and the players simply don’t look very interested any more.
Do you think Emery can pull us out of this slump?
Darren N