No I said that was the final straw. There’s a number of reasons he should be sacked. His choice of captain being one. His inability to find a settled and balanced midfield. A lack of any kind of philosophy in our approach. A defense as bad (if not worse) than the one Wenger left him with. His negative approach in general.
He had a clear philosophy when he arrived, we were going to play a high line and press to get the ball back as quickly as possible. And as I recall it resulted in a 20 some game undefeated run, not sure I remember very many people calling for his head then and all of the Unai haters were strangely quiet. You couldn't find AFC East for the life of you back then.
I'm guessing that the back four injuries put that to rest and he tried 3 at the back etc etc and it all went a bit wrong after that. He still doesn't have his first choice back four (I would argue he has only one of them) and he's trying to play younger players as the dross he was left by Wenger simply isn't good enough and as a result there are going to be issues with continuity, team selection etc as he tries to get it right.
But the main point is that I don't want to be Chelsea, we should be bigger than a club that chops and changes every time it starts to go wrong. All Arsenal managers deserve 2-3 years at least to prove themselves and then if it doesn't work we move on. I strongly expect that people like AFC East were calling for Wenger's head in 2001 and lambasted him for fielding a team without any English players because it went against the traditions blah, blah, blah.
Ferguson was almost sacked early on at Man Utd, Wenger received no shortage of criticism in 2000/2001 - and as I said, let's remember we improved marginally last year and are currently fourth, ahead of Tottenham and Chelsea.
Bruce Rioch got us back up to 4th. He'd left the back 5/6 alone, and been happy to work with the added creativity that DB10 and Platt brought, while having a top form IWWW, Parlour and Merse.
We were basically a top CM and goal-scoring winger away from a title challenge. But we fücked him out the door so we could get AW.
Luiz is a carthorse who has made Papa Sok worse. Torreira would have been fine for AW, esp with Rambo and Ozil, but Dick doesn't like him cos he's too small.
Pepe's taking up a space which, had he not cost a fortune, would be to Saka or Nelson. If Xhaka can't defend, why play him not Ozil?
Ceballos's spot could go to Willock or AMN. What worries me most is that if we had a better manager, he'd get more out of what looks like a great generation of kids.
Northern Monkey ... who can't upload a bleeding Avatar
I'm just saying that Saka, Nelson, Willock, Smith-Rowe and AMN given a chance in MF (now we've HB coming back, Chambers showing he can play there and AMN having learnt the skills to beat a man and make goals out wide after his experience at FB) would learn to play better football under a better coach.
If we'd been playing Torreira at DM with Willock further forward, Willock would have scored that one Torreira put over. He's got a bit of the Rambos/Freddies about him in the way he arrives late into space in the box.
We need MF creativity, but Xhaka can't play defensively, Torreira's not an 8/10, we let Rambo leave and dropped Ozil despite the fact he's no worse defensively than Xhaka, who we've made captain.
Pepe so far doesn't look any better than Saka or Nelson and Willock could be a top level MF. But I'm biased. I just don't like Dick for replacing AW.