Apart from striker & right wing, I don’t see Liverpool being better squad than us; so yeah on paper we should finish ahead of them.
But football is weird.
Exhibit A - Leicester.
Exhibit B - Chelsea.
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Nine out of ten times expected results tend to come to fruition though.
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I agree with you there, no doubt.
Imagine our injury crisis if we were playing Kloppball twice a week.
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Chelsea aren’t really an odd case. Players just got old, it happened to plenty of champions, see Liverpool in the 90s and United when Fergie realised he’d ran his old men into the ground.
4 of the key players in the 2015 Title winning season didn’t decline because of age though, Hazard, Costa, Matic & Fabregas none of them are in their 30s.
Fabregas did though, he slowed allot, his hamstring injuries ruined him. Then you have Terry and Ivanovich who have lost their legs. Cahil has declined for a while.
It was the same thing with the Liverpool side of the 80s, that went from champions to also rans, they had too many players in their late 20s. Same with the Man City side in the last 2 seasons. Man United got away with playing older players by pairing them with young runners
The other thing is that when you’re in a title challenge you play 100% every game, it’s hard to sustain that 2 seasons in a row. As it was Chelsea were winning/drawing games by the skin of their teeth. Teams know they only need to fix a few things to beat you next season and if you’re no longer 100% you see what happens.
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I bet my house Costa is in his late 40s.
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Whatever gets Wenger out. It’s not that I’m a big Klopp fan. We shouldn’t have as much of a problem axing the next guy when he doesn’t perform but we have to start by killing the king.
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I don’t remember any Fergie side pissing about below fifteenth place for half a season before limping to a tenth place finish.
Chelsea last year absolutely was an odd case, it’s very very rare a side makes that bit a hash of their title defence. I can’t think of a single title defence as bad as Chelsea last year.
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I don’t think it’s a good idea of talking about Klopp replacing Wenger especially when he’s currently at one of our domestic rivals. I still much prefer Wenger to Klopp right now, after all he is our manager. Klopp hasn’t exactly made Liverpool a consistent team to fear yet.
If I had to swap the vulture out today I don’t think Klopp would be the worst fit. Clearly we have a style to take into consideration which would put for example Simeone or Mou further away and Klopp and Pep closer (all names are just for the sake of making a point) in terms of style.
I would really prefer to get a manager who is proven enough to not be a fluke but who has the intention to stay here long term. I am one of those fans who appreciate long term planning and running the club properly, I would be opposed to us joining the manager merry-go-round shite that most other clubs are stuck in if we can avoid it. If Klopp was up for it, I guess it would be ok, considering?
Klopp took a shite side in Liverpool and he has to upgrade the squad. Just like us any simpleton can figure out they neither have the money nor the pulling power to just get whoever they point at so it will probably take more than one or two seasons to begin building a squad with the right characteristics to see if he can get them on Dortmund level or similar.
I don’t know if Klopp is the best alternative in the world but if he was declared our new manager then I guess it could be worse, assuming he intended to stay for the long haul. I’d probably take it over any flavour-of-the-week manager no matter who it is.
His eyebrows certainly look they are in their late forties.
That’s probably why won’t see him here.
Simply not good looking enough.
What would that be?
[quote=“morrisc311, post:75, topic:729, full:true”]
WengerBall bitch.
Arsenal 3 Chelsea motherfuxking zero WengerBall bitch.
If our style against Chelsea was replicated more often then there wouldn’t be so many people, myself included, questioning our style of play.
It’s similar to Walcott. If he consistently played like he has done this season (the Chelsea game in particular) then there wouldn’t be so many people questioning him.
In both cases, if recent performances become more regular then there will be fewer people being critical.
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OT: It helps not having a squad full of low hanging fruit and teenagers to rely on as well. Why that was the case should be common knowledge by now, it wasn’t the best Wenger could imagine but they’re what fit the budget to get the stadium thing over as soon as possible so we could start getting Xhakas instead of Denilsons. Especially with the resale value of kids included.
Jack sent on loan is something I would never imagine a handful of years ago, fit and in form or not, those were the players we relied on to scrape toghether a starting XI. I think Theo is the same case, if we had refreshed our squad with £50m every year the past decade I don’t think we’d have the same patience with him as we have had. It is now time for Theo and Ox and the likes to ignite or prepare to make room for another Sanchez though, because now we can and will get that type of players.
I mean, we had to start rebuilding a squad. Prioritising GK’s, CB’s and midfielders which we stocked up on is justifiable I think, building from the back and all that. Strikers are still an issue we can all agree (Perez judgement withheld for now), but wingers or wide forwards are probably correctly our last priority, and we’re getting to them now I feel.
Ever since the last game I have been thinking about if the players really understand that if they give it their all like they did vs. Chelsea the sky really is the limit, I hope they do. I hope we see a similar effort, result or not, vs Basel in a couple of hours.
Actually when Denilson was here, that was when we played good, attractive football. During 07-11, when we supposed had shit squads according to likes of you, our football was pretty nice/attractive. It was after Cesc and Nasri left the football went downhill and never really came back. It wasn’t like Wenger worked with shit squads either. 07/08 and 10/11 squads had solid first 18’s apart from some glaring holes.
Funny for you to say that we are prioritising GK’s, CB’s when Sanchez was one of the first players who he bought to enter the rebuilding of the 11-13 team. Face it; Wenger had trust in the likes of Giroud, Mertesacker, Arteta and Walcott, but they never were and never are going to be good enough to be starting players for us. We can only be glad he’s starting to see that now too.
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Nah. “The likes of you” can be “glad” that “he’s starting to see it now”. If you understood the process from the beginning you’d see less coincidences everywhere. It has been going as planned. And the manager didn’t make the plans, he just manages them. Even the most resistant simpleton should know this by now.
I can kind of tell by you saying Sanchez was ‘one of the first players bought’ that you don’t get that we’re still in the starting phase of building. You did however forget to mention that we got 3 defenders and a goal keeper the same window we bought Sanchez and we got 5 defenders in total plus Bellerin coming from from the youth ranks for free, plus the two goal keepers we use making up the vast majority of the bulk of defending players we use, since then. That is in the past 3 windows. So yes we are building from the back in every sense.
You may have liked Denilson’s sideways and backwards passes, I didn’t, it’s just opinions. And in 07/08 we still had enough players left from the 05/06 team and the midfield was mainly run by Cesc-Flamini-Rosicky then. Denilson started 4 times in the league that season so your argument is shite there anyway. He stayed for another bunch of years though playing more and more which is what I was going for and for me he was a good symbol of how the team quality deteriorated. Xhaka and Elneny and the likes over him any day.
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He had too start rebuilding because players from the 12/13 team got old (Mertesacker, Arteta), they just left (Sagna, Vermaelen), and/or got found out (Szczesny, Mertesacker, Giroud currently). The fact that he only added Ozil and Sanchez to that line-up but still persisted with 8/9 players from that team for TWO more seasons, makes it more plausible there wasn’t an actual rebuild planned like you’re claiming. It was born out of necessity. I’m pretty sure we would not have bought Mustafi if not for the injuries of Mertesacker/Gabriel. We needed to get those players in 14/15 because Sagna and Vermaelen were leaving for better places and like I said, Szczesny got found out.
I don’t particarly like Denilson. It was more your suggestion those squads were shit and using him as an example of that. Those squads weren’t shit. I remember very well concensus back then was those teams needed two/three players to really compete. Before Fabregas and Nasri forced there way out. We’re pretty much in the same situation now.