So, according to pretty much all the media reports this morning, Arsene Wenger went ‘crazy’ at the players during a training ground meeting yesterday.

Having stewed overnight on what he’d seen against Milan, he gave them bollocking/rollocking/dressingdown type thing and, frankly, who can blame him? If he’d chased them around Benny Hill style trying to whack them with a very big stick it’d be hard not to say it was justified. He had plenty to be angry about.

The dismal display against Milan, as well as costing us a chance of a place in the next stage of the Champions League, reflected badly on the club as a whole. And in football when the club is under the spotlight then the manager is the one who takes the brunt of the blame. That is how it is, how it always has been, and always will be. It’s plaudits and praise when things go well, brickbats and broadsides when they don’t.

If Arsene felt let down by some of his players on Wednesday night then he has a right to be aggrieved. As I said yesterday it was the manner of the defeat which hurt far more than the defeat itself. Those players might not be the best Arsenal team we’ve seen during Wenger’s time at the club but they’re not as bad as that scoreline suggested, so I’ve got no problem whatsoever with the manager laying into them, making them accountable and demanding better.

Yet, there’s little point in him going mad at them without some introspection too. If the players were culpable then so was he. After all, these are his players, he bought them, he trains them, he sets them up for games, he picks the team and in hindsight he might consider the selection wrong. Oxlade-Chamberlain should have started for me, and the unceremonious way in which Theo Walcott was hooked at half-time suggests he knew it too, even if Henry was the one to replace him.

He didn’t pick his best team on Wednesday night, choosing an understandable but misguidedly conservative approach, when perhaps we don’t have the ability to be that subtle just yet. We had a rotten January and after only two good results sticking with what worked, for the most part, would actually have been the sensible approach. Not picking Oxlade-Chamberlain was the risky move and it backfired because it impacted on the way the team played.

Now, that’s not to say that if we’d played the young man all would have been well, hindsight is a marvellous gift to have when writing about football, but it just strikes me that it couldn’t have been much fucking worse, could it? He was, during the darkest moments of the last month, the obvious bright spark and while I can understand a reluctance to heap too much pressure on him, the fact is he is a player in form. He might have had a quiet game against Sunderland but he deserved a place in the side on merit rather than reputation, a quality Arsene seems overly fond of at times.

The other thing that worries me slightly about these kind of ‘hairdryer’ stories is how effective they are in the long-term. If it serves to re-focus the players ahead of tomorrow’s game, which while always important has now taken on huge significance, then that’s great. But you can’t do that every week, for every little thing. And I’m not sure it addresses the fundamental issue – why did the Milan performance happen in the first place?

You can get the whole gamut of opinion across this great web of hours. Players aren’t good enough, summer wasn’t good enough, manager’s past it, owner sits in his Colorado Castle twirling his ‘tache and seemingly doing little, club put profit before success on the pitch, lack of leadership from boardroom to dressing room, the ghost of Sylvester haunting us and so on.

Many of them have merit, there does seem to be a lack of direction. Nobody still quite knows what Stan is about, Arsene appears more and more isolated, there’s financial confusion, the lack of investment in the squad seemingly at odds with what the balance sheets tell us and when it comes to the football side of things, maybe we need more from Arsene than a meeting at which he lets off some steam in the direction of his shocked players.

Shouting and roaring, raving and ranting, will have an immediate impact. Unless the players really don’t give a shit – and I don’t think that’s the case – then they will do their best to respond. But soon enough the ranting and raving becomes easy to ignore and the key is solving the problem so that’s no longer neccessary. What is a more effective, long-term message: some shouting after a bad performance or, when the under-performers consistently under-perform, dropping them and ultimately replacing them in the team? Let them ply their capricious trade somewhere else and it certainly sends a message to the rest.

That requires something of a change in tack from the manager, yet who is there to stand up and give the club in general the bollocking it seems to need? Our issues are not confined to the pitch alone, what’s happening at the top is affecting what’s happening at the bottom, and while the manager and the players are the frontline it would be wrong to ignore the bigger picture. Unless we strive to improve everything about the way the club operates – from simple things like communication from the owner, to crucial issues like how we conduct our transfer business – then the training ground tirades will only go so far.

And that’ll be true under Arsene, under another manager and with new players. You can’t put a plaster over a wound which needs stitches and hope for the best. All we can do is keep fingers crossed that nights like Milan teach us lessons to ensure that nights like Milan don’t happen again.

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Right, time for this week’s Arsecast. Joining me to discuss Sunderland, Milan and the fall-out from that is Philippe Auclair. Also in the mix, Internet Joe, Amaury Bischoff PI and your chance to win an engraved Arseblog iPod (something to try and cheer people up).

You can subscribe to the Arsecast on iTunes by clicking here. Or if you want to subscribe directly to the feed URL you can do so too (this is a much better way to do it as you don’t experience the delays from iTunes). To download this week’s Arsecast directly – click here (22mb MP3) or you can listen directly below without leaving this very page.

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From what I gather there’s no pre-Sunderlad press conference, but news should drip out through the day. Follow it on Arseblog News (and follow Arseblog News on Twitter for instant notification of same).

We’ll have a proper look at that game in tomorrow’s blog. Have a good one.

Right then, after a week which has been dominated by two craggy faced managers (so much so that Fabio Capello was in my post-apocalyptic dream last night wearing a gigantic gold hooped earring), it’s time to turn our attention to the stuff that really matters.

Arsenal play Sunderland tomorrow and under Martin O’Neill they’ve been about 61 times better than they were under Mrs Doubtfire. O’Neill, however, is one of the most annoying people in football with his voice and his face and his hair and his eyes and his limbs and his torso and extremities and his tracksuit pants. Obviously though this game isn’t about how annoying Martin O’Neill is, not for Arsene Wenger and the Arsenal team anyway.

It’s about making sure that we pick up where we left off against Blackburn. The likelihood of another seven goal haul is pretty slim but we have to come away from New Roker Park with three points tomorrow. I fancy United to beat Liverpool, Chelsea are going to lose about 5-0 to Everton while the combined cuntery of Newcastle and Sp*rs will hopefully open up a vortex to another dimension where everything looks normal but food eats you.

So, bearing all that in mind, we’ve got to win the game and keep up the pressure for a top four finish. We know that our margin for error is more or less non-existent, so from that point of view there can’t be any lack of focus on our part. We know what we have to do, we know we’re going to have to play well to beat a Sunderland side who have been much improved, so let’s just get out there and do it.

In terms of team news, there are no new injuries, bar Frimpong’s cruciate but as he was on loan it doesn’t affect us directly, while according to the boss Chamakh and Gibbs are back in the mix:

Both are in contention to be in the squad, there is no reason anymore to keep them out. But I will have to decide that tomorrow. Chamakh is now at normal fitness and Gibbs is getting closer as well.

Yeah, I can think of a reason to keep Chamakh out too, you didn’t get there first, but maybe a return from the African Cup of African Nations in Africa playing for a Cup will somehow have transformed him back into the Chamakh that first arrived at the club. Maybe Dr O’Driscoll has been beavering away in the lab at the new medical centre and has invented a potion of pure confidence that he can inject straight into him to replace that which he has lost (yes, this does sound very similar to cocaine, I know).

But with Thierry Henry unlikely to be around for the Sp*rs game, and no possibility of anyone else coming into the squad until summer, I’d rather see the old Chamakh than the more recent version. We can but hope. Maybe he and Park can spark each other into life, hahahaha, urgh.

Meanwhile, the return of Gibbs means we’ve got a specialist left back for the first time since Olympiacos away. It means that the manager now has three centre-halves to choose from and that can only be a good thing. For most people it’s a case of who partners Thomas from Ireland (hat-tip WST Jr), but I guess, depending on the opposition, the manager can tailor his defence a bit more. Quite what he’ll do remains to be seen but it’s a good problem for him to have.

One man who won’t be involved this weekend, or next if we’re being honest, is Gervinho, who scored the goal to get the Ivory Coast to the final of the Cup of African Nations Cup of Nations of African Nations who drink from a Cup. Arsene Wenger believes it’ll do him good when he does get back to Arsenal via the traditional two week party (Kanu taught them well):

It was a cracking goal against Mali. Sometimes he rushes his decisions a little bit but I was very happy that he kept calm and finished in a very controlled way.

That’s great news for his confidence. He creates those dangerous situations but the coolness he misses a little bit. That can help him to do that.

I haven’t watched it but I just love the idea of Arsene Wenger saying ‘cracking goal’. Obviously an Ivory Coast win in the final means a happy Drogba, which is never good, but maybe we need to just live with that if a happy Gervinho produces more for us. I know he’s frustrating but he has produced a reasonable amount of assists/goals for someone still getting used to English football. He can certainly do better and hopefully he’ll be putting them on a plate for Chamakh and Park during the run-in, hahahaha, urgh.

Right then, that’s about all the news so it’s on with this week’s Arsecast. Joining me to discuss a much more pleasant week than those in recent times is Jim Campbell, comedian and co-presenter of the very excellent Football Ramble podcast. On the agenda, Blackburn, the Ox, Sunderland, Milan and more. Also in the mix Internet Joe while Arshavin takes some time off. Plus a t-shirt competition, what more could you want?

You can subscribe to the Arsecast on iTunes by clicking here. Or if you want to subscribe directly to the feed URL you can do so too (this is a much better way to do it as you don’t experience the delays from iTunes). To download this week’s Arsecast directly – click here (22mb MP3) or you can listen directly below without leaving this very page.

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Right, that’s that. Have a good Friday, the beers aren’t too far away now. Back tomorrow with more regular blogging. We should hear more from Arsene about tomorrow’s game, the team and everything else at his press conference later on, coverage of that to be found on Arseblog News throughout the day.

Bye for now.

“Not good enough.”

Three words used often by football fans to describe aspects of the club they support. They’re used in relation to certain players, performances, the manager, the board, the price of a pint and a pie, how their club handles various communications, pretty much anything they’ve got the hump with for one reason or another.

It’s rare enough that you hear from a manager or a player though. Yesterday Mikel Arteta said just that about this Arsenal team’s performance against Bolton. Speaking after the game, he said:

This result is not good enough. We have got the players and the quality to have a better result. It is going to be tough to finish in the top four but it depends on us.

And he was particularly scathing about the finishing:

You are not going to get 15 chances to win a football game and nowadays when you get it, especially away from home, you have to take it.

Therein lies the frustration for many. If we weren’t creating chances that’s one thing, but making them and missing them is another thing entirely. Per Mertesacker said much the same, but in a slightly more diplomatic fashion:

I think there is a lot of room for improvement. We have a very good side and good potential but we have to be good on the pitch. At the moment we don’t use all our opportunities.

The lack of efficiency must be driving him mad. But going back to Arteta, he’s right. ‘Not good enough’ sums things up right now. One win in our last six league games really can’t be considered anything other than abysmal for a team trying to get into the top four. And let’s be realistic about this – we know the gap to Chelsea is only four points right now, but it’s what we’ll need overall that needs to be looked at.

The points total of the team that finished 4th in the last four seasons were: 10-11: 68pts – 09-10: 70pts – 08-09: 72pts – 07-08: 76pts. Arsenal have 37 points with 15 games to go. Assuming it ends up around the 70 point mark again that means we’ve got to win a lot of games, and go on one hell of a run, between now and the end of the season.

It means that we can’t afford to spurn chances like we did against Bolton, it means we can’t concede silly goals like we did against Fulham or Swansea, it means that our margin for error, slim as it was to begin with because of our start to the season, is miniscule because of the way we channeled a traditional November into the month of January. Between now and the end of the season we’ve got Sp*rs, Newcastle, Man City and Chelsea all at home, plus Liverpool away.

We’ve played 12 league games away this season and lost 50% of them. Of our 15 remaining league games 7 are away from home. Which is to say that we need to see a huge improvement on what’s been served up thus far. And it’s not impossible by any means. We’ve seen Arsenal teams go on winning streaks and long unbeaten runs before, but we shouldn’t be blind to size of the task ahead of us this season. It is a firefight the likes of which we haven’t experienced for a long, long time. Even the lasagne season it just felt like we were destined for the top four despite it going to the final day, this time, not so much.

This is the team that Arsene built and sadly it’s been found wanting. Yet amidst talk of protests of sackcloth and ashes, I wanted to touch on one thing. For me, Arsene Wenger is absolutely and 100% open to criticism for the state of the team and the decisions he’s made. I doubt that anybody, whether they’re a fervent supporter of the manager or not, can be happy with the way things are going.

What he does not deserve is some of the abuse that’s leveled at him. I know things are amplified online and some people say things via a keyboard they’d never let pass their lips, but I personally find it a bit disheartening to hear Arsenal fans refer to the manager in a manner that ought to be reserved for those in N17, for not racist at all, oh no, England captains, for duplicitous former players who shack up with Ruble spunking enemies, helium voiced ‘pundits’, Tony Pubis, Lennie and his Legbreakers, the sunburnt, withered, jaundiced testicle at Villa, Joey Barton’s thesaurus powered online acumen and the countless others in the world of football and beyond who really deserve it.

There’s plenty to criticise him for: player sales, player purchases, the teams defensive weaknesses, his stubborn intransigence which seems to be fueled by his desire to do the opposite of what people want him to do, his substitutions, his patience with certain players, his unwillingness to give others a chance, his tactical inflexibility, and more than anything else, the results we’ve seen this season and in recent seasons.

Pick and choose any one of them, pick all of them if you want, and go to town, because they are decisions and actions that deserve analysis, criticism and for which Arsene should be accountable. And yes, all of these things add to the sense that a lot of people have that all is not right at the club at the moment. From top to bottom it feels like something’s missing. As the man in charge of the football, Arsene is on the front line.

Yet once you let anger and frustration spill over into abuse you lose something from your argument. “Arsene’s recent purchases have been poor” would surely spark reasonable debate between fans, even if they were coming at it from different sides. “Arsene’s recent purchases have been poor, the fucking cunt” will ensure that the debate isn’t about the recent purchases, it’s about whether or not the manager is a cunt, and ultimately it gets us nowhere. There’s nothing constructive about it and it only ends up causing more anger and argument.

I’ve long said that I can’t stand the polarisation of our fan base. There is no ‘You’re either with us or against us’. We are the us. The vast majority of people are quite aware this is a team with problems, it’s how they choose to express their concern that pushes people to one end or the other. Criticism and disapproval are necessary if we want to make things better. It can be helpful and productive. Abuse, on the other hand, rarely provokes a positive reaction and if people really want things to get better for this football club then I hope they bear that in mind.

Rant over. Now, onto this week’s Arsecast in which I’m joined by Goonerholic and Hayley Wright to discuss the week that was. On the agenda the transfer window, Villa, Bolton and more. Also in there the t-shirt competition, an old friend returns and we have a confused PI.

You can subscribe to the Arsecast on iTunes by clicking here. Or if you want to subscribe directly to the feed URL you can do so too (this is a much better way to do it as you don’t experience the delays from iTunes). To download this week’s Arsecast directly – click here (24mb MP3) or you can listen directly below without leaving this very page.

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And that’s about that. We’ll have news throughout the day, and from Arsene’s press conference, over on Arseblog News.

Back with a full preview of the Blackburn game tomorrow.

Later this morning Arsene will meet the press for his pre-Aston Villa press conference. And beyond the normal information we get from one of these gatherings, I have to say I’m really curious as to how it will go down.

It’ll be the first time he’s faced the media since Sunday’s defeat to United and that reaction to his decision to take off Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain. He can’t not have been affected by it. I know when you’ve been at the top of the game for as long as he has you need to develop something of a thick skin, but you’d need to have a hide like a double-elephant for that to bounce off you.

And while I’m pretty sure that’s going to be a major talking point for the ladies and gentlemen of the fourth estate – as it has been for Arsenal fans all week long – I hope that doesn’t become the focus because for me it clouds the real issue. While we rant and rave / discuss sensibly and with decorum the decision it changes little. It was one moment in a game in which we had chances to score, it might well have had a bearing on the winning goal and I’ll have to take slight issue with those who say it was tactical genius by Ferguson to bring on Park.

He might well be quick-thinking and astute but it he didn’t look at The Ox coming off and make a decision based on that. The reason he made the change was because Rosicky kicked Nani up in the air and the shit Michael Jackson got injured and had to come off. That their goal came down our right hand side and had some Arshavin involvement wasn’t a surprise but nor was it anything other than decent play by Valencia.

Update: I’m a bit wrong about that sub, oh well, it wasn’t important anyway!

If the decision by Arsene was one he got wrong, then he got it wrong. People let him know they thought he got it wrong. Fair enough. It happens. And it’s always struck me as a bit over the top when a manager chucks a player on who then scores to hear that decision described as ‘inspired’. What about all the times he throws on players who contribute nothing? Anyway, here I am talking about the substitutiuon again because it’s easy to talk about it and not so easy to talk about the bigger issue.

Which is that Arsenal have gone through January without picking up a single league point. I know there have only been three games but isn’t that far more worthy of debate that one single moment in a match, however momentus it felt at the time (because of the reaction more than the decision itself, let’s face it)? I’d much rather hear what Arsene has to say about our current run of form, how we’ve lost league points and how the lack of a left back has contributed to that despite him saying it would be ‘stupid’ to lose points due to a player shortage in that area.

I’d like to hear why it is that when we’ve had a pressing need for players, not just at the back either, a club with the resources of Arsenal could only bring back a 34 year Thierry Henry on loan. I know people are quick to blame the manager – and he is far, far from blameless – but I can’t believe Arsene looks at that squad and doesn’t want another striker.

I can understand his reluctance when it comes to full backs, we’ve been over the difficulties of getting a decent player on loan or having a bloated squad when players are fit again, but Arsene loves strikers. He loves forwards in general. He’s collected them and hoarded them throughout his Arsenal career and now, at the most challenging time in that career, he’s got one striker he trusts and knows he can count on. One.

Look, maybe he’s gone a bit bonkers and, like a starving Scooby-Doo who sees a gigantic sandwich when he looks at Shaggy, he sees Romario and Gerd Muller when he looks at Park and Chamakh. But maybe, just maybe, there’s more to it than that. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility, is it? And that’s not to make excuses for him, only to try and find some explanation as to why a manager, for whom scoring goals has always been more important than defending them, has allowed his squad and his team to become so goal shy.

That said, unless there’s some extraordinary circumstances Arsene will always be loyal and protect the image of the club, the same way he protects the players, but it’s still a question worth asking, in my opinion. And while we can sit here and look at the January transfer window and think of a wide variety of reasons why no signings have been made (its January, players won’t move ahead of Euros, summer targets etc etc), there’s one very simple and very good reason as to why signings could and should have been made: it’d make us a stronger team for what remains of this season.

Arsene is the one in the firing line, we know he makes all the decisions regarding football, but a question worth asking is if the manager and the board are working in tandem, in perfect harmony. That’s not to suggest there’s any massive problem but the summer illustrated our shortcomings in relation to transfers and how we manage our squad. We hoped that lessons would be learned, that it would makes us better and more efficient, but maybe those issues remain. It’s all conjecture, I realise, but I think these are areas worth exploring, at least.

In today’s Arsecast, Amy Lawrence joins me to discus the week that was. Obviously the Ox/Arsh incident is high on the agenda, and how that might have changed the relationship between manager and fans, but Amy also asks why, during a difficult time, we’ve heard nothing from up above, nothing from Stan Kroenke and whether or we ought to expect from him.

You can subscribe to the Arsecast on iTunes by clicking here. Or if you want to subscribe directly to the feed URL you can do so too (this is a much better way to do it as you don’t experience the delays from iTunes). To download this week’s Arsecast directly – click here (23mb MP3) or you can listen directly below without leaving this very page.

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And finally, in brief, some good news as Bacary Sagna returned to full training yesterday, and if you haven’t seen it already, after Harry Redknapp’s admission he can barely read or write at his trial, we have an exclusive copy of Sp*rs team sheet from last weekend.

Right, press conference news and more throughout the day on Arseblog News. Back tomorrow.