By the end of the 5-1 Champions League capitulation there was an air of sadness, of a wonderful manager caught in the final stages of a long goodbyeThis was a strange, decelerating, ultimately rather sad occasion for a great club and a wonderful manager caught in the final stages of his own torturous long goodbye. Before kick-off a caravan of two hundred or so Arsenal supporters had staged a procession from Highbury to the Emirates in protest at Arsène Wenger’s continued employment, a kind of Jarrow march for the parochially enraged of north London. “We want you to go, we want you to go,” they sang on the streets outside the stadium. “No New Contract,” the signs read. Which, as...
Hull’s Harry Maguire is dreaming of England, Spurs are better placed than ever to best Arsène Wenger’s Arsenal and Aitor Karanka continues to divide opinionThe Dozen: the weekend’s best Premier League photos In a cartoon history of Arsenal’s ongoing run of springtime top-four escapology acts – the battle, above all, to stay ahead of Spurs – Arsène Wenger would probably be depicted right now wriggling furiously inside a sealed lead trunk, still rattling his padlocks but descending towards the seabed. Tottenham are six points ahead of Arsenal with 11 games to play, to Arsenal’s 12. Tighter spots have been negotiated. But as Spurs beat Everton to take their half of the weekend’s London-Merseyside derby exchange it was hard to avoid...
Arsène Wenger’s reaction to Sánchez’s behaviour was a halfway house that demonstrated Arsenal would be better off with a new managerEvery week seems to bring a new episode in the Arsène Wenger endgame. Calamitous results, the same old frailties, worn excuses and now it seems a training-ground row with Arsenal’s best player. Alexis Sánchez now looks very likely to leave the club after arguing with Wenger and his team-mates, a disagreement that led at least in part to his omission from the starting XI for the defeat at Liverpool on Saturday.This development really acts only as confirmation of what even the most amateur of body language experts may have suspected for a while. Sánchez has cut an increasingly irked figure...
The Arsenal manager shunned his usual approach against Liverpool to counter Jürgen Klopp’s pressing tactics but Sánchez’s pace could have been valuableIf this proves to be Arsène Wenger’s final season as Arsenal manager, the 3-1 defeat against Liverpool may be remembered as his most damaging loss. It would be a peculiarly unfitting finale, as the focus here was almost entirely upon Wenger’s shock decision to omit Alexis Sánchez, the Premier League’s top goalscorer and Arsenal’s most dangerous attacker. Wenger later claimed this was a decision made for purely tactical reasons, which would rank as the most atypical selection decision he has made during his two decades in charge of Arsenal.Wenger is not, in simple terms, a keen tactician. His basic...
Worried Premier League clubs could do worse than adopt Herbert Chapman’s 1926 suggestion to scrap transfers once the season starts – and to relegate half the divisionTen days ago Leicester City, fuelled by their sheer terror of the implications of the relegation they appeared to be hurtling towards, sacked the man who had led them to the greatest moment in their history nine months previously. As of the start of this weekend none of the top 14 clubs in the Premier League had changed their manager this season, but four of the bottom six had, one of them twice. There is a systemic problem here, and it is not a new one. Helpfully, one of the greatest English managers of...