it feels like there is something rotten at the club that is infecting everything it touches. like some sort of arsenal coronavirus. its been here for the last decade.
if you look around the league, there are clubs that have a much weaker roster of players who consistently put together better performances week in and week out. fucking fulham beat leicester yesterday. fulham's squad is garbage, outside of like 1-2 players. is scott parker some kind of managerial genius?
we play football like a club terrified of making a mistake, and its been that way for ages. under late-wenger, all it took was one mistake or one goal and things tended to crumble. we were so leaky at the back and conceded comical goals constantly. now, we've swung to the other side of the horseshoe, and we're afraid to even commit players forward. the fact that we can be at the bottom of the league in shots attempted/shots on goal, below clubs like brighton, is an embarrassment that cannot even be accurately described in words.
and it goes beyond even the way we play football. i saw some stat the other day, i didnt bother doing a deep dive to see if its true, but it said that partey had missed a total of like 6 games in the last 5 seasons. he comes to arsenal and hes injured almost immediately and out for weeks/months. and hes not the first person. as someone who has the utmost belief in quantitative analysis and trusting the numbers, it feels like our club is cursed. everything went right during the invincibles season. and since then, its been a series of utter failures and missteps as a club, starting with the CL final defeat and spiraling from there. it hasn't been a complete capitulation, as we've had a few domestic cup runs in that time, but our league performance has been pretty dire, our european performance has been an abomination. and it feels like a lot of the luster has come off the club in the last decade. we're now basically just a meme. for one of the most distinguished clubs in european football history to become a meme is utterly embarrassing.
is it kroenke's fault? did he suck the soul out of the club? is it just random variance? the club has had down decades before. but this feels different. do i blame it all on arteta? no, its not all his fault. at the same time, hes the face of the club now. and he has one of the 5-6 best squads in the league, in terms of talent. he is getting paid a lot of money to win football games for this club, and to provide a product that people want to see. right now, all he is doing is ruining my weekends.
what id like to see is an arsenal manager who comes in and does not opt to play like a fucking coward. we have an actual competent CB now in gabriel, and a great leftback in tierney, with a great keeper in leno. this isnt andre santos, almunia and silvestre at the back. stop playing like fucking cowards, play with some urgency and energy, and try to take it to teams and force them into mistakes instead of turning it into a simple drill where they just barricade the 18 yard box and we pass the ball around aimlessly or send in hopeless crosses with no one there to meet them. it doesnt take a tactical genius to inject life, directness and ideas into the team. there are 8 or 9 managers in the premier league right now outside the top 2-3 clubs who have their less talented teams playing with more energy and commitment than ours. im sick of it.