A few weeks ago, before Spurs hired Mourinho, I suggested it was time for Arsenal to address the key problems. Emery and our defence were the problem and the simple solution was Mourinho. He is a huge character, big enough to keep our big players under control, plus also able to get some cohesion in our team, not least the inept defence.
The article met with a fairly negative response saying we don’t want Arsenal playing like a Mourinho side because it’s not easy on the eye….
How stupid do the people who said that feel now? I can say with some certainty they don’t feel stupid at all because, despite what statistics and results show them, they genuinely believe they are right.
Here’s some simple facts…Arsenal haven’t played beautiful football for years. This is how poor we have been in recent history: We had to get Henry back from America to save our blushes in recent history when he was well past his best and nobody flagged that up as there being a serious problem. The demise has been so slow that nobody really identified the poor transfer policy or AW’s failing abilities.
Here’s where the future lies: Short term goals – and the first of those is a short-term manager to come in to stop the losing streak. If anyone watched Everton against Chelsea today, you would have seen exactly what Arsenal need. A manager who will come in and deliver results, nothing more than that. Results are what confidence is built on. Defeats destroys it in in the same manner.
That manager doesn’t need to reinvent how the future of Arsenal will be, he just needs to make us an unbeatable unit again. Part of his role would be to fire those players who don’t respond to being shouted at for being useless. (I noticed many of you jumped to the defence of Willock when Auba roasted him for being rubbish the other night). If you’re old enough to play in the first team then you’re a man and that means you can be shouted at without people jumping to your defence.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves and expect the incoming manager to reign supreme for the next 10 or 20 years. He comes in, gets rid of the deadwood, steadies the ship and we go from there. We’ve been spoiled over the Wenger era when we played beautiful football and won games at the same time. Those days are done so don’t dwell on the nostalgia of it. When we won under George Graham it was often terrible to watch but nobody complained when we beat Liverpool at Anfield to lift the Premier league for the first time in a couple of decades.
So, to the here and now. We have a mediocre squad that are incapable of playing beautiful football that can deliver results at the same time, so we have to settle for win ugly. I can assure you that’s what Spurs will do under Maureen and absolutely why we should have got him.
My final point, when we discuss people who aren’t good enough to manage us, like Poch, Arteta, Ancelotti, (I even read on here someone said Rodgers wasn’t good enough), is that we are currently sh#t, we’ve been sh#t for a while and we will continue to be sh#t while we have this current group of players. The object of the immediate exercise is to stop this sh#t group of inadequate players from losing every week.
Is that too much to ask?
Matty Barnes