By Tony Attwood
The media are now out to get Mr Arteta, ably backed as ever by the usual anti-Arsenal suspects. And AFTV and co must be feeling quite confident of success, given their earlier triumphs in terms of getting rid of managers.
Arsenal have had eight managers who have won trophies and with Mr Arteta getting his foot on the ladder already as he joined the elite group of Chapman, Allison, Whittaker, Mee, Neil, Graham and Wenger.
But some attention seeking groups want him out, despite the fact that for some of our earlier successful managers winning that first trophy took a while – and it didn’t happen every season. Chapman, for example took five years to win his first trophy (the FA Cup) and in that season Arsenal came 14th in the League. At least Arteta hasn’t been as bad as Chapman!
In fact looked at in comparison with our earlier managers Mr Arteta is doing rather well. But the media and their allies in the madcap groups are having none of it. So the headlines are already of the type: Report: Arsenal identify main priority to replace Arteta, Gunners willing to meet £196k-a-week demands
That is from TBR football and given that so far this summer they have reported no less than 61 players who are about to come to Arsenal, maybe we should not take them too seriously (see here and here for the mind-numbing details).
But others are getting in on the act as well, such as the Boot Room that is putting in the, well, boot, in reporting the “shocking Arsenal news” that AFTV are against Arteta. Shocking however seems to be a bit over the top since AFTV is always against everyone for as Football Insider, said, “On 12th August, Arsenal Fan TV shared a ‘Best Premier League Manager’ poll in which Arteta was ranked 19th.”
Which is rather interesting because if one lists Arsenal managers according to the percentage of matches they win we find our top ten managers, throughout the entire history of the club, excluding only those who managed for less than 50 games are…
| Manager | From | To | Games | Win % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Neill | 9 July 1976 | 16 December 1983 | 416 | 44.95 |
| Howe | 16 December 1983 | 22 March 1986 | 117 | 46.15 |
| Allison | 28 May 1934 | 31 May 1947 | 279 | 46.24 |
| Whittaker | 2 June 1947 | 24 October 1956 | 430 | 47.21 |
| Graham | 14 May 1986 | 21 February 1995 | 460 | 48.91 |
| Chapman | 11 June 1925 | 6 January 1934 | 411 | 49.64 |
| Bradshaw | 30 June 1899 | 30 April 1904 | 235 | 50.21 |
| Arteta | 22 December 2019 | Present | 86 | 52.33 |
| Emery | 23 May 2018 | 29 November 2019 | 78 | 55.13 |
| Wenger | 1 October 1996 | 13 May 2018 | 1,235 | 57.25 |
So if Mr Arteta is forced out that will be three managers in a row. The three who have the best win percentages ever in the entire history of Arsenal, all forced out by the unholy alliance of media allies.
This time, really the board has to stand up to them.
My favourite bait and switch has just been dropped by the Metro. With all the talk of Barcelona WANTING Aubameyang and Lacazette, they’ve now reported that Barcelona have rejected OUR offer of Aubameyang for Coutinho. So they start with ‘big club wants your best players and they want to leave!’ This covers bashing Arteta. They then change it to ‘you trying to get rid of you players, but the big clubs don’t want them or their big contracts!’ This covers bashing Edu and the owners! It’s an amazing attack from all sides and I worry about the amount of fans that buy into it.
Where I work there are a lot of gunners there already tell me arteta has to go
I spend days last season having the same augment with these people how changing the management don’t buying endless new players isn’t the answer
But the just qoute talkspot or sky sports or some other punter or media outlet who knows best
The damage is done the so called expert are winning
Is up to us and you to keep banging our heads against this wall and maybe it will sink in
Keep up the great work
Is really shocking to see a writer who as been writing for years to be this sentimental….how can you be so down to d extent of you prefer arsenal to play in league two just because you want to support arteta or been against religion/politics all because of hatred .,..is a foolish thinking & also an hatred for humanity infact i don’ t no what to call you but surely you are not an arsenal fans
There’s an interesting thread on this topic on the Mark Brit/@markabrit twitter account
… even though I think the author’s much too kind with AFTV; I’d rather not write what I, for one, really think of those morons
“state club”; I agree – if we really want arsenal to be competitive, both in England and in Europe, that’s the only way, and that’s what those result-obsessed poisonous brats have in mind
(actually, being able to call oneself a “fan” of the likes of MCity – PSG (even my son, 36, who had been a fan ever since he I first took him to the “Parc” (he was 5), has now given up) – Chelsea … is something that eludes me completely too)
I don’t want to get into the Arteta “debate”, for fear of fueling the ugliness of it – even though I have second thoughts about a few things
My main concern is where do we stand? I think a great many Arsenal fans don’t want to hear about the “state” solution, but what we’ve been doing ever since the Great Man called it a day unfortunately looks like a pale imitation of those money-laundering machines’ spending ways
There was (is?) another way: rely heavily on our academy, so we can save money to buy 2/3 real game-changers
I’ll name a few (subjective list, of course): Donnarumma, De Ligt, Lucas Hernandez, De Jong, Haaland are such game changers, but if we spend loads of money on (good) players who don’t really make a difference (there’s obviously much to be liked about Ben White but £50m???- please!!), we’ll never be able to afford them; the days when Arsène could get that kind of young players for next to nothing are behind us, once and for good
That’s why I think so poorly of the way we dealt with the situations of the youngest player to score in seven consecutive games in PL history (Joe Willock) and of the lad (Reiss Nelson) who scored 7 goals in just 587 minutes of action in the Bundesliga (a record, too, I think), at 19 years of age.
If we are unable to build a team around that kind of wonderkids, we’ll be trapped in a never-ending cycle of reckless spending, frustrating results-performances, and childish recriminations as a result
Not to mention the fact that what has been done to Joe-Reiss is terrible/negative publicity for the club; the gifted lads and their parents-advisers-relatives will now think to themselves: “if Arsenal didn’t give a proper chance to these two football geniuses, who will they give one to?”
There is one station that I could name and that is everyone on talk sport and the biggest person and that Adrian Durham
LE GALL
I agree completely, why waste money on players who are not much better than what we already have available in the U23 squad.
We may just as well accept a few years of mediocrity whilst our young academy players mature and improve as they surely would given consistent game time as buying players who are not going to take us much further forward in the short term as in the current situation.
Look at how Saka has developed compared to spending 70 million on Pepe as a good example.
Is Lokonga any better than Azeez would be given regular game time?
Tony
“Of course I want Arsenal to win things, but if the cost of that is being funded by an anti-democratic, anti-human rights religious state then I would say no. I would sooner watch Arsenal in League Two than have them owned by a repressive anti-democratic religious fundamentalist country”.
Well said.
But actually I go even further. I am totally behind the self sustaining model we adopted, very openly, back at the inception of the Emirates stadium project.
Yes the World has changed and along with it the footballing landscape, but as I have said on many occasions, where is the achievement in winning when you are funded to such an extent, irrespective of the morality of the monies source, as to make winning an absolute certainty?
I give no value or credence to anything, and I mean anything, that has been won by either Chelsea or Man City since they were funded to those extraordinary and actually obscene levels.
I want success but not at any cost.
I’m all for using the academy layers and getting them into the 1st team. But let’s face it : you can’t plan on them nor can you plan on when they will ‘blossom’. Had Aubameyang not seen his contract renewed last year, it would have been a total revolt, right ? So can yeah, Willock scored one after the other, but was it immaginable to replace Aubameyang with Willock and/or promise Willock real playing time with Aubameyang and Lacazette in front of him in the pecking order ? Same with Nelson.
And playng for Arsenal definitely comes with it’s own set of (unofficial) rules concerning the way any thug can mow you down anytime of the game totally unpunished, and the way your actions or actions against you are being refereed.
It ain’t as easy as shuffling pieces on a chess board.
Someone ought to look at Fantasy Football and check what Aubameyang, Lacazette, Willock and Nelson are worth…that would be as good as any survey. My guess is the first two come out on top.
My pinion is that had we gotten Messi, there would be so-called Arsenal fans, or rather spectators pissed anyway. Because is is not the tallest, they’d have trouble seing him from far above…
IDX I don’t think I have ever before seen the notion of standing up to falsehoods and misleading information to be sentimental. Quite a thought.
Looking at last nights under 23 match of which I missed West ham’s first goal , players like Hutchinson , Azeez and Patino have a long way to go before they take the steps that Saka and Smith-Rowe have taken.
Having said that the team last night was a shambles . perhaps the new man Betsy was still trying to get his message across and the tactics were not being interpreted correctly . However 4 of the goals came from the same sort of playing out from the back and getting caught in possesion that is plaguing the first team . From a coaching point of view , if you do not have the players to adapt to it then don’t do it . Hoping that as a collective they will all learn together is hampered by the confidence drain that a 6 – 1 defeat will have given them.
It wasn’t the best 70 odd minutes that I have watched recently but following Brentford and some of the pre season , I can see that it’s a club policy .
Perhaps that’s why Stevie bould was removed.
IDX yours is perhaps the strangest post I have seen on this site. I can’t see anything by Tony Attwood in his remarks which justifies your remark that he is demonstrating a hatred of humanity. He had said that he would rather Arsenal were relegated than taken over by repressive states in the way that Manchester City and PSG have been. I agree with him. With your attidude I am surprised that you are on this site at all.