I don’t have many friends who are interested in football, and the only two who are are Spurs fans, so I rely a lot on the internet community of Arsenal fans to get the general mood among gooners at any given time.
I might be wrong, but I don’t consider myself to be prone to knee-jerk reactions, obviously if I did I wouldn’t be writing for various Arsenal sites and blogs.
So, the difficult truth is, win or lose, as much as I love Arsenal I don’t have a great deal of faith in them. It doesn’t take defeats in cup finals or to Man Utd to remind me of this. Even when we win games, the flaws are often there for all to see, but people have short memories; if we win a couple of games, or Denilson plays well once, everyone thinks the team has turned a corner and is finally destined for great things.
Why set yourself up for such a fall? We were never going to be favourites for the title this season, or even for a top four finish. Obviously we all want the team to win a trophy, but we all know Wenger doesn’t really set his team up to do that. If you sell more players than you buy, from a squad that finished 3rd the season before, and make the overall squad age even younger, things like cup finals and a title challenge of any kind is a bonus.
Strangely enough, we are currently in that situation. We have been fortunate that Chelsea have declined so much from last year, and find ourselves the only realistic challengers to Man Utd for the league. If we manage to go all the way, it doesn’t suddenly mean Wenger was right not to invest more in the team, it means a massive risk paid off.
Until yesterday I thought we might scrape the title by a point. United are not brilliant, and have harder games than us, so like last season, a weak team could win a weak league without a big margin. It’s not as big a task as the reward at stake would suggest.
Sadly – and this might be a tad knee-jerk – Johan Djourou missing the rest of the season changes a lot. He’s been a revelation this season, and our best defender, which has been lucky as we’ve been without Vermaelen for so long. Without him, we have no choice but to play Koscielny and Squillaci together, and for some reason that just doesn’t work. With Almunia our only fit goalkeeper behind them, it would be nothing short of a miracle if we didn’t concede plenty of stupid goals in our remaining games. With Fabregas out, and Arshavin in such horrible form, we don’t have enough creativity to outscore our opponents regularly enough.
So, as ever, while we build a team that’s just about good enough to challenge, our squad is too thin to go all the way. We’ve seen these end-of-season implosions many times in the last few years, and this one is looking just the same. I don’t know why so many of you are surprised. It wouldn’t have taken millions of pounds or lots of work to improve the squad just enough to make this scenario less likely. We might not know why, but we do know we have an incredibly injury-prone squad, so Wenger was wrong to rely on players from his best eleven staying fit all the way through.
I’ll be delighted if we win the league, but I guess what I’m trying to say right now is, we’ve made it harder for ourselves than it needed to be, and it’s that, the work that’s done at the start of the season and in January, that’s as important as what you do in April and May, and that is where Wenger has not done enough to ensure success. You can bet if we did win the title, there would be plenty done by our challengers to improve their teams, but little done from us, just as in 2004 when we let many of our most experienced players leave for free. Or in 1998, when we let Ian Wright leave and didn’t sign a replacement straight away, and drew a string of games 0-0 at the start of the season, which eventually allowed United to narrowly beat us to the title, and the historic treble that no one will ever shut up about again.
These are Wenger’s weaknesses, and always have been, even when the team was winning trophies. But, then again, we’re fans, and if we win trophies we don’t care. It’s a funny old game.
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