Morning. Hope your Wednesday was better than it started and today is better than yesterday. Football certainly hasn’t helped of late, so I’ve been engaging in other activities, like watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and pretending I was seven again. I’ll ignore the fact the movie was terrible. It brought me back to my childhood.
As for terrible, perhaps we can speak once again about officials who let’s be honest, should be investigated after ‘history’ was made by Barca last night. Heh, history with a helping hand, more like. When even the BBC news at Ten presenter is raising his eyebrows over ‘questionable’ decisions you know there’s something dodgy going on.
Still, I was watching TMNT so I didn’t have to suffer the rage of seeing UEFA manipulate another route to the final with the bigger teams in Europe.
What I did see though, was that the Ox supposedly still hasn’t signed a new deal and is looking at a potential exit in the summer. He’s been one of the bright sparks of late and I like what I see in central midfield from him, but I’ll not pretend to you that a mass exodus from a host of players isn’t something that I’ve wondered might be good for the club rather than bad. If we do get what we’re all hoping for and Arsène exits at the end of the season, then a new man will want to bring in some new blood. Our squad is already big enough, so you can’t see too many new bodies being brought in unless there are some exits.
Personally the Ox, Özil and Alexis wouldn’t exactly be first on my list though, because each of them has the talent that you wonder what a new guy could do with them if he had the chance. No, I’d probably be looking at the back and in midfield for some departures first, like Big Per, Debuchy, Coquelin, for a start. There’s probably a bit of ruthlessness to be had with Gibbs, Cech, Jenkinson, Ramsey, Giroud and Walcott too, so if there needs to be a new broom to sweep some of the old mentality from the old regime away, I’d be all for it. I don’t have anything against some of the players towards the end of that list, I just think that the club needs a big step-change. Maybe that’s the change that needs to happen.
You can’t keep hearing the same things from players like Theo, saying that the players need to take it upon themselves to react and not let the manager be the lightning rod, which let’s face it he is. I think it’s time he moved on, but he seems to bare the brunt of the criticism, yet some of the players have been terrible this season. Players like Theo are a classic example of why we probably need some kind of root and branch change at the club. Theo sounds like a great guy, he gets us goals, but I just wonder if he’s symptomatic of the malaise at Arsenal. You only have to look at how his season started, then how it petered away, to see why as a team Arsenal are nowhere near competing for top honours.
If mass change does occur in management and on the pitch, it might just be a rocky old road for us next season, but personally I’m ready for it. I’m ready for the bad – or the very good – so at this moment in time it just feels like we’re on hold until the end of the season. This season is fast becoming just a distraction to what needs to happen in the summer, which is ridiculous, because it’s the football on the pitch that we all watch and feel passionately for. But this season the excitement has ground to such a halt, that most of us just want it over.
More tomorrow ahead of the FA Cup quarter final.
Laters peeps.
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