It’s been a struggle all season, after the disastrous start to the season things started to turn around. The start of 2012 saw a return to the ways of the beginning of the season, not winning a single Premier League game in January and failing to score against the worst defence in the league at Bolton. It’s not looking promising for the year. I myself can be classed as the most optimistic of fans but even I understand there’s something wrong.
Wenger is not the issue, not him as a whole. I can’t think of anyone that can do a better job that Arsenal would be in with a shot of getting. The issue is much simpler than that. Arsenal needs fresh faces, something alternative. This plan isn’t working, so it’s time to bring in plan B.
I’m not suggesting splashing £30 million on a player for the sake of it, that’s just setting yourself up for trouble. Wenger needs to spend on a player that’s worth it. We all know he favours the young talent, but there is plenty of young players out there that can be bought and can light up the stadium. This needs to be done, the problem at the moment is that we lack something exciting. If Van Persie isn’t on fire then we have trouble finding the net. Recently he hasn’t been on form, you can’t deny that. We were lucky against Aston Villa, extremely lucky. It should have forced Wenger to spend, like he did in the summer after the Manchester United game, but he didn’t and that could cause some problems.
Arsenal’s January antics resulted in 1 new player and 1 previous legend. Thomas Eisfeld may not play first team football this season and certainly won’t solve our problems. He may be a great player in a few years time, perhaps even next year but that is too late. We need players to make an impact now and the club failed to provide. Thierry Henry is only here for a few more weeks and I can’t help but think it was just a ploy to get fans off Wenger’s back. I agree with the loan deal, I’ve stated so before. However, on the pitch he doesn’t have enough of an impact. The Leeds goal was great but that was one game, since then he hasn’t offered anything new.
The main thing we need is an attacker. Someone else that’s capable of getting goals, so that we don’t have to feed Van Persie and hope he scores. You can see the pressure is getting to him, it’s affecting his game. Snatching at chances and not playing on instinct, while the wide players and midfielders just constantly look at him for goals. Every time a player gets into the box they look for the Dutchman, especially Gervinho and Walcott.
The fact that the club didn’t spend in January may simply have cost us the Champions League next season. Is this such a bad thing though? Of course everyone wants to play in Europe’s top competition, amongst the elite, but sometimes you have to take a step back to realise what has gone wrong and then improve. We won’t win the Champions League this year and we probably wouldn’t next year either. Failure to reach the competition might also persuade Wenger to spend and then we can start going forward again. I want what’s best for the club in the long term, not just what’s great for the football we watch. We could actually win the Europa League and would that really be so much of a failure?
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