“If we are going to be totally honest” Ian Wright delivers his take on Arsenal’s season

Ian Wright admits Arsenal has slightly overachieved in this campaign as he reacts to their loss to Newcastle United last night.

The Gunners have been on the cusp of nailing down a Champions League spot.

Before their last two matches, they had a four-point advantage over Tottenham and they needed to win one or two more games to confirm their qualification for the UCL.

But they have lost to Spurs and Newcastle in their last two matches and Antonio Conte’s men now have the advantage.

Considering that the Lilywhites and Manchester United have a stronger squad, Mikel Arteta has done a great job in getting the Gunners this close to qualification and Wright admits it.

He said, as quoted by The Sun: “If we are going to be totally honest, we overachieved getting in there.

“There are teams that should be doing a lot better than us with the squads they have got.

“Tottenham have shown, even during an indifferent season, they have got themselves probably that fourth place.

“This is a young squad. Mikel Arteta has done brilliantly with them.”

Just Arsenal Opinion

We truly have overachieved in this campaign considering the quality of our squad when compared to other top four challengers.

This has been a great campaign relatively, and it shows that Arteta will secure that top-four spot if we back him with the right players.

Tags Ian Wright

21 Comments

  1. I agree with Wright. Our squad is far too thin and having not a single striker of any real use for the entire season and yet getting as near as we did to CL qual, was something none could foresee.
    We still need major numbers of quality players in this summer and it now far looks less likely than it did last week.
    Make no mistake, failing to make top four will prove very costly for a long time to come.

  2. He’s probably right to a great extent, but arteta really has to kick on next season. Of our rivals, let alone the top 2, only Chelsea look like maybe getting weaker, maybe, whereas spurs and united have strong potential to improve dramatically, and then there’s Newcastle who will likely get much stronger, certainly candidates for Europe in some capacity. West ham also have real potential if they hang onto their best players.
    It rarely seems to work out how you think, but i have a feeling competition for top 4, and Europe in general, will be extremely fierce next season.

  3. This is why we need to thread carefully when accessing the progress.
    Like I have always maintained, this is quite a progress for Arteta and some players included. But definitely not Arsenal.
    Like someone said, Arteta met Arsenal at Europa, took us out of there, then likely to take us back there again after 250m+ spent.
    It’s actually a progress for him and the some kids but not entirely the team as a whole and definitely not Arsenal. So Maybe they did deserves some credit for their own personal achievement, but as club, this is never an achievement for us.
    Bear in mind out of the top9, only wolves has had lesser games than us this season, which might have gave us the advantage to be where we are this season.
    The youth project stuff is just to hide the incompetency.
    Our academic players are not doing it at their level, how do we expect them to do it at a higher level.

  4. We have overachieved not because of Arteta. We have overachieved despite having Arteta.

    Arteta was backed with over 4OOM and allowed the strip the club assets bare of its valuable assets for literally zero receipts in return.

    And yet we failed to achieve top 4. The rookie-manager should be shown the red card. No other business or football club would tolerate or accept such a colossal failure.

    1. “Colossal failure”
      LOL Are you prone to exagerration by any chance?
      How about the “colossal failures” of the 15 managers below us?
      SACK THEM ALL!

      1. All 15 Manager below would outperform Arteta with just a fraction of funds we made available to him. To give him the benefit of the doubt, I have ignored our losses from players he gave away leaving for free or on huge discounts.

      2. Pat, non of the managers below us has the power Arteta weilds. Only Man Utd has more resources but Arteta still outspent them this season. We have played lesser games than some of them. One game a week and we’re still struggling with fitness issues and a thin squad. We’re a joke, or should I say , we’ve been made into a joke

      3. Hey a club of arsenal stature should have their benchmark with the teams above us not blow. That’s how deep we have fallen even our mindsets have fallen with the club!!

  5. If we are being honest to a degree I agree with Wrighty but at the same time we have had Top4 in our hands for the best part of 2months & embarssingly messed it up.

    We have had no European football meaning the load was alot less with basically one game a week. FA Cup we couldn’t get by the 3rd round, League Cup was okay until we again embarrassed ourselves in the 2nd leg, so the Cup runs were basically 5 extra games this season.

    We only had the League to really concentrate on and had good patches through out after the distarous start but failed miserably when the pressure was on.

    Yes we have a small squad but why is that? Mikel and Mikel alone with Auba, Matteo, Lucas, Saliba, Bellerin all shown the door & Artetas ego played a huge part, Im not saying they were pulling up trees but we had the bodies for the season until the summer at least. Chambers, Mari & relying on Nketiah & Laca for Top4.

    Why have we no gameplay, plan B and run around like lost sheep half the season? Again Mikel and his tactics, his way or no way seems to be a theme here for an inexperinced rookie manager in his 1st job to have so much power.

    Yes we have moved from 8th to 5th, really that’s progress considering 7th gets the same thing and we are literally 4points or so ahead of that spot. £250m Spent & 3places up with all the free time we had with no European Football.

    We absolutely blew the end of the season and there’s no two ways about it when he had it in our hands on numerous occasions. Even worse we lose it to Spurs which just hurts even more.

    All we had to do was not lose was Mikels plan, sit back & hit on the counter since we beat UTD then Leeds.

    I accept now we are heading to Europa League unless some footballing miracle happens which I’m 99.9% sure won’t happen as Spurs will tank Norwich!

    Been a really hard today after last night, will take a while to get over. Slipped through our fingers once again!

  6. How do you support or back a manager that can not handle the human relationship between him and players, if he is going to succeed, then he Needs good players and this good players always have their individual problems which any coach that wants to be successful must try to manage.
    Arsenal squad is too tin, they do not have good and capable players to step in wh3n injury sets in.

    1. This is exactly what killed Arsenal. I am so sure that if Tomas Partey and Tienny were around in some of the games we played since their respective injuries, Arsenal would have either won or draw some of the games lost and we would have qualified for Champion League. Guess what, these two guys were not around for all those games and there were no replacement for them. That cost us the top 4.

  7. How do you support or bad manager that can not handle the human relationship between him and players, if he is going to succeed, then he Needs good players and this good players always have their individual problems which any coach that wants to be successful must try to manage.
    Arsenal squad is too tin, they do not have good and capable players to step up when injury sets in.

  8. Even pool and city are struggling to cope with the pressure of the bussiness end of the season.

    1. Cmon now they have an excuse. Liverpool will have played every game available to them throught out the football season, have won both cups and in final of UCL.

      City semi of all of those competitons also and top of the table with a challenge from Liverpool. We only wanted Top4 and had it in our own hands but the thin squad and inexperince of the squad and manager showed at the end of the campaign

  9. A great job to reach top 4, and couldn’t likely won’t finalize when the pressure turned up.

    The point is we likely weren’t going to beat spuds at their toilet bowl.

    Our limp display was disgraceful, and to repeat that limp display against Newcastle was shameful and infuriating.

    The loss hurts, but the teams less than 100% effort was on full display and Arteta had no plan B as usual.

    The predictable chatter afterwards from players and manager mean nothing as they are likely to rinse and repeat that performance as we’ve seen all year.

    Nice speeches from them after the Palace, Brighton, and Southampton defeats; only to repeat those limp displays this week.

  10. I like wrighty, he is a proper Arsenal fan but how can we have even slightly over achieved when our downfall came to mid table clubs in the last few weeks, Southampton, Brighton, Crystal Palace and Newcastle. That quartet of teams are not or should not be classed in the same standards as us but all four totally hammered us and made us look like relegation fodder, not top 4 challengers. Im sorry Ian, we have not reached where we should have.

  11. We need two new top notch strikers a holding midfielder and three reinforcements to bolster the defence Outgoings Guendouzi Torreira Maitland Niles Mari Leno Xhaka Bellerin Lacazette Maybe keep Nketiah as third choice striker still not up to being first choice at Arsenal Tavares and Lokonga to have another season developing and perhaps one last chance for Nelson Arteta is doing a good job tge team just suffered through fatigue at end of seadon and of course injuries took their toll plus lack of experience in the team in general We need a couple of good experienced players to instill habitd into the younger players such ad Saka Smith Rowe Martinelli Odegaard Saliba

  12. People can portrait this season the way they want,be it as progress, overachieving….but I see this season as missing/messing a very good opportunity to finish in the top 4.

  13. I totally disagree with Wright there. We are just some points better than last season. We are where we are simply because other teams are struggling and had a very incontinent season. This was our chance to make champions league. I do not buy into the idea that the young boys overachieved this season.

    Just to remind you of a similar situation years back when Leicester city won the league. All the big boys where having a bad season and then Arsenal was expected to take their Chance but did they? NO. They blew it just as they have done this time.

    I knew it the moment we lost to Tottenham that it was over because I didn’t see them winning Newcastle and Everton.

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