Arteta is a poor Brendan Rodgers. For Arsenal to improve , they’d need to sack him and get someone who doesn’t lose his marbles at the slightest sign of a fight.
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Liverpool had to play near perfect football to be even in with touching distance of city. And yeah , we did get screwed over but that’s how consistent any team has to be , day in and day out , when facing the financially doped drug cheats.
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Drawing at Liverpool per se wasn’t a bad result(on paper) any team would have taken that. But the way they imploded at half time after behaving like utter twats left scars on them.
If they couldn’t face upto Liverpool in the second half , they had no biz winning the league. That’s when their confidence took a big hit.
Not being able to dispose of a patchy Liverpool team (and this season has been just that)
We bottled the league with Rodgers. No one denies that. We had a lighter team than this current Arsenal team.
If that’s bottling up , so is this.
I do. I don’t accept we bottled it then, and I don’t accept Arsenal bottled it this season.
I agree with @Limiescouse’s points he made above as to why they may fail to land the title this season (as it is looking likely they will).
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We bottled it against Chelsea and we bottled it against crystal palace trying to go the extra mile.
Plus games earlier where Brendan’s tactic naivete (which klopp would never have done) got exposed.
That team has given me a lot of joy , but to say there weren’t games which we didn’t bottle it ?
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It comes down to arteta the same way it came down to Brendan. Nothing on the players , most of the football that arsenal has played this season has been sublime.
But arteta didn’t have a clue on how to break pep down. And he had lost the league well before starting with the Liverpool match.
No one expected Arsenal to be this good this quickly. Slating a manager for not living up to expectations that no one reasonably had for him until he started over performing is a pretty shit thing to do.
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Replace Arsenal with Liverpool (13/14) and see the parallels
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And I daresay arteta this year has had a much better team than Liverpool did under Brendan.
I am of the genuine belief that if you have been tainted by City that you still believe that they are your masters and therefore should not bite their hand.
Yes and no. 1st game we played them we were robbed. That seemed to give them a boost. I seem to remember patchy play before that.
Also you can blame a manager for thinking he can play the same 11 throughtout the season. That’s a basic mistake.
They definately over achieved. But is it a one season wonder? I think it is. Next season they’ll be fighting for top 4 not the title.
Edit: Seasons not over, but City can afford a loss and still win the title.
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Saying we bottled games isn’t the same as saying we bottled the league.
The Palace game we didn’t bottle, we had just run out of steam - Suarez had been playing since that February with a knee injury requiring surgery, and from memory some of the team had been suffering with flu or something.
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Those games do tend to add up to the league don’t they ?
Agreed. Ranieri got away with that with Leicester but that’s almost certainly a once in 40 years kinda thing where every other team imploded
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If you bottle one game and lose two others because of poor refereeing it’s the latter that has cost you the league.
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The point is you still would have won the league despite the poor refereeing if you hadn’t bottled that game.
And arsenal didn’t have nearly the same amount of shit refereeing decisions that we faced.
Arsenal have no excuse. They just bottled it worse than us with Brendan
The seasons Liverpool were in contention with klopp to win the league , we never bottled it. We were quite simply robbed.
That’s not the same case with arsenal , they got a leg up with the win against us in Emirates.
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I am convinced, if Suarez did not have that 8 match ban, he would been scoring goals for fun and would have had at least 1 title under Brendan Rodgers.
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