It doesn’t seem that long ago that JustArsenal was over-run with AOB’s that were filled with hate for Arsene Wenger simply because we couldn’t win every single game we played in. The first half of his season was defined by injuries to nearly 50% of our squad, making it extremely difficult for Wenger to even pick a Starting XI that were all in their most effective positions.
As Wenger explained yesterday after winning our seventh game in a row against Liverpool: “We missed important players at the start of the season where we dropped too many points. If you look since everybody’s been back and available, the number of points we have made shows we have the quality to fight at the top.
“When you start the championship with the players coming back from the World Cup not available and having big players out for three or four months, we played six games in the Premier League and won one. You have a mountain to climb after. We are a consistent side and consistency is linked with quality.”
So now we hardly ever hear that Arsene should be sacked any more, but during that bad run last year we practically had a civil war on JustArsenal, not to mention the abuse given to Wenger and the players at Stoke Station after another loss. It got so bad that I had to intervene with a personal statement on the issue after I was accused of being a biased AKB by one of my readers.
Here is an excerpt from my response on here: According to various opinion polls at different times recently, including my one on JustArsenal, there are slightly more AKB’s than AOB’s in the world, so I am finding it hard to understand why a majority of my commenters (You lot!) are totally Anti-Wenger, and that is why I sometimes go out of my way to represent the silent majority at times. I DO NOT want my site to be off-limits to half of the Arsenal fanbase just because they get abused by the AOBs.
Right now Arsenal are going through a hard time, whoever you blame, but the fact is that we have been in bad places before, but Wenger has ALWAYS managed to turn it around and get us back into the Top Four. We should allow him to work his magic again until the end of the season and then re-assess the situation.
Until then please just support the team and encourage them to finish as high in the table as possible.
Thankfully (for the club) Wenger has proved me and himself right, and as the injured players returned the results have been getting better and better and we are now safely positioned for a Top Four finish. So how do the fans feel now? The last poll conducted by Forza Football, who provide fan generated data for all clubs, gave us this result before the Liverpool match.
75% of Arsenal fans have confidence in Arsene Wenger
79% have confidence in the Arsenal squad
63% have confidence in the chairman
I was personally surprised that only 3/4 of the fans still supported Wenger after this fantastic run of form we are in, but it does show a massive increase on the figures before the New Year. Can we safely assume now that there are very few AOB’s left and we all really believe that Wenger could lead us to the title next season?