Re: What's with the adulation of George Graham?
Posted: Thu May 21, 2020 8:58 am
Started supporting Arsenal after Italia 90 too, that 90-91 Arsenal team was unbelievable, great defensively, bags of flair and scored goals for fun, they were really exciting. In his latter years we weren't always the prettiest to watch but what we had is real grit, we could upset the odds and beat superior teams and you knew we always had a chance of doing so, he kept winning trophies as well, including the cup double (we did end up midtable in the leauge but we pretty much focussed on the cup and let the league slide that season as we didn't have the squad to compete for all of them) and that great Cup Winners Cup.
He never had much of a budget to buy players either but made some good signings, Stefan Schwarz was great IMO and very underrated.
As for Wenger, let's be honest it was amazing in the first few years, great football, some amazing wins and trophies but from the time he decided to ditch his winning formula and players like Vieira and Henry it became awful. The football was boring and repetitive and pretty, we were weak and easy to bully on the pitch and he seemed to get obssesed with playing midfielders in every position.
Defensively, he really got found out, the thrashings we took fairly regularly were unbelievable, including that humiliation against Chelsea in his 1000th game, in Grahams time I think we only lost one game by any kind of scoreline like that, against Man U in the league cup that I can remember, with Wenger it became something we came to expect. In the end the quality of the squad became pretty low, but we had a huge wagebill of players with no hunger, fight or desire to win and that's where we are still today, there's very little quality and it seems that we now have a manager who seems keen to stick with a lot of these guys who are just not good enough and whose measuring stick is a time when Wenger was failing.
He never had much of a budget to buy players either but made some good signings, Stefan Schwarz was great IMO and very underrated.
As for Wenger, let's be honest it was amazing in the first few years, great football, some amazing wins and trophies but from the time he decided to ditch his winning formula and players like Vieira and Henry it became awful. The football was boring and repetitive and pretty, we were weak and easy to bully on the pitch and he seemed to get obssesed with playing midfielders in every position.
Defensively, he really got found out, the thrashings we took fairly regularly were unbelievable, including that humiliation against Chelsea in his 1000th game, in Grahams time I think we only lost one game by any kind of scoreline like that, against Man U in the league cup that I can remember, with Wenger it became something we came to expect. In the end the quality of the squad became pretty low, but we had a huge wagebill of players with no hunger, fight or desire to win and that's where we are still today, there's very little quality and it seems that we now have a manager who seems keen to stick with a lot of these guys who are just not good enough and whose measuring stick is a time when Wenger was failing.