Let the results do the talking

There has been a lot of interesting talk in the last few days and I think a few of us are seeing things far clearer than we were, say, a week or two back. The reaction to my recent post on some of the disproportionate and unproductive attacks on the manager was interesting, a lot of comments made some very sensible and reasonable points that I agreed with.

It is good to see the manager coming up with some fighting talk and I can't disagree with Arseblogger's calm and measured take on Arsene's banter, elsewhere one can see that some people are just still a bit angry to say anything sensible or useful on these matters. One excellent point made by the manager is the amazingly biased and subjective way in which the media analyses all this stuff:

"Do you judge this season or the last four seasons? Some of the clubs behind us have done nothing for 20 years, yet suddenly they get a lot of praise."

I agree with Arsene on this, some clubs, mentioning no names, definitely not that excellent and honourable club that was spanked 4-0 by a rather average Madrid side in midweek, seem to get a ridiculously positive response from the media despite their relative lack of achievement. The bias of the media is there for all to see in this regard, generally the media are always looking to stick the knife into Arsenal, and many other clubs seem completely immune to this kind of behaviour, strange that.

If all our players had the fight and commitment of Arsene then we would not have thrown the points away recently that we have done, if results do not start to improve before the season ends then the manager simply has to take note of what has happened, papering over the cracks again would not be productive in any case.

I have concluded that Arsene has simply got the balance of his squad wrong, the odd individual has also not pulled his weight, this is true, but largely our problems stem from a more systemic malaise than can only be addressed by some fairly substantial ideological changes in the summer. We have lost that balance between pace, creativity, flair and steel that won us so many trophies in Arsene's early reign, we have become too obsessed with the technical and forgotten just how important physical fight and bite can be in grinding out results when one is not playing well. We also do not have quite as much killer pace, we no longer sting on the counter quite as dangerously as we used to.

We simply had to beat Blackpool tomorrow to have any chance at all of staying in the title race, injuries see us left rather short in certain areas, again I may add. There is some good news in that Szczesny and Djourou are very close to returning to training, the bad news is that Walcott, Sagna and Song may all miss out thanks to various ailments. Frankly I am starting to get bored with the talk, it is the outcome of events on the pitch that matter.

It is a bit of a chicken and the egg scenario, but repeatedly being close and not quite doing it cannot be simply down to bad luck, when it becomes a recurrent phenomenon it then defines you as not being winners, as not being quite up to it, and there does come a point when enough is enough, and substantive changes then become a necessity. If the players cannot break the current vicious cycle of being nearly men then it becomes essential that decent changes to the playing staff are brought about to reverse this trend.