Tony Adams wrote:DiamondGooner wrote:The funny thing is he started off okay, first season bar Crystal Palace onwards was actually half decent, we were looking good for top 4.
But then he started second guessing himself, he couldn't sort out the defence or get his 4-3-3 to work so he kept swapping with 3-4-3 to have 5 at the back to plug the holes, it worked most of the time and stabilized some results but then he never fully committed to it despite the better results, he kept trying to succeed with 4-3-3 even after the Utd battering etc.
The players were just confused.
Then came the 2nd season and it was just a mess from the off.
Torreria placed basically as CAM, Pepe frozen out, Ozil frozen out until Unai buckled in a panic due to results, made Xhaka captain when at the time most fans wanted him gone for his unreliable fk ups and basically being a liability, you don't make a liabilty your captain.
Then it was the 4 captains BS showing indecision, also allowing the players to vote on the captain rather than picking your own.
The 2nd season was a shambles.
I think it was the europa league run that killed it. It was like we stopped trying in the league cos we were so confident of winning it. Then we dropped off in the league meaning there was way too much pressure on us in the final and we bottled it!
We then went into the new season with the players no longer believing. It was right back to the doubts they had under Wenger.
Agree but I think there was a lot of luck in the first season as well in the PL. we didn’t deserve half the results we got and ironically played our best stuff in the competition we were so desperate to get out of.
The EL games were some of our best performances (Napoli, Valencia both legs, Rennes return game), people underestimated these teams and how big the results were. The same Napoli that couldn’t get a sniff against us, had the best team in Europe all over the show just 4 months later.
This season would have been very different if we had won the EL imo but eventually would’ve turned out as 4/5 wasted years with us still nowhere near the top and without a proper identity.