The Wenger Thread!: Page 45 - The Arsenal discussion forum and community: One More in the Tolly

The Wenger Thread!

Jed

ludovic van zis wrote:
Jed wrote:
Look at ManUre last year, had a worse squad than ours, but they also had a manager with a relentless desire to win. They ended up champions with a few games to spare. Fast forward one year and a midtable manager and they find themselves struggling for a Europa League spot.

United had/have a top class squad. But they were Ferguson's players and he knew how to get them to perform. Moyes isn't doing poorly because he's a midtable manager but because he has his own ideas. Whether he turns out a success for them depends entirely on how well he handles the pressure that the inevitable short term failure will put on him.

When you compare their squad last season to ours this only their strikeforce is better. They had people like Giggs and Cleverley starting most of their games in midfield yet they won the title by quite a margin.

kamikaze

lol "only their strikeforce". you know, the guys that score and create goals, which are the things you count to determine whether you win or lose. minor details!

Rex

Jed wrote:
Look at ManUre last year, had a worse squad than ours, but they also had a manager with a relentless desire to win. They ended up champions with a few games to spare. Fast forward one year and a midtable manager and they find themselves struggling for a Europa League spot.

That is absolute houseboat.

Bosscielny

Jed's been on form recently.

goon

Jed wrote:
Oftgoon, are you suggesting that scraping 4th is the same as winning the title?

To win the title you need special mental resources as Wenger would say (funny how no other top club manager mentions the words 'mental' and 'strength' as much as Arsene does; perhaps because he doesn't actually believe we have it?).

Considering we had to win virtually every game, then yes it is the same. In fact, I'd say the pressure was more intense for us to get in the top four last year, it was expected of us, the home crowd was more hostile than ever before.

The mental strength argument is flawed anyway, there are countless other factors that are far more important, it's just a lazy explanation for everything.

Team goes through bad patch at start of season = great mental strength to get back into it.

Exact same team goes through bad patch at end of season = poor mental strength.

Gunner89

Jed wrote:
Why do we always choke under pressure if we had this supposed mental strength? It's not a myth, there's enough evidence to suggest we're mentally weak. We've got the bottlers tag over us for a reason.

2007-08: We were the best side in the league, then threw it all away in the business end, including getting knocked out of the cups.

2010-11: Wenger typically failed to add a striker in January when the whole world and its dog thought he should, especially in light of Van Persie's injuries. Anyway we were top of the league until February, we drew 4-4 at Newcastle in the biggest choke I've ever seen from an Arsenal team and it was downhill from there. We naturally also got knocked out of all the cups in the space of two weeks.

2011 Carling Cup final: Birmingham fucking City. Need I say more?

Oftgoon, are you suggesting that scraping 4th is the same as winning the title?

To win the title you need special mental resources as Wenger would say (funny how no other top club manager mentions the words 'mental' and 'strength' as much as Arsene does; perhaps because he doesn't actually believe we have it?).

In the 07-08 Rosicky got injured and we were playing Diaby and Eboue on the wing from January on-wards. Not directed at you but any sort of bullshit excuse about a lack of money goes out of the window. Of course we were not financially competing with Chelsea, United than but the notion we had absolutely zero money is not true at all. We could have spent 15 odd million which was a decent figure at that time and got us a good winger than or in 10-11.

Claudius

Even the current united squad is at least as good as ours. They have more talent. They've just overloaded it in one or two positions and left CM desperately short. Their problems are managerial/motivational. We haven't had comparable quality to United for 7 or 8 years.

Burnwinter

otfgoon wrote:
Considering we had to win virtually every game, then yes it is the same.

I don't really think it is the same Otf. A minimum standard vs an exceptional achievement: big difference. The psychological requirements of early season form and late season form are also very different.

Gazza M

we finished 12/13 so strongly, and were probably the most consistent english team in 2013. and yet i always knew we'd flop at this point.

tbh the only way wenger will ever win trophies again is to overload the squad with quality players to compensate for the neuroses which infects seemingly every squad he's put together since 2005.

goon

Burnwinter wrote:
otfgoon wrote:
Considering we had to win virtually every game, then yes it is the same.

I don't really think it is the same Otf. A minimum standard vs an exceptional achievement: big difference. The psychological requirements of early season form and late season form are also very different.

I agree there is a big difference, the threat of not managing the minimum standard is far bigger than managing something nobody expects you to.

As for early and late season, that may be so, my point is jumping to conclusions that it must be a mental thing depending on when a team peaks or dips is a lazy explanation that may or maynot be true.

City are mentally weak because they can't focus at the start of the season or away from home. Chelsea are mentally weak because they lose focus against the smaller sides. We're mentally weak because we can't perform against bigger sides. Southampton are mentally weak because they couldn't hack the pressure of a top four challenge. See how easy it is?

Qwiss

Burnwinter wrote:
otfgoon wrote:
Considering we had to win virtually every game, then yes it is the same.

I don't really think it is the same Otf. A minimum standard vs an exceptional achievement: big difference. The psychological requirements of early season form and late season form are also very different.

I'm really convinced this team sees itself as a 3rd/4th place team. Thats why when it takes amazing form to get 4th they play like champions for a few months. Its also why we're falling away now, deep down they don't believe they can win the league. And that all comes from Wenger, instead of building on the early season form he become too scared of losing and that seeped into the players heads.

Burnwinter

Yeah, well I agree with that point Otf. "Mental strength" is a very labile and unmeasurable concept. Almost as bad as "momentum" …

Kurtz

That Arsenal (or any other team) lack Mental strength is usually a canard used by lazy football pundits. How about simple explanations like Arsenal don't have good enough players and are ravaged by injuries? Replace Giroud with Cavani and Cazorla with Reus and see if our 'mental strength' picks up.

Claudius

qs! wrote:
I'm really convinced this team sees itself as a 3rd/4th place team. Thats why when it takes amazing form to get 4th they play like champions for a few months. Its also why we're falling away now, deep down they don't believe they can win the league. And that all comes from Wenger, instead of building on the early season form he become too scared of losing and that seeped into the players heads.

Very important points you make here, QS. I think that's it. Am I good enough to be a senior manager or the CEO. Once I make senior manager I stop applying myself. Lots of things could be driving this- comfort, fear, confirmation by ownership's actions to achieve just enough to get the prize.

ebouefan

qs! wrote:
Burnwinter wrote:
I don't really think it is the same Otf. A minimum standard vs an exceptional achievement: big difference. The psychological requirements of early season form and late season form are also very different.

I'm really convinced this team sees itself as a 3rd/4th place team. Thats why when it takes amazing form to get 4th they play like champions for a few months. Its also why we're falling away now, deep down they don't believe they can win the league. And that all comes from Wenger, instead of building on the early season form he become too scared of losing and that seeped into the players heads.

This team is where it should be. It's impossible to maintain the early season form after losing two of your most important players. Blame Wenger all you want for transfer inactivity but he has done fairly well when it comes to getting the best out of this bunch.

Gunner89

Barring big games he's been doing that for a while. But the problem is injuries happen every season and Wenger fails to take notice and blames them. When you don't position yourself to be as competitive as possible with the resources at hand and fail to get results you are to blame. People can come up with excuses all they want but it's not really hard to improve on a strike-force of Giroud, Bendtner and Sanogo.

Klaus

It's not particularly hard to find wide men who offer a bigger threat than Cazorla, Wilshere and Rosicky either. Though, judging by how Podolski is treated, they would probably be left on the bench anyway.

banduan

The problem with games like Stoke is not that we end up trying to play tippy tappy. It's that we play tippppy taaaaaaap-ohfu lost the ball.

Klaus

It's a weird mix of styles alright. We ended up with something like 55% possession against Stoke despite being set up to keep the ball. That's obviously not very helpful. The point of having the ball most of the time is that the opponents don't get a chance to build up an attack. Instead they're forced to counterattack which is easy to defend against if you know it's coming.

Burnwinter

ebouefan wrote:
qs! wrote:
I'm really convinced this team sees itself as a 3rd/4th place team. Thats why when it takes amazing form to get 4th they play like champions for a few months. Its also why we're falling away now, deep down they don't believe they can win the league.

This team is where it should be. It's impossible to maintain the early season form after losing two of your most important players.

We're a third or fourth rated team that knows we are, then. Let's not hand out any huge plaudits for performing to expectations. Once we got ourselves into a strong position, Wenger needed to make the moves needed to trick us into thinking of ourselves as title winners.

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