Titus Bramble ffs. But yeah we were playing beautiful football in between but just go missing when their was a chance of glory. Bottling started about a decade ago now.
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We had both tho, everyone is quick to forget how fucking hard we partied and how great it felt to win the FA Cup in 2014, then we won 2 more and made another final. We were fine under Wenger and played much better football, our issue was lack of vision from the front office. Things looked to be on the up when we hired Sven to recruit but we can’t get our shit together as an organization.
Once again results are results, but play style is a different conversation. I don’t remember those matches personally, but do I believe Bolton coulda done us with some set pieces when they were down to 10 men. I guarantee they didn’t boss our midfield tho.
They fucking bossed our midfield and defence in europe though didnt they.
Don’t recall playing Bolton in Europe tbh.
Very good. But you do remember us winning a CL.
Yeah we won in 06. Remember we used to play such beautiful football under Wenger that we actually bossed Barcelona while we had 10 men instead of Watford bossing us with 10 men.
When did we boss Barcelona with 10 men ? The game we lost 3-1 but didn’t have a shot on target and only scored from a Barcelona Own goal ?
Or are you talking about the CL final ? I wouldn’t say we bossed them, but we held our own pretty well for the most part, although the match has become somewhat of a blur for me now.
I’d say we played beautiful football under Wenger in that 2007-2011 period but sadly didn’t win anything, I’d much prefer those days to life under Unai though.
Yeh CL final. First match I ever watched and I was amazed as someone who knew nothing about the sport at the way Arsenal shit on Barca with 10 men. Hleb was pretty good in that match, best player on the pitch by a mile. It’s why I’m an Arsenal fan. I could have easily opted to be a Barca fan but they didn’t impress me whatsoever, Arsenal had one less man and were clearly the better more impressive team. We won that match for all intents and purposes tbh 🖒
I went to that game 
We had a small chance of still winning the league had we held out for the win
Yeah that’s the kind of meltdown I was having in mind when saying that the knee-jerk to the end of this season has been overplayed as if it hasn’t been a regular occurrence for a long time. And that was in 2010 when we played the ‘beautiful’ Wengerball.
This was the league table after 31 games
Our remaining fixtures:
Birmingham A
Wolves H
Spurs A
Wigan A
City H
Blackburn A
Fulham H
And this is our form in those games
D W L L D L W
We also threw the Birmingham game away in the 90th minute too after going 1-0 up in the 81st minute.
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Ah back in the days we were at least capable of having a + 40 GD with 7 games remaining.
Yeah that season was a bad collapse, I was in London at the time also and had real hope we could win the league. We played some brilliant attacking football that season, just not good enough defensively.
Before big bossman Emery decided to leave his shit stain at the club.
Should prepare myself to see way less of this next season.
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Hilarious that ppl think we shoulda been winning anything of note with Chamakh leading the line and Almunia between the sticks 
You really should be thanking Wenger that he had these shoe string budget players even within touching distance of stacked Chelsea and United teams with unlimited budgets. It’s a minor miracle that we played such wonderful football and anyone would expect to even compete with those sides.
Edit: btw just watched the highlights of that WBA win, two Almunia howlers are the reason we lost. Ppl finally figuring out that the players are the issue now that Emery is here. Was apparent 10 years ago
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Chamakh wasn’t at the club in the 09/10 season.
There are two conversations here sorry. Chamakh was involved in the West Brom match being discussed, in 2010 in September.
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Yep. N’zogbia screamer from 25 yards, I remember it clearly
Why didn’t we ever sign the fucker?
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We were decimated when RVP, Nasri and Cesc went within 2 seasons and he had to change to get cheap players in that would provide end product like Gervinho, Podolski, Giroud so yes the football changed.
It’s a shame the board/gazidis/dick law didn’t go out there and do anything to get the players Wenger wanted. Because he did want Mata, Xabi Alonso, Suarez, Hazard, Gotze and Santi before we got him too. Not sealing the deal on elite players cost us immensely and in this day and age you don’t put all that blame on the manager. We only got Santi because Malaga were close to folding.
But in 13/14 we still played some very tastey football with Santi, Wilshere, Ramsey, Rosicky interchanging and we did in the season run ins when Rosicky was bossing it too.
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3 FA Cups and 3 Charity Shields though
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I think you’re right about the board not backing Wenger, unless it was his decision not to pay the extra to get too quality rather than barely adequate players.
Either way, not getting top level players was a false economy.
For the sake of just a few million, we lost out on, like you said, Mata, Hazard, Alonso, Suarez, Kante, etc and instead got mediocre players.
Not only did we lose out on trophies, it meant that when we came to sell these players, we would get very little money for them.
This is why it was a false economy, because we could have made money on all those players but the board we’re too tight fisted to spend the extra and we end up with a group of players that won’t win anything, that we can’t get rid of.
Wenger used to pride himself on being an expert in economics and in transfer dealings but I didn’t see much expertise in either, unless the decision to buy the players he wanted was overruled by the board.
This is the main reason we have a squad so lacking in quality and why we lost out on winning the PL title on a few occasions.
The board’s lack of ambition is obviously responsible for the mess we’re in.