Former Arsenal midfielder Stewart Robson has, for the past five or six years, had the same message. It's earned him the name as a bit of a crank at times, and Arsenal fans are only too happy when they can prove him wrong. Robson's overarching point though, is that Arsene Wenger is the problem at Arsenal. He needs to go before the club can achieve any real success.
The main crux of his argument is that Arsenal are consistently bad at defending. He thinks players have it too easy at the club, and that's down to the manager who won't hold them accountable for poor play.
In 2016, he spoke to TalkSport after one particularly poor performance against Swansea.
You can’t keep looking at everything else, you have to look at yourself at some point. That is where, over the years, I have thought the manager’s been wrong. They don’t look at themselves.
We’ve heard it time and time again. In the end you have to look at yourselves: Why don’t we defend well enough, why do we keep making the same mistakes and we need more leadership in the team.
That’s been the same for the last seven, eight, nine years and it hasn’t been resurrected by the current manager.
From what I hear, Arsene Wenger doesn’t like confrontation, he wants to keep everybody happy.
You can’t work at a football club like that because you have to have confrontation, you have to leave people out, you have to criticise people when things aren’t going right.
He picks the team and puts the players out and I don’t think he really gets after the players when it's not happening.
He’ll have a moan to his coaching staff but he doesn’t confront the players and eventually the players have it too easy at Arsenal. They are given too many excuses and that’s been the case for the last six or seven years.
Whether Arsenal players are being confronted by their manager or not, there's no doubt that players make consistent mistakes and it just doesn't seem to change. Yesterday, in a shock 4-2 defeat to Nottingham Forest, they made the kind of mistake that's just inexplicable for professional footballers.
Here you see the Arsenal team setting an offside trap, despite two of their own players setting a wall about four yards closer to the line. Eric Lichaj couldn't believe his luck.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB5_20nEyEg
This is as bad as it gets really. They would go to lose 4-2 to a team without a manager who sit 14th in the Championship.
It's indefensible for any team, but it also shows how much Arsenal have changed under Wenger. When their previous (successful) manager George Graham was in charge, their offside trap was so famous, it was even used in The Full Monty.
You have to wonder if the manager will be happy confronting his players after another shambolic defensive performance, highlighted by this farce.
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