THE START

For starters I will write a few paragraphs about most of the main players on our team and my opinion about them. Starting next season 2011-2012, I will blog after each game that I am able to watch. And who else can I start with but Arsene Wenger. The Professor. The man who has done so much for the club and who is under so much scrutiny right now:

ARSENE WENGER

PRO’s: One of the main reasons Arsenal are where they are right now is Wenger. Obviously every football fan wants their team to win trophies every year. But when you think about what Wenger has been able to achieve with the amount of money he has spent: It’s absolutely remarkable. I am not going to go into details about the “Invincibles” season and the trophies we have won under Wenger, because everyone knows about those.

We have been in the Champions league every single year since the 1998-1999 season. No exceptions. I don’t think some fans realize how hard is to do that without spending the amounts of money teams like Manchester City, Manchester United and Chelsea have spent.

We built and moved to a new stadium with a good financial plan on how to avoid going into huge debts like many of the other clubs now days. To be able to stay competitive without spending the huge amounts of money some other clubs spend, is a testament to Wenger and his abilities to recognize talent and develop it. I don’t think the move to the Emirates Stadium would have been so smooth and with no effects on the performance of the team if Wenger wasn’t here. 

Wenger has found and developed young players into stars more than any other manager I can think of, with Alex Ferguson being the only one who can claim something similar. Don’t get me wrong, Wenger has some flaws and I will talk about them next, but before I do, I just want to stress that in my opinion the positive things that Wenger has done for this club outweigh the negatives by a huge margin. 

p.s.People make a big deal of how upset he looks on the sideline this year, how he throws bottles in frustration. But that shows one very important thing: That he still cares, and he is desperate to win probably more than anybody else.

CON’s: As big of a genius as he is, Wenger can sometimes drive me absolutely nuts with some of the decisions he makes. Substitutions are one thing that he somehow manages to fuck up completely, most of the time. And not so much the players he takes out and puts in but the fact that a lot of the times he would make a substitution in the 80^th  or 85^th minute and expect that this player will have any impact on the game. This gets particularly annoying when we are having a shitty game and things are not going well but he stubbornly refuses to make a change before it’s too late.

The same could be said about his reluctance to spend money on players even if they are needed in some areas. I don’t think that anyone will argue that if we had just a few more experienced players in the squad we wouldn’t have gone 6 years without a trophy. To this point, if he had held on to some of the older players like Pires, Viera, or Gilberto Silva that would have helped him transition to this younger team much smoother. I understand that sometimes if a player wants to leave you can’t stop him but having a few veterans who do not need to start every game but are available for the big matches would have been a tremendous help for Wenger and this young team.

Always relying and bringing in technically gifted players has backfired on him because sometimes we lack the physicality and hunger of some players with less technical ability but with more determination and desire. I really believe we need to make sure we have more English players on the team, guys who are not afraid to be physical when they need to be and guys who will be passionate about Arsenal and what the club stands for.

His strategy and positioning of players is pretty much the same or at least has been for most of this year (2010-2011). He would always play with one striker up front when sometimes we could be way more effective with two strikers. Putting guys like Bendtner on the wing is something that works once and the other 9 times it doesn’t because the guy is not suited for the wing. If you are going to play Bendtner put him as a striker and move the other guys accordingly. The bottom line is that Arsene is reluctant to make many tactical changes even if it's obvious that the team is not playing well.