In some ways it is hard to disagree with Arsene Wenger when he talks about what he has done for Arsenal Football Club. I can also see his point about some Arsenal fans forgetting about that, because as well as the first 10 years of his reign being a time of amazing achievement on the pitch, the years of transition after moving to a new stadium were much better than could reasonably have been hoped for.
There would always have been plenty of managers willing to take on the job, even though the club’s transfer budget was a fraction of those being spent by our direct rivals, but I do not think any other top manager would have stuck with us, especially with big spending clubs such as Real Madrid and PSG after them.
In that sense we Arsenal fans should remember what the Frenchman has done for us and to give him the respect he deserves, but in the interview reported by The Mirror in which he suggests that more Gooners need to have this ‘perspective’ it seems to me that the boss himself is too focused on this aspect of his time as our manager,
He said, “My job is to make 100% of people happy and if you look at where the club was when I arrived and where the club is today, I think I am quite proud of what I did for the club.
“Today we live in a period where people are very demanding and I can understand that but I know as well that I have guided this club through very difficult periods with very, very, very limited resources.
“I managed to always get the best out of the team and that’s what I will do as long as I am at Arsenal Football Club.
“At the moment we are going through a difficult period on the results and so I think it’s much more important to focus to get it right again.
“We suffer a lot at the moment but it’s not, when you take a little bit distance and put things into perspective, you know, we are two games in hand, we are in the semi-finals of the cup to prepare against City. Our season will be decided how well we respond now to the difficult period we have.”
The problem for me is that Wenger seems to be losing perspective with all this looking back. He has said many times that he would only stay on if he thought it was best for the future, not the past, and right now it is easy to understand why the fans think it is time for a change.
We seem to be going backwards rather than forwards and that was not the plan when we left Highbury. The plan was for short term pain to be followed by long term gain. 13 years without a decent crack at the title is long term pain and no amount of looking back is going to change that. We need to look forard as well as back don’t you think?
Bob.