Do Not Sell My Personal Information
I feel sorry for myself as a fan. I was sick in my stomach after the Liverpool game. I feel sorry for Arsenal. I felt sorry for Arsenal after the very first Spurs goal at White Hart Lane. A fellow Gooner sent me an SMS after the first goal “we need two more”. I thought to myself, a team that needs three clear goals to get three points is not in good mental state for a final push.
I feel sorry for the Arsenal players. As soon as they lost the Carling Cup in the 90th minute, I wondered if they would get anything out of the season. I was certain they would never lift themselves up after the Spurs game. Something had broken in the team – they know Man Utd and they had convinced themselves in self-criticism about their lack of “winning mentality” that Man Utd were superior. You can’t stand on the start line of a race thinking negatively about yourself and positively about your opponent and hope to have any power to overcome them.
I feel sorry for Arsène Wenger. It is my opinion that Wenger is not stubborn. He is very good at certain things and very bad at others. Nobody spent those years watching Thierry Henry by complaining that he could not head the ball. But if Thierry Henry was only scoring 8 goals per season instead of 20 to 30 goals per season, then we would all be complaining about his poor aerial ability. Wenger has not won a trophy for some time so everything he is not good at is brought to the surface and everything he is good now looks unimportant. How many of those negative qualities really mattered these past 6 years is something we shall agree on in due course – there is no chance we will agree on that in the next year.
If you read the first two paragraphs again, then one might argue why feel sorry for Wenger instead of bitterly blame him if his team is as portrayed above. But Wenger has been taunted, derided, disrespected, and belittled by a lot of people including other managers. He has also been rightly criticised by some. My view is that some of the criticism is right and some are beyond what he deserves. But there is no denying he has failed. Failing doesn’t make him a bad manager or a bad man for that matter.
I feel sorry for Arsenal fans. I am one. I have to say that Arsenal fans have been impatient and acted spoiled for many seasons but the fans have been brilliant this season. This was one of our best seasons contributing as fans since moving from Highbury. The Emirates is starting to show signs of home. Fans have genuinely been nice to the players and manager even during some dark periods. The fans feel humiliated right now.
That is possibly true of the players and the manager as well. Think about what Patrice Evra, Nani and other players even in lower teams of the premiership have said about Arsenal and their players. They may have been wrong but at the end of the season will have them claim to be right. Winning or losing is binary. A guy that sits on the bench at United and would not get into an Arsenal team or a Spurs or other premier league player whose team finished behind Arsenal still feels big about taunting Arsenal and its players or manager. Seb Larsson can tell Fabregas that he left Arsenal he has won the Carling Cup, so can David Bentley.
In a sense, the empty end to this season is not the club’s biggest problem. The biggest problem for the club is the general humiliation (jeering), belittling that everyone – manager, players and fans have been through. How do you recover from that?
Well before we really get into all of this and start deciding how to look forward, let’s wait for Chelsea to play United and for Arsenal (weakened, broken and de-spirited) to play United. Then let’s come back and start quickly to pick ourselves up. We will have to contribute to picking ourselves up and do it amongst ourselves as fans for we have no control of what will happen with players and managers. We will have to focus on getting ourselves up and wait for the club to do its part. Let’s chat at the end of the season and start the healing. It may even be that we end the season as champions! We have no spirit left to believe that but Mathematics is still left to consider!
