Burnwinter wrote:
Football's a mysterious thing, I'd never begrudge someone the chance to keep following a team they're highly disappointed by most weekends, most seasons. That's probably half of all footy fans.
It really is. I seriously questioned my sanity at times being bored to death watching us play. Began towards the end of the AW era but the hope that we'd finally be able to start afresh with someone with new ideas had me holding on. Those days I was bored of where we'd finish every season and pretty much having almost nothing to play for or look forward to year in year out because we knew we'd pretty much just scrape into top 4, get battered by the big guns and in the CL and repeat the next year. That said we'd still turn it on here and there and by and large beat most of the teams we should be beating albeing having our arses handed to us by those around us, especially away.
The Emery season was just about ok for the most part, but that end if season collapse really hurt. His next few months were agonisingly bad to the point where it seemed we'd be better off with anyone else as the players had comoletely downed tools by the look of it. Arteta's first 6 months were decent in the league, I gave him leeway and thought he was focussing on making us hard to beat before pushing on and making us a big threat. That didn't happen that season but it wasn't a big deal to me at the time, and on the plus side we had some pretty big wins in the Cup so great end to the season for me.
That spell in autumn 2021 was horrendous and should have seen the end of him but he seemed to have pulled it back around Christmas when ESR came into the team. I saw shoots of good football slowly being oroduced and thought this is it, we are now moving onwards. By March/April was where I started really questioning why I still watch us play as we were once again dull, and this continued on to the first few months of last season before Martinelli and ESR reignited our season around Christmas. Those 7 to 8 months were some of the most soul crushungly boring displays I'd ever seen us play. I end up looking forward to the game and once its reached 10-15 mins I ask myself why I expect something different. Like someone with amnesia, when we get to within a few days of our next game I'm excited again, and once again left disappointed in our style of play.
The second half of the season was decent on the whole and I was back on board with giving Arteta a chance even though our chance creation and attacking play was seriously lacking because we at least seeemed to be back on course to return to the CL. It was gut wrenching to miss out but it is what it is. With the signings weve6made over the summer and the way they've come into the team I'm a lot more excited about our prospects at the moment. It seems we've progressively moved to a more attacking game and the defenders we have now seem able to give us enough cover without needing to defend in numbers. We also seem to be pressing much more cohesively as a unit and more in the final third which is a plus for me. And with Jesus up front, we have an absolute match winner. All in all I'm pleased with how things are looking at the moment,. Not fully convinced by Arteta's ability to manage the squad and keep the fringe players involved but it's early days in the season and he's slowly winning me over. All I can say is I look forward to our games now thinking we have a good chance playing the type of football I can enjoy rather than just hoping it'll happen when I know it won't.
Sorry for the long post by the way, jusf couple thoughts on my rollercoaster of emotions I had over the last few years.
Burnwinter wrote:
As far as the forum goes, if people are capable of showing a scrap of empathy concerning the cognitive labour they demand from those whose eyes skim over their unreformably rubbish opinions day by day, that's enough for me. 😃
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