6-0. Thanks for staying Arsène « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News, supporting the club, the players and the manager
By Walter Broeckx
Some fans have only bad words for Arsène Wenger. It might be worth having a look at some of them – especially in the light of a 6-0 win.
Wenger doesn’t want to buy. Yes Wenger doesn’t want to buy just for the sake of buying a player. He isn’t interested in showing off to the other managers and saying: ‘Just look at me, I bought player X for £50M, how about that’. No he thinks that prices are too high and maybe they are.
Just for Cesc I would make an exception, he cannot be priced high enough. Wenger does buy but he will only buy after having a very close look at a player. After following him for 1 or 2 years even on training with their clubs. And believe me in Europe a lot of training sessions can be visited at all time by people like you and me. Even at big clubs like Ajax. They just train next to the stadium and you can see them train looking on from the pavement.
Wenger has been buying players all the time but he rarely spends silly money. It has happened a few times but no buy is 100% certain even if you do thing the way Arsenal are doing it. If you see the merry go round at times at other clubs where players are coming in and the same players are getting out at high speed I think we do rather nice.
Wenger is filling his pockets. Yes I agree with this. Wenger is filling his pockets. Just like I do at my work and like you do at your work. And yes it is a fact that Wenger earns a lot more money than I do. Don’t know about the rest of you but I can imagine that he earns a lot more than we all do. But this is the wages that are being paid in football for managers. We can think it is too much and I think in fact it is. But there is nothing we can do about it.
Football managers are very well paid for their job. Off course some are trying to suggest that he is filling his pockets in a slightly suspect way. Now how could this be? By getting a percentage on transfer dealings? And then to think it are mostly the same people who first say that Wenger doesn’t buy players and then suggest he is filling his pockets with his dealings. One has to make up his mind.
Wenger is stubborn. I think he is. Like most successful managers. Mourinho is very stubborn. He keeps holding on to his “killing the enjoyment of the football supporter-tactics”. When they criticise him for this he just goes on and does it his way. I dislike his way, but he doesn’t mind. He doesn’t listen to what people say and he goes his own way. Stubborn yes indeed. Just as Ferguson is stubborn. So being stubborn as a manager is more the mark of a good manager than of a bad one. If a manager would change his mind every week after a game and start changing it all, the players will no longer respect him. And you must have the respect from your players to be a good manager. So I hope Wenger stays stubborn for the remaining years at Arsenal.
Wenger likes us to lose things or Wenger doesn’t want us to win things. Now here is something so stupid I could not argue on this. Whenever we lose a game we know that Wenger will moan about something. If he didn’t mind losing he wouldn’t speak about the ref making bad calls. He wouldn’t speak about his players being kicked to pieces. He just would accept it with a smile and carry on with counting his money and filling his pockets.
No, he is upset when we lose a game, you just have to look at him and you can see it all over his face and body. It is also interesting to see that most people who say Wenger hates losing are the same Arsenal fans who want Wenger to shut up after a defeat and tell him to stop moaning. Maybe because they know that Wenger does hate it to lose?
Wenger has lost it. The only thing he has lost since he came to Arsenal that I can see are his glasses. He has exchanged them for contact lenses as he sometimes couldn’t see what happened on the pitch. But for the rest I cannot see what he has lost apart from some hair on his head. But we all do after a certain age, well I do anyway. He still is a man that is living for his job night and day.
Maybe he has lost a few things during his time at Arsenal. He has lost the chance to go to Madrid or Barcelona. That is an opportunity that he has missed. He could have gone on a few occasions. But he always remained faithful to his contract and his word. So maybe he has lost a lot of money by staying at Arsenal.
Wenger has his favourite players. They say this whenever he plays a player they don’t like themselves. As the fans have their favourite players themselves. So they say Wenger should drop X and play Z. X being the player they don’t like and Z being the player they like. But they forget that for each match the manager is having the players in training, is looking at the other team they have to play and for some matches you need a certain type of player more than another.
They don’t realize that maybe he gives a certain player a certain task to do on the pitch. Something we don’t know and the manager and the player don’t talk about to not alert the opponents. Or maybe some player is having a physical problem with a minor injury so the manager picks the other player to give him a rest. All things we don’t know so we can’t really comment on them. Unless you don’t like the manager and anything will do to throw at him.
What Wenger has done in the last 5 seasons looks not much for the moment, certainly to the people who write rubbish articles in the press. What Wenger has done for this club will be written in gold in a time that we are no longer here. In some 100 years maybe a new Tony Attwood will write a book about this period and call it the Re-Making the Arsenal. Supporters who now even have to be born will look at the Wenger era and will say to each other: It must have been great to have been an Arsenal fan in those days. And hell, yes it is great being an Arsenal fan these days.
Being led by a courageous manager who accepted the risk of going through a period with a smaller chance for trophies and even then he came close a few times, a manager who has led our club through the move to the Emirates and accepted money was short for buying players. A manager who accepted for taking the blame by some part of the fans and stuck out his head during the last period. How easy he could have turned away and go to Real Madrid and leave us in tatters. He didn’t. He stayed because he cares for this club. Maybe he cares even more than some of the fans do who tell all those bad things of him can imagine. Thanks for staying Arsène.
And the 6-0 was good fun too.