To what end, though? I'm sick of hearing about underlying metrics, I just want to appreciate good feeling in the team and winning games. If we don't sign 2 midfielders by Monday then we seriously risk losing both of those current trends and there's nothing any manager can do about it.

Teams like Leicester, Leeds, Brighton, and Wolves have better midfields than us. It's not acceptable.

Coombs wrote:

If he doesn't get the players he asks for this window, any criticism of him will be essentially meaningless.

Was all criticism of Emery meaningless?

Emery lost the dressing room as I've said. He was also screwed by the club in what should have been his window. Emery was a symptom not a cause, but Arteta could be the cure.

Emery failed to build anything. Fans were very patient because it was our first managerial change in 2 decades, but well after a year there was no coherent footballing philosophy. Anti-football if anything. That was his downfall. Arteta has an identity. You feel that he is Aouars away from unlocking something good.

I simply reject that narrative. Emery had a clear philosophy that, frankly, Arteta is following directly in the footsteps of. Emery is a good coach with good ideas, but he was a bad fit and a poor manager of the squad. He chose the wrong players to lean on, and he caved to player pressure too often. That's why it fell apart. The football went out the window when he lost the players.

Claudius wrote:

Emery failed to build anything. Fans were very patient because it was our first managerial change in 2 decades, but well after a year there was no coherent footballing philosophy. Anti-football if anything. That was his downfall. Arteta has an identity. You feel that he is Aouars away from unlocking something good.

All thats irrelevant. Coombs said we can't judge Arteta if he doesn't get the players he wants. Which is ridiculous. He'll be judged on results whether he gets Aouar and Partey or not. He's already been given Willian who he wanted and kept David Luiz. If United don't get Sancho do their fans say "well can't judge Ole, he didn't get the players he wanted".

Qwiss! wrote:

Claudius wrote:

Emery failed to build anything. Fans were very patient because it was our first managerial change in 2 decades, but well after a year there was no coherent footballing philosophy. Anti-football if anything. That was his downfall. Arteta has an identity. You feel that he is Aouars away from unlocking something good.

All thats irrelevant. Coombs said we can't judge Arteta if he doesn't get the players he wants. Which is ridiculous. He'll be judged on results whether he gets Aouar and Partey or not. He's already been given Willian who he wanted and kept David Luiz. If United don't get Sancho do their fans say "well can't judge Ole, he didn't get the players he wanted".

It's a bit of both. He needs to be given more time than 6 months interrupted by Covid-19 for us to have a true picture of what is really happening. He hasn't even had a summer to get the players fit. So he is still in 'probation'. But he should be judged on what he can do with what he has on hand 

That said, it is in everyone's best interests to help him with even better tools. 

Oh he'll be judged, but he'll be judged stupidly by stupid people. How he plays with this set of players is already known. We've seen it. We know what is coming, we know what kinds of results are ahead of us. If we don't get people in, it won't change, and when the knives come out it'll be disingenuous and stupid.

Coombs wrote:

Oh he'll be judged, but he'll be judged stupidly by stupid people. How he plays with this set of players is already known. We've seen it. We know what is coming, we know what kinds of results are ahead of us. If we don't get people in, it won't change, and when the knives come out it'll be disingenuous and stupid.

He has played in different ways so I wouldn't say "how he plays is known" just because he's played that way for a few months. He needs to grow as a coach too. If he's going to keep playing the way we did against WHU and Liverpool then yeah he'll be judged because Arsenal fans aren't going to stand for shitty football matched with shitty results for very long just because we didn't manage to get our first choice midfielder.

Maybe I am too much of an optimist but I expect Arteta will be able to produce much better football than we've seen lately. And yeah he's probably going to have to do it without getting all the players he wants because this isn't a video game its real life.

Real life for every other club is bringing players in. Gabriel and Willian is not part of any strategy, it's giving up. We absolutely need to do better.

The video game is when you win using all out attack despite having bad players. That's what people will be expecting, regardless of what happens by the end of Monday, because people are dumb.

The highest height this team is capable of his grinding out a Europa League trophy. We've already reached it's second-highest capacity in winning the FA cup. If Arteta fucks up the EL, I'll criticize him.

No manager ever gets exactly what he wants unless he's Pep Guardiola. Getting things done with what you have is the beginning of good management. The biggest improvement this season was always going to have to come from within, and it's something he was acutely aware of when he took the job, just like Emery was.

If Arteta is worth sticking with he'll find answers, just like he did last season when it loooked like we had been screwed beyond fixing by some absolute charlatans.

Every manager gets players. Every manager in the world. And honestly, the rest of that was nonsense as well. "Worth sticking with"? What does that even mean? You're basically saying that Arteta has to achieve what you expect of him no matter what the squad he has to work with. It's lunacy.

Coombs wrote:

Real life for every other club is bringing players in. Gabriel and Willian is not part of any strategy, it's giving up. We absolutely need to do better.

They're players Arteta wanted, and Gabriels looked a good investment so far. Arteta is the manager now, not the coach. He has input into the transfer dealings so whatever we end up with is down to him and Edu. We'll see how that pans out on Monday.

Coombs wrote:

The video game is when you win using all out attack despite having bad players. That's what people will be expecting, regardless of what happens by the end of Monday, because people are dumb.

You know you can be more adventurous than 5 defenders and 2 sitting mids without it being all out attack.

Coombs wrote:

The highest height this team is capable of his grinding out a Europa League trophy. We've already reached it's second-highest capacity in winning the FA cup. If Arteta fucks up the EL, I'll criticize him.

The main measure of a manager is how he does in the league. Winning the FA cup was brilliant but we need league progress and if we don't get it then whoevers manager is going to be judged. Wenger won 3 FA cups in his final years but we were still regressing.

Coombs wrote:

Every manager gets players. Every manager in the world.

Arteta has gotten players. Maybe not the same ones he would have gotten at Real Madrid but we've gotten Gabriel, we got Willian (whom he pushed hard for personally) and we secured another loan for Ceballos who at the moment is at least twice the player we loaned last August. We signed two defenders in January. We have both young and older players who keep improving. It's absolute nonsense to think things are ever static in football. Everything and everyone changes all the time. A player on your books this year doesn't have to be the same player he was last year.

Coombs wrote:

"Worth sticking with"? What does that even mean? You're basically saying that Arteta has to achieve what you expect of him no matter what the squad he has to work with.

No, I'm saying Arteta needs to show he can manage a bloody team. What my expectations are is neither here nor there; it's not like they dictate Arsenal policy or fan opinion at large. People will know if he does well because they'll watch the same season.

Artetas going nowhere fast with this midfield. No other coach in the league could magic something out of these boys

As for him not getting players - arteta seems to have sanctioned moves for the likes of cedric, mari and willian. If we come up short in the market due to resource shortages, those moves have to be questioned

Gabriel is a good signing, don't lump his name inside there.

But he is also a pointless signing if we fail to do anything else this year because it will be another entire season of failure. This entire bunch of players are nowhere near good enough and Arteta can only defensive football them to a certain extent.

I can't wait for this window to end to rate our window. Could be as good and influential for our club future as the Cech window.

The idea that Mari and Cedric are on Arteta is absurd. They are both very clearly and squarely the work of Raul and Edu. Cedric, honestly, is still kind of necessary, and it's Mari that is the odd one out now that Gabriel has come in.

If you'd asked Arteta where he would be the compromise at the beginning of the window, he'd say out wide, and that's why we have Willian. If he knew that Willian would be the time where he gets "what he wants" and that he'd lose out on every midfielder, there's no way he takes that deal. It's a very strange stance to take to say "well, it's not FM, you don't get to sign players you want" when you watch every club around you doing exactly that.

The players who stay on our books this year are going to be exactly the same players they were last year, I'm sorry to say.

We play like we do because that's the level our squad is at, not because Arteta is a Mourinho clone who hates football.

Only very few sides get the big players they want. Everybody else has to make do with what they have looking for more creative options. Just like Emery, Arteta should be judged on his ability as a coach with what he had.

The argument about us not going for a big manager was we couldn't provide the transfer backing for that type of of coach. So that was why we went for Arteta and he knew that when coming here so it can't take a position of he hasn't had the players. There are teams across the league looking a bit better offensively then us.

Arteta has to be targeting top 4 and if we fall well short of that then there certainly has to be questions about whether he is cut out for this level.

Just so, so wrong. How could it even be remotely possible to target the top 4? You're living in a dream world.