At the beginning of the season it was fair to say that Arsenal were playing shit.
We seemed a bigger shambles than a pissed up David Hasselhoff trying to eat a hamburger.
At the time there many people jumping on an RIP Arsenal Football Club bandwagon. A bandwagon that was gaining more speed than Keanu Reeves on a bus.
Unbelievably, in my eyes, some were even suggesting that we were, in fact, in a relegation battle!
Now I have heard of extremes, but this was an extreme of the highest order.
I cannot, for one second, actually believe that there were people out there, some of them Gooners too, who could have thought Arsenal were in a relegation scrap.
That is not me being arrogant, but this was just one of the biggest exaggerations I have ever seen in my whole entire stinking existence.
We had a bad start to the season, after losing our best player, but we would always recover.
And we have recovered. Arsene Wenger put us in the recovery position, gave us the kiss of life, and now we are at the right end of the table.
I love seeing the doubters proved wrong. Not just for Wenger's sake, but for the actual club.
Where are those psychic's now? The so-called experts who said we would be playing in the Championship with Derby County or Crystal Palace next season?
I'll tell you where. They are in hiding. Waiting for the next 'so-called' crisis of Arsenal to happen.
And I'll tell you what, they want a crisis to happen so they can say 'I told you so'.
Arsenal were never going to be relegated, and I know we can improve a lot more.
But I wonder if those people who said the Gunners were a sinking ship will hold their hands up and say they were wrong.
I doubt it somehow.
Follow me on Twitter @_Wrighty7
Keep It Goonerish........
39 comments:
Even though Wigan are pants, we played some beautiful football at times today. If Ramsey can get some shooting practice in, he'll bag 10 goals in the 2nd half of the season because his Lampard bursts into the box will reap the rewards soon.
Stunning pace and skill by Theo to set up the 4th in what was a quiet game for him, but showed that he can turn it on in a second.
The spuds are on their best ever league start for nearly 30 years. We've had our worst start in over 40 years. And we're still close. You reverse the result at the Lane and we're above them. By February. we'll be well clear of them, don't worry about that!
Good blog, and I always admired your optimism. A bit of friendly advice, however - go easy on the metaphors, they become annoying pretty quickly. Perhaps try to limit yourself to one metaphor per article. :)
i will say i did not see things improving after the united game i still thought wenger was going to stay stubborn and keep with the same team for the rest of the season. if that happened we would of been in trouble, but then when he made what i believe were perfect signings that is when i and i am sure everyone believed we would be back sooner rather than later. it is just horrible to think were we could be if we got our business done early because we would of beaten newcastle and liverpool and even though the squad was here for blackburn they would of been settled and we would of won that as well. I believe we will be challenging for the title because city will drop points
What is a metaphor? ;)
Correct me if I'm wrong but this your website was one of those on the bandwagon "Arsenal is in trouble" and screaming Arsene must go and doesnt know what he is doing - those were dark days and people like myself found it hard to find anywhere with positive or encouraging stuff to read. I stopped reading your articles at that time. Hopefully next time things look bleak you will tow a different line!
I don't think anyone has been 'proved' right or wrong after 14 games. What it looks like is we're in a battle for 4th this season, which really isn't that amazing for a club of our stature, certainly nothing to get smug about.
The summer was still horribly mismanaged and put us in the position where a 4th place finish is the best we can hope for from the season.
*wipes egg off face* Simile, not metaphor!
Myles Palmer can go f*** himself
Adam & Jekyll
Lots of teams that did their business early still strugled; Man Utd, Chelsea have all had bad patches.
It also seems a lot of gooners are blind and to be honest we are helping other teams to steal our best players.
We all want trophies and not 4th position but its not easy when you have teams like PSG, REAL MADRID, AC MILAN, MAN CITY & Liverpool & Chelsea paying crazy money for players. Chelsea paid 50 Mil for Torres whats he done?
Who is to say the players we bought were available for sale early summer - Arteta wasnt! or Man Shitty wldnt have swooped in with their Oil millions.
Lets just support our team, we've got a great manager and he is better at doing the business and managing the team than any of us arm chair managers.
Lets get behind the team - as Wenger said "Lets Be UNITED" through thick and thin, in good and bad times - Be a gooner through the storm - throphies will come if not this season it will come soon its not the end, we will celebrate soon and trust be it will be big, we can beat anyone - so Chapions League is on the card.
Arsenal FC - "The greatest FC the world has ever seen"!
@Anon 22:14.
Please tell me you were joking???!!
I get told I am TOO positive so I don't think you have read my blog before. Ever.
I shall come to your rescue Wrighty:
http://wrighty7.blogspot.com/2011/09/champions-league-we-wanna-worry-about.html
Fairly balanced view there, no doom.
Love your blog. Continue!
wrighty, good to hear from you, but i do not fully agree that it is wenger dat has brought us to where we are now, as our keeper chesney has tweeted, pat rice has taken over the defensive coaching of the side after the early season embarrassments, and he also gave a monumental rollicking to all in the dressing-room after the spurs defeat. after-all the last time we had anything like defensive stability was when martin keown was brought on board and we got to a champions league final.
This is bullshit-there was a solid basis for such pessimism-our record from February until the end of last season,the way the club handled the close season, losing our 2 best players- our results at the beginning of this season-losing to Liverpool, Spuds, thrashed embarrassingly by United, still shipping goals.In September It did not look like we could turn it round.
At the beginning of October we were 16th.
At that point exactly what was the basis for optimism?
Fergie was furious when the ref awarded a penalty to NU.The ref had blundered.Then he was demoted.
Ramsey was manhandled in the box and it was 100% times 5 penalty.I want to see the authorities take similar action with regard to the ref.
arshavin out hazard in
rosicky out gotze in
Many ppl will still be arrogant to admit we got our players late. If u care 2 know, Arteta and few of them want 2 play in CL. And with Arsenal not yet guaranteed as at then. They dinot want 2 take d risk take it or leave it.
2ndly. I remember vividly I read a very disheartening article about d gunners here. was even thinking that it was Ian right blog. all of a sudden u'r rolling back. good 2 c though
@Anon 22:35
Agreed, agreed and AGREED.
Need more SUPPORTERS not 2004 fans spoilt from the success of the club.
Which other manager has been as successful having spent as little as Wenger? And that doesn't make him tight, just very efficient with what little the board allows him to spend.
This is response to the Ramsey push.Too many refs are getting away with blatant blunders.I full agree that these guys should be more accountable.If the gunners had lost,the repercussions could have been very obvious.
Now what about the Luiz foul on Demba?If Luiz had been sent off,Chelsea could have lost and the manager under even more intense pressure.
The authorities should be swwift in dishing out punishment to such blundering officials and announce widely such error prone officials will be demoted with immediate effect and match fees deducuted depending on the gravity of the error.
Only by such measures will such errors be reducd but not totally eliminated.
We were in a relegation scrap, were we likely to stay down there? No but from the carling cup till the end of the season we took 1 more point (might have been 3) than Birmingham who got relegated and we started this season with 3 defeats (United, Blackburn and Liverpool) all in quick succession, so points wise we were definitely in a relegation battle.
Can't exactly blame other fans for pointing it out either, we did when Sp*rs were near the bottom under Ramos, it's part of the banter, if a rival struggles, you exaggerate to make the most of it, hence the claims from other fans we'd go down and realistic Arsenal fans saying we were showing relegation form (because we were)
We were in a relegation scrap, were we likely to stay down there? No but from the carling cup till the end of the season we took 1 more point (might have been 3) than Birmingham who got relegated and we started this season with 3 defeats (United, Blackburn and Liverpool) all in quick succession, so points wise we were definitely in a relegation battle.
Can't exactly blame other fans for pointing it out either, we did when Sp*rs were near the bottom under Ramos, it's part of the banter, if a rival struggles, you exaggerate to make the most of it, hence the claims from other fans we'd go down and realistic Arsenal fans saying we were showing relegation form (because we were)
superb post as always.love to read your comments
please post often.
@Rash Gunner.
Ur position doesn't make sense. If Arteta was waiting to see if we would qualify for UCL, what were his options? Was he going to play Champions league with Everton. Bcos until the last day of the transfer window he was still an Everton player.the truth is that Wenger had already said we needed just One more player or 2 at most.thanks to d old trafford Embarrasment and a few injuries we would have been totally f***ed by Wenger blind optimism. Do u rmbr that Wenger said we didn't need a replacement for Clichy,bcos Vermaleen cld assist Gibbs?
Pls do not make it look like we should be applauding Wenger that we're now chasing 4th. Not that we can compete with d moneybags, but if only he brought in 1 or 2 players we needed in Jan,maybe we cld ve even won d title. Imagine if Wilshere got injured in Sept, that means we wouldn't have bought Arteta and we would be struggling now. I accept Wenger has done almost magic for us, but it's frustrating to see him stubbornly refuse to spend just dat extra 15-20m dat cld take us to d next level of becoming champions.if we had signed these type of players last season(instead of d kids and d bargains we're used to),Maybe Cesc and Nasri wld ve had a reason to stay. At least we would have looked ambitious.
i once read a disheartny anti wenger post on this blog that i got disappointed since i used to have the impression that it is owned by our legend Ian Wright, but good to see you've also come around, woken up and smelled the coffee. Anytime a team sells a big player they struggle like the first few games after selling vieira, few games after man united sold beckham and so on. It is just a phase and now AFC has now taken a winning shape. Gunners till i die!!
some of the comments on here are retarded......wrighty keep up the good work.....
Wow,
Some of the comments here are retarded.
Is everyone talking about the same Arsenal?
wake up some of you, and see what is really going on.
I have been an arsenal member for over 35 years.
Is My team and I stick with it, and with everything.
How, can you say people , that this team was close to relegation?
Is not even in My vocabulary, for team with the status of Arsenal.
Great Post.Keep up the good work, and some people need to have a close look at themselves.
Thanks
Still a Dick as ever Wrighty.
We were in a relgation battle. Then we got beat 8-2. Wenger was forced to get his head out of the sand along with idiots like you.
He brought 4 average players on deadline day which gave the team experience and balance. We havent looked back since.
Had he brought them in July like the AFC fans (as opposed to AW fans)were screaming for, we might have been closer to Citeh and higher up the table.
Poor management for someone paid £7milllion. But never mind. We move on.
we left our buying until deadline day in order to get players at value prices and wages. that's what you have to do when competing with clubs that can afford to lose half-million quid every day, year after year.
plenty of people think we should be doing the same thing of course with usmanov pulling the strings but i'm not so sure. for all the investment chelsea have had since abramovic came along with his tank firing £50notes, look at them now.
as soon as man city stop pouring money into the machine it will grind to a shuddering halt. arsenal's strategy is for the long term and it works.
i could add that we suffered some very poor officiating early in the season which robbed us of at least 7 points, so we can look forward to that evening itself out in the coming months!
YOU were the one who suggested we were in a relegation battle! You're the definition of a fickle football fan.
SATURDAY, 17 SEPTEMBER 2011
Wrighty7
Champions League? We Wanna Worry About The Championship!
Behave Chris Ten.
Is that your age?
Did you actually READ that article?
Poor Wrighty7, lambasted at the beginning of the season for being too balanced and not critical enough of Arsene, now being accused of having been a hater and a doomer all along! It seems that there's a similarity in the psychological profile of the haters & doomers: 'intellectually' dishonest, self-important, irrational, and completely delusional about their knowledge of the football business. Narrowing it down (significantly) to haters above the age of twelve and not living with their mums, I wonder how many of them have ever held a professional position requiring negotiations or decisions more complex than ordering office supplies. Do any of them have any grasp of the sheer complexity and uncertainty involved in player transactions, unless, of course, one party has a great need to launder billions of roubles of post-Soviet plunder or diversify investments from an immense pool of family owned oil-dollars? Without being sure whether Nasri would finally choose to leave, Arsene Wenger was interested in several players, and when prices became too high or negotiations broke down for some, he moved for others. Wenger bought (or loaned) a couple of older players because he was priced out of suitable younger ones. To suggest that Wenger was pressured to change his ways or that he did some panic buying is ludicrous, especially when we can now see how much the judicious signings have brought to the team. Such is the delusionary and self-aggrandizing nature of the haters, however, some of them seem to be taking credit for somehow having finally forced Wenger into buying older, experienced players. What a joke, if Arsenal had listened to the Wenger haters over the years, we would have had a squad filled with the likes of Gareth Barry and Shawn Wright-Phillips and been massively in debt to boot. You're right, Wrighty7, the haters & doomers just can't wait to see Arsenal fail.
Who is this person, Wrighty7, he does not speak for Arsenal fans, only for himself...
And why should anyone follow you on twitter? who elected you as spokesman?
Um, Anonymous at Dec-4 18:26, Wrighty7 speaks for me and the thousands of Arsenal supporters who regularly read his blog. And seeing that this article was #4 on the top ten stories on NewsNow: Arsenal, I have a small suspicion that he speaks for a lot more Arsenal supporters than you do. Speaking of which, why don't you and your lot of haters just go and support the bigamist Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan's Manchester City? Nobody wants you here on a proper Arsenal blog, you f*ing twat.
Wrighty mate
dont go overboard..Our beloved Arsenal was left out to hang during this summer transfer ,and cant you see just how much that inept handling of the transfers have cost us ?..and exactly what have changed...do You see us as title contenders now ?it would have been better to just admit that this year we're further away from being contenders than ever before in wengers years...it is a shame how wenger and nazidis have slwoly built down Our Beloved Arsenal ever since the hollywood looker came in from the cold in 07
Arsenal has too many fans and too few supporters. It's pity we can't sell some of these spoiled, negative, little babies to Citeh.
It is AKB fans who have issued labels like" Wenger haters", "Arsenal haters", "dormers", "Anti Arsenal Arsenal" and other insults about other fans who dare criticise Arsene Wenger- after poor performances.
Quite honestly you were no where to be seen or heard between February and October- and had nothing to offer except irrational hero worship of the manager.
If you really believe that it is so difficult to sign players that after 3 months of the transfer window you can only do so on the last few hours- then why is it not equally as difficult for Man United who sorted their transfer business 2 months earlier? Some of you writing on this site need therapy.
Well said wrighty but i would like to know where the *anker known as P-morgan is hiding his gob
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