Tag Archives: Arsène Wenger

When wanting Wenger Out turns nasty

27 Replies

The majority reading this will want Arsene Wenger to go. Some will say they have wanted him out for years, others merely weeks. Some define their football “lives” by wanting him to go, classing themselves as WOBs, others just feel he is not the right man for the club, but will happily celebrate the success.

Over the years, I have never had an issue with people wanting Wenger to leave or stay. Both sides of the centralist position have valid arguments.

Some people “boycott whilst he is still in charge”, others never actually went to games previously and pretend to boycott just so that they can make a point. One clown even declared this summer that he was boycotting, and has then been to every game this season. Odd.

You are entitled to support (or not support) the team how you feel. But up to a point. There are some things that I feel are frankly disgraceful:

1. Wanting Arsenal to fail – It is Arsenal FC, not Arsene FC. You should want the team to win, no matter your view on the manager. People say they want Arsenal out as he will not win us the league, then also say that they would hate us to win the league as they do not want him to stay. You can not have it both ways.

If you found yourself cheering the Bournemouth winning, delighted that Nottingham Forest beat us, or hoping that we lose every game, then you are not an Arsenal supporter. You just have an anti-Arsene agenda.

Support the team, not the regime.

2. Wanting Wenger to become ill – Everyone has had someone affected by cancer. It is not nice to watch a loved one contracted the killer disease, and then their lives slowly deteriorate. There are people out their wishing that Arsene Wenger gets cancer, or other terminal illnesses like AIDs.

Wenger is a father, an (ex) husband. It is not big, nor clever to do this. In fact, it is down right disgusting, vile behaviour.

3. Comparing Wenger to murderous dictators – I have seen people compare Wenger to the likes of Adolf Hitler and Robert Mugabe. These are men who have killed millions for no reason then they were “different” to themselves. Comparing Wenger, a football manager, to people that have committed genocide. OK.

4. Wanting Wenger to die – Alongside the illness, people want Wenger to die. This is just odd, that they want to see Wenger in a coffin.

Again, he is a father to a teenage daughter. Wanting him to die, because you are annoyed we lost to Bournemouth. Yeh. Alright then.

5. Calling Wenger a “kiddie fiddler” – The lowest of the low. Spurs fans have spent years calling Arsene Wenger a paedophile. Punches have been thrown over this. And now some fans have started to call him a nonce, a kiddie fiddler, all because we finished 5th.

That highlights how classless some of our fans are. Calling a manager a child sex offender, all because you are upset that we are not challenging for the league.

I do feel for the fans who go down this route. They must live truly sad, insignificant lives. Karma will catch up with them.

Calling for any of the above is just attention seeking. It is for a few RTs, follows or likes on a Facebook page. For me, if you do any of the above, you are not only a sub-par Arsenal fan, you are a sub-par human being.

By all means, want Wenger Out. Demand him to go. Protest against him. But as soon as you begin wishing cancer on him, or calling him a kiddie fiddler, you lose a lot of validity, and a lot of backing.

The last protest against Arsene Wenger was marred by a fake video going viral of fans singing that they wished Wenger was dead. This devalued any sort of message from the protest.

Demand Wenger Out, but keep it classy guys.

Keenos

We need to reclaim our Arsenal back

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Football fans generally have two emotions, elation or agony.  Those are certainly the two I remember from being a young girl standing on the terraces.

If someone had said to me 30 years ago, ‘one day you won’t  feel as though you belong or you will despise the club’ I would have argued with them all day long. How could I not love everything Arsenal??

The Arsenal were my love. It’s where I belonged and where I made my best friends and memories.

The football didn’t really matter. If we lost we felt disappointment, I don’t remember coming away feeling angry. Maybe some anger at a referee, or anger at opposing fans, but not anger at my club. We looked forward to the next game. Someone would get it if we had lost.

Half time we might sing ‘Georgie, sort em out’, we knew he would, George knew.

Fast forward to 2018.

Blue shirt, Cannon facing the wrong way, inept performances, a chairman who treats us with disdain and excuses that run out of every pore of the club.

Fans who treat us a hobby not as a cause, and the fever pitch fans who got involved when football became fashionable.  None of us wanted it to be fashionable.  We liked it that no one liked football. We were looked down upon by the rest of society.

Now we sing to our manager ‘Spend some fu**ing money’ or ‘Get out of our club’.

We now stand where we’ve been told to sit down, hoping the stewards won’t tell us to sit.

We have no idea who will be sitting next to us from week to week, we don’t know the stewards name, we boycott the shop, we’ve stopped buying programmes and when we concede we accept it. We are becoming as passive as those who run our club. I’ve not seen much anger this year.

It’s been like watching a social experiment, how to silence the masses.

We clap poor performances and have been brainwashed to ‘get behind the boys’ at all costs.

We hear more and more ‘there is no point in protesting, there is no point in making a noise’. We buy tickets to games we have no intention of going to…… and we all just wait. We wait for the day it’s going to change.

Earlier on this season I wrote a blog about when anger turns to apathy…..the signs were all there.

Friends whose lives revolve around their job of following the club, started to talk about giving it all up.

So, why do we bother? We bother because we remember. We remember what it was. We bother because without bothering, we wouldn’t ever sit in a pub again and talk about those great days we’ve had with the only people in the world that understand.   Choosing not to go is a huge decision, only a few will really understand that. We are scared of not being part of the new dawn that can’t be far away. We are scared of throwing away a huge chunk of our lives.

The club have become unrecognisable to me. We write and they ignore us, we protest and they wash over it in press conferences. But, we did start to get to them, we were being heard even if they wouldn’t admit it.

I’m not sure those great days will ever come back, but to a certain extent that is up to us.  We have to continue to force change. We mustn’t mirror the apathy on the pitch.  We need to reclaim our place as football fans…. followers of The Arsenal.

It’s our club, it’s still our name on the badge. Anyone who is thinking about bowing out, do so with knowing you have made as much noise as possible before you say goodbye.

JD

Struggling to find any positives

1 Reply

I see myself as a fairly positive character. I try not to get things get me down, especially things out of my control. I feel sorry for the Arsenal fans that live in such a negative world that they spend nearly every hour, from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to sleep, spouting negativity on social media.

We all know the people. 100 tweets a day, all negative. They run Facebook groups where, after a defeat, they post anti-Arsenal 50 meme’s. They clearly get no enjoyment from football, or their only enjoyment they get is being negative.

It is easy to slip into this world of negativity. As negativity breeds more negativity and you tend to surround yourselves with people with similar negative views. It must be very depressing to be one of these people. Constantly walking around being negative.

I might get criticised for it, but I prefer to stay positive. Always looking on the bright side. Trying to find the good in people. It is better to live your life this way then have the negative outlook that some have.

But with Arsenal at the moment, it is very hard to find the positives.

Another predictable defeat against Bournemouth sees the gap open up between Arsenal in 6th and the top 4 futher.

It has been hard to remain positive as an away this season – just 3 wins in 12 away games in the Premier League. With no wins in the League Cup or FA Cup, and just the single win against BATE Borisov in Europe makes it 4 wins on the road for Arsenal.

We are now on a run of just 1 win in the last 6 – a post Christmas victory against Crystal Palace. It is easy to get down.

I read somewhere that Arsenal have been awful since beating Chelsea in the FA Cup. And it is hard to argue against this:

  •          Arsene Wenger signing a new contract
  •          Alexis Sanchez not signing a new contract
  •          Mesut Ozil not signing a new contract
  •          Just 2 senior players signed
  •          A profit on transfers in the summer
  •          2 defeats in the opening 3 games
  •          No away win until 22 October 2017
  •          1 away win in our first 6 away games
  •          Limp performances in the Europa League
  •          Including losing to a bottom of the league Koln – who had one a single game all season
  •          Sir Chips Keswick showing disregard to fans
  •          2 wins in the last 9 Premier League games
  •          Knocked out of the FA Cup at the 3rd round stage
  •          23 points off top (just 22 points off bottom)
  •          8 points off the top 4
  •          Sanchez set to leave
  •          Ozil still not signed a new contract
  •          Jack Wilshere not signed a new contract
  •          Players being sold for below market value
  •          No players being signed

I could go on but then I am on the verge of entering the spiral of negativity that I am trying to void.

Arsenal is not a happy place at the moment.

It is not enjoyable going to games, and even less enjoyable speaking to people at Arsenal.

In my office, I have Spurs and Liverpool fans trying to “banter” me, ignoring the fact that their clubs are no better than us – neither winning anything bar a couple of League Cups in the last decade. Finishing above us once in 20 years does not over turn 2 decades of failure! But it is hard to argue against them.

So what positives can I cling on to?

  •          We are still in the League Cup
  •          We are still in the Europa League

A trophy will not make up for how poor we have been this season, how badly mismanaged we are, from Wenger to Ivan Gazidis to the board, but it will be a minor success.

I guess the only positive I have to cling to is that even in our barren years, we are still more successful then that lot up the road. And whilst we have had a poor couple of years, Spurs have had a poor 3 decades.

So my positive for the day, at least I am not a Spurs fan.

Have a good week, and don’t let football get you down. It really isn’t worth it.

Keenos