otfgoon wrote:
All Wenger essentially said is that Ozil needs to believe until the end and not give up before it's over. I'd be pretty pissed if the manager advocated otherwise.
I'm all in favour of positive leadership, but this is not that. Özil's comments aren't in isolation. Every editorial on the league, and several other comments from players—for example Walcott's about our squad's "crisis meeting"—have already laid bare what's happened. The matchgoing fans have been in what, for Arsenal, amounts to open revolt.
Our morale has been in disarray all of 2016 so far, and our results have reflected that. Wenger should have done a bit of public self-reflection by now and lifted the burden of delusional expectation from the team in advance of the mathematical certainty of failure. He's a bad leader in trying to conjure belief out of nothing instead of creating its necessary conditions.
