Isn’t Theo leaving second worst?
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Nah he was damaged good with the knee and we got a lot of money for him. Losing Wenger and Sven doomed us to a much worse fate.
Strong cases to make for Newcastle 4-4, sale of RvP, but gotta be Emery’s arrival. That was just too much…insult to injury. In picture form it was like one of these mafia beatings you see in the Sopranos or a Scorsese film, well it was the part where the guys already on the ground and fucked and they proceed to beat the shit out of his face or break his arm or whatever.
The fact there are so many lows shows what a shite decade it’s been for the club.
Fucking hell, so depressing.
I’ll go with selling RvP. Demonstrated so clearly what our level was (and continues to be) when a player left us in such a savage manner, and then proved his point by winning the league straight away.
It hurt not only because we lost our captain and talisman, but because we all knew he had to leave because he was gonna achieve nothing with us.
Brutally laid bare what a pathetic club we had become.
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United was going to contend for the title with or without RvP. I think it is overestimated how important that moment was for them or for us for that matter. They won the League in 10/11, got equal points with City in 11/12. At that point Arsenal had been losing key players like it was nothing anyway (Hleb, Ade, Cesc, Nasri etc). RvP was just next in line.
I think the 6-0 was the most difficult moment. Chelsea was one of the reasons of the demise of Arsenal pre-2006, Mourinho, 1000th game of Wenger. Fuck. Awful moment.
Voted for the Birmingham loss, not because it was the biggest gutpunch at the moment but because it was such an inflection point. We were four points off the top in the league, on the cusp of breaking the trophyless streak, had just beaten Barca at home in the CL in that thrilling 2-1 match, and then everything totally went to shit, dashing the entire project of building a team around Cesc/RVP and other young talent and ushering in the true banter years.
Would things have been different had we won the cup and gotten that confidence boost from doing so? I can’t say for sure but they sure fell apart quickly when we didn’t.
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Problem with this is, all the problems we have had in this decade originate from the last decade. There have definitely been points were could of made changes that would of seen us reverse our fortunes but unfortunately our fates were sealed after we failed to capitalise on the champions league in 2004, in the final of 2006 and the February 2008 capitulation in the league. The second half of the naughties was the start of our downward spiral.
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I think the significance of the league cup final defeat to Birmingham has been airbrushed out of our history a little bit. At the time, in the midst of that long trophy drought, it was absolutely crushing. It absolutely killed that season (as I recall we hardly won a game from then to the end of the season). I think it was absolutely instrumental in our losing Fabregas too. More than that it really darkened the mood around the club and did as much, I think, to damage our standing and our prestige both in the minds of ourselves and those outside the club as the 8-2 loss to United.
If you’re looking for a moment that set us up as complete chokers on the big stage, this was it.
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So many excellent justifications for different worst moments, I read one and think, “yup, you’ve nailed it, worst moment for sure” until someone else comes along with their perspective on it.
I honestly can’t call it.
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The Newcastle debacle preceded this final with about 3 weeks, so if there’d be a starting point to our momentous break-down that season, it’d be the visit to St. James’s. But yeah, I had actually forgotten that on top of throwing away the league after that result we also managed to throw away a cup final against fucking Birmingham too. Thanks for the reminder.
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We also forgot Luca getting permanently banned from OA (April 2019)
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Ornstein moving from the BBC to The Athletic.
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8-2 was the one that made me not want to show my face anywhere.
And the one that first made me acknowledge that Arsenal are actually shit, and only Arsenal could lose in that manner.
I still supported Wenger after that, but really could never look at him the same again.
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8-2 definitely felt very embarrassing but with retrospect it was definitely not the worst Arsenal moment if it means that the moment made a significant impact on the club future.
The impact of 8-2 was compounded by the dire transfer window in which we lost Fabregas & Nasri and that the opponent was United.
But we finished 3rd that season. There was no tangible impact of that loss on our season or upcoming seasons.
I agree with @Leper that the league cup loss led to not just (well) losing the league cup but it also trickled down to league & champions league. We were on a roll that season and if we had won the league cup, it would have motivated the squad. However, the loss sapped away all the confidence out of the team as well as the fans.
Fabregas, Sagna, Persie perhaps realized at that moment that it will not gonna happen with Arsenal for them.
By selling RVP, we became the only top club to sell our best player, as well as the best striker in the PL, to a direct rival.
But worse than that, we replaced him with Giroud and pocketed the rest of the money.
This really showed what sort of club we had become.
Our top players wanted to leave every season because of a lack of investment by the club and selling RVP was a perfect illustration of what we had become.
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Torres a season before
That’s true but they got almost a world record fee for him and have not done so bad since.
They also didn’t do it every season.
Liverpool sell big and buy big, or bigger.
We sell and buy small, or nothing.
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Exactly.
Arsenal selling players is not the issue. It’s not reinvesting that money back into the squad that harms us.
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Torres was past it when Chelsea signed him. RvP was in the peak of his career
I keep reading directly rival but we were not title contenders and United were. By the point we sold RVP we were not in the same topic of conversation as City, Chelsea and United.
It hurt that we sold RVP to a team who were once our fiercest title rivals. But we weren’t title rivals at the time that’s for sure.
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