goon wrote: Ideally you'd have someone who has a proven record of doing that, like Klopp, sure. In the absence of that, you go with the next best thing. It's impossible for us to know whether that's Arteta, Freddie or someone else, but I can certainly tell you it isn't Anchelotti.
Good summary goon. I agree about Ancelotti, and I think if more people had watched Serie A regularly they would too. He did to Napoli this season exactly what Emery did to Arsenal. It would have been kinda hilarious for us to go and hire him after that, past merits notwithstanding.
My issue is that we're doing everything backwards as a club, and the manager appointment seemingly reflect that. I think we had one inexperienced interim manager who was getting praise for his coaching ability and was loved by the players, particularly the young ones where most of our future investment lies, who could have seen us through the season and given us more time to evaluate our options.
Instead we replaced him after four weeks where he had to borrow the kit manager and the academy director to be able to hold training sessions, and now we have another inexperienced manager who's on a long-term contract and the results still aren't coming. This seemed to me at the time like a bad idea, and it still doesn't seem like a great one seven months later. Even if Arteta still were the one we definitely wanted, couldn't we have let him start on a fresh page in the summer instead of involving him in the fiasco that is this season?
I reckon we didn't do that for the same reason we sacked Emery three days after the international break instead of three days before, which would have given Freddie two full weeks to prepare and pull some crew together. We can't plan for toffee. There is no plan except the one in place, and when it fails we panic. The people in charge went from literally voting on offering Emery a contract extension to sacking him within two months, and then Freddie was replaced because the results didn't come quickly enough after giving him nothing to work with. Now we're stuck with someone who could either be a new Wenger or a Solskjaer (and is most likely something in-between), and we can't really evaluate him or afford to make another change in the near future. Talk about painting yourself into a corner needlessly.