Well very few Arsenal fans and footy pundits saw the Gunners producing such a sublime performance to destroy Tottenham yesterday, with our (so-called) uninterested contract rebels, Ozil and Alexis, both producing Man Of the Match displays.
Many fans had called for the pair to be dropped as their work-rate seemed to have gone down since last season, but as Wenger said, he never doubted their commitment. “If you have to give me one credit, it’s that I’ve never questioned that. I know them well and I know that when these guys go on the pitch, they want to win the game.
“They’ve shown their commitment again today. I’ve never questioned their commitment. They can have bad games but the problem is that, when a player gets near the end of his contract and has a bad game, everybody says it’s because he’s going. Their interest is to play.”
But it wasn’t just those two. Shkrodan Mustafi returned and played like he was on top of his game. Ramsey and Xhaka clicked at last, in fact every single player showed that they could fight for the shirt when it really mattered, and therein lies the problem!
Where was this fight and passion when we played at Liverpool, at Watford, at Stoke? Where were our best players playing in their best positions? Wenger has consistently tried to blame the referees for our problems, but the fact iis that if we had played even half as well as we did yesterday then we would have been so far ahead of those teams a small referee decision would have had no effect at all…
It’s great seeing the Gunners play to the best of their ability, but why do we have to wait until we play against Spurs before we see it come out on the pitch? Yes we are back in the race for the Top Four, but we are still 12 points behind Man City and it is probably too late to fix that even if we played like this every week. Which we won’t!
Darren N