:hehe: Good man, Stan.
The easiest thing would have been to placate the fleeting, impulsive, toddler-esque demands of our fans rather than do the rational thing and deal with the subsequent flak :shrug:
Cue you telling me that wanting change for a decade isn't impulsive. Cue me rolling my eyes and saying something disproportionately offensive about you. And so on and so forth...
I understand your point but in this case I happen to disagree. There is no shortage of criticism but the supporters are hardly in open revolt, the Emirates is still sold out, there is a waiting list for season tickets etc. Wenger will always keep the team pretty competitive and he's incapable of looking at his players objectively so the turnaround in players and the knock on financial cost will always be low.
There is no downside to keeping Wenger beyond knowing that you won't challenge for the PL or CL and Kroenke clearly isn't bothered about that or he wouldn't have given him a 2 year extension.
The difficult thing in this case would have been to take a chance on a new manager, new approach to transfers, new style of play, knowing that it could go wrong but also that we might actually challenge for the PL/CL which is all that the supporters you so easily condemn really want.
The hardest thing for the board to do was see through the fog of fan disgruntlement and apply logic and reason to the question of whether or not Wenger was still the best man for the job.
You and I can both agree that this decision was informed by a safety-first approach. The point on which we disagree is not based on anything remotely quantitative, but rather our own individual (and entirely legitimate) inclinations.
Which is why so much of what is said about the board is totally ridiculous. The difference between their and your position is negligible.
True. It's not Kroenke's fault that we can't defend.
He's actually proved to be a model owner; keeps quiet and leaves the football to the football people. And we can't really insist that our owners be extremely wealthy and then complain that they are only interested in money, can we.
On another note, I see that identity politics has even crept into our AGMs. Some old hag with a few shares asked Sir Chips when the board is going to be more “diverse”.
He literally completely ignored her and moved onto the next question :clap:
Anyway, I’d say a board full of people who basically hate each other and - as we are led to believe - were split over whether to keep the manager is, by definition, pretty diverse, no?
:hehe:
We also had a vicar
Rev F Bone