Wenger's time is up

Arsene Wenger has become an impotent football manager, bereft of any new ideas and skills, hopelessly stuck in a time-warp. He still thinks he is the manager of the 15 years ago.

He has kept us in the CL competition for all these years – great! But hang, on, aren’t we a big enough football club to expect that much at least? Who did we have to fend off in all those years for that coveted top 4 spot: Tottenham, Everton and a struggling Liverpool, who are seemingly in a perpetual transition. I do not know why some people think that it is such a huge achievement.

I think that a younger, progressive manager would have achieved more with Arsenal in the last 10 years than Wenger, even with all the financial constraints. I also strongly believe that a top class manager would have won us the league at least once or twice and that he would have ensured that we got to the later stages of the CL.

He won us 2 FA cups in the last 10 years – Great! Even so, there was a great deal of luck with that too. In neither of those 2 campaigns did we have to beat Chelsea or Man City, the 2 strongest teams at the time. In the end, we played Hull and Aston villa in those finals.

But that is about it. His once famous ability to get players on the cheap and make them into top class is long gone. It is now replaced with his tendency to buy top players and make them look average (Sanchez being the latest slowly drifting into this category).

His failure with young British players is most puzzling. The current crop of Walcott, Ramsey, Wilshere, Gibbs, Chambers, Ox – they are all struggling at Arsenal big time. And it is not that some of those guys don’t have any talent or potential.

His failure to address the obvious problems with the squad is more than just puzzling, it borders on stupidity. If you come out and say that Giroud is a top class striker and that there are not too many better than him to go for, then you look stupid when he fails again and again (and to be fair to him, it is not his fault, he plays to the best of his ability, just that his best can never be a world class).

If a manager says that he does not care if some supporters want him out, that reeks of pure arrogance. Recklessness even. Belligerence, you name it. Where is the humility? Is he trying to copy Jose Mourinho?

Oh, yes, Jose Mourinho! Wenger’s impotence against Mourinho’s teams has become a very uncomfortable viewing. Here he is, supposedly one of the great managers of our time, and being routinely dismissed by a true great manager (albeit horribly flawed, self-obsessed human being) like some managerial novice.

And who could ever forget those losses to Chelsea (6:0), ManU (8:2) and many others that are simply not befitting a club of Arsenal’s stature, no matter the circumstances.

Still worse, there are now clubs like Southampton, Swansea etc who seem to regularly get the better of us. Clubs like Watford (with all due respect and congratulations) that knock us out of competitions on our own turf.

This year’s league should be the final nail in Wenger’s coffin, as far as I am concerned. The usual contenders struggling big time, here is a chance to surge forward and reclaim the PL at last. Alas, what do we do? We even outdo our rivals in the flopping stakes. We let teams like Leicester and Spurs (no offence to either) to compete for the spoils, while we are likely to have to fight to retain that 4th spot once again.

Is it all Wenger’s fault? Perhaps not. But his responsibility is the greatest, by far. He has been presiding over this mediocrity for far too long, because the money-hungry board is not willing to take the risk and fire him, in their pathetic belief that no manager could do better than him. They both perhaps deserve each other but we, the supporters, deserve better.

We need a change. And if they are not willing to implement that change, than we should become a lot louder!

Sometimes good things come to those who shout!