Because, tactics for inferior teams matter. Wenger’s Arsenal was in many cases inferior and he was tactically a disaster. Getting trounced by big teams so often as we did showed he didn’t know what he was doing with the personnel at hand. When you want to play as Barcelona and you don’t have their quality: don’t play like Barcelona. Adapt your game. He very often didn’t, showing he did not have tactical nous when it actually mattered. Stubbornness, arrogance, whatever it was, he didn’t show it and didn’t have it.
Weaker teams are capable of beating stronger teams by deploying proper tactics. It’s not that hard to understand Trion.
What was so frustrating about Wenger was that almost everyone could see the weaknesses in our team yet nothing was done about it.
He also never seemed to learn from his mistakes and just kept repeating them, which is something no successful manager does.
Like you say, he persisted with players for several seasons even though they were constantly under performing and he was left in a situation where the only decent players would clear off because they had enough of playing alongside them and he had to make panic buys which is not the best transfer strategy.
I always laugh when people make the argument that “Well, Wenger had shit players, it wasn’t his fault”.
So who chose the players? Who kept the same ones which had failed around for ages because he liked them personally, and gave contracts to them when they didn’t deserve them? This doesn’t even begin the tactical side of the debate and how he set them up.
It’s astonishing the mental gymnastics people do to defend his final years.
That’s possibly true but nearly all the top players that left us went on to win a League title at their new club, often in the first season, which means they were dissatisfied with what was happening here.
Also he hasn’t bought many good young players through since we have been at the Emirates.
16 FA cup wins in a row wasn’t it? Beating the current champs, and Peps city. So yeh we punched above our weight quite often.
And as far as Wenger constructing the team isn’t it kind of common knowledge now that a lot of these horrendous guys that have been signed like Gabriel, Xhaka, and Mustafi, ended up being Stat DNA signings and our boy Gazidis was responsible for that shit?
This is probably the most infuriating thing for me. That day when we went to City in early 2015 and got that 2-0 result by sitting in and defending properly with all eleven players behind the ball; why the fuck did we never do that again?
It’s as if it was actually an accident and we hadn’t meant to do it, which is obviously nonsense but there’s no explanation for going back to our usual set up after and once again getting routinely trounced in these matches. Did he simply think “well we got the result, but it wasn’t as fun to watch for me, the football wasn’t as pure”? I just can’t work it out lmao
I actually think that Man City game was overrated. Man City had a couple of gilt edge chances to go ahead, didn’t take them, we scored and kinda knocked the stuffing out of them.
Even so though, our intentions were clear from the way we set up, and it worked. We never tried that again and I just can’t work it out in my mind as to why.