Michael Owen has claimed that Arsenal Football Club are rated higher than their ability on their pastimes.
The Gunners put in a painful performance at the weekend as they ran out 2-0 losers against Liverpool, seeing them fall back to tenth in the Premier League table.
We appear on course to miss out on the top six in the division for successive seasons, and will hopefully save ourselves by winning the Europa League to again snatch a place in Europe without earning it through their PL campaign.
It took an FA Cup win last year to see us earn our spot in this season’s Europa League, but we have already been eliminated from that competition, and the EL has given us a reasonable draw to believe that could be a possibility.
Our form domestically will ring alarm bells for anyone hoping we have a chance of finishing in the top six or have a chance of winning the EL however, and our performance against Liverpool this weekend only highlighted our frailties.
Michael Owen has now claimed that we are worse than people think we are, and that our pastimes of being at the top and having legendary players has us rated as better than we actually are.
“I think Arsenal are probably 10 or 20 per cent worse than what we collectively think.
“Their badge carries them. Their stadium and their support and the legends that have played for them carry them.
“So we all think — when I think of Arsenal, I think title challengers. It’s just what I’ve been brought up with, it’s what I naturally think.
“Arsenal are a huge club, so I’ve naturally got an opinion and our generation has an opinion way above what they actually are.
“They’re average. They’re ninth in the league, aren’t they? So an average Premier League team.
“We haven’t played five games this season… 15 years they’ve been an okay team but okay is just not enough, certainly not enough from the teams I grew up watching.
“They’ve had gluts of years where they were unbelievable title-winning teams. Every year they would be up there and you’d think, ‘Wow, we’ve got to beat Arsenal.’
“Now you look at fixtures and look at the last 10 fixtures of someone, if you see Arsenal, secretly you just think that’s not that hard a game anymore.
“They’re just an average Premier League team at the moment. That’s what the league says, hard for Arsenal fans to stomach that, but that’s what they are and Arteta has got a huge job.”
Do our own fans or other fan bases believe we are better than we actually are? Could we lose our ranking as one of the so-called top-six be at threat?
Patrick