AD-Free Episode 442 - Death By Bongo Bongo

It can go very far, we’re not an intelligently run club in the slightest

Would love to hear the chat at the end fleshed out. Arteta is a guy that many people said was a bad hire. We (fans and board) keep showing undying faith in a rookie coach with so far an awful track record. How far can this faith go? Are we rebuilding from a terrible squad? Or is this actually a squad that is better than Emery's but producing far less?

Clive was bang on for his point on Elneny acting as a safety valve and slowing the pace of the game down to mitigate the threat of City going forward. I don't like the backward passing as much as the next person, but I do think he was the right choice (given that we have Benfica coming up) for this particular match.

Pepe on the right should be avoided, it does not work he is just too 1dimensional.

Absolutely nailed it with Hector Bellerin @yankeegunner people forget when he was at his peak, he had the choice to go anywhere, stayed and committed further. This is one of the players I’m proud to have at Arsenal, he clearly LOVES the club, he is socailly conscious, trying to improve the world and sticks by the things he loves and believes, despite the abuse he gets. Rightly question his performances but also remember players all go through bad periods at times and we know how good he can be and has been at times this very same season

If Benfica is an inflection point, then Leicester is too, I reckon. Man City out of the way, there aren't any league games left that we don't have a decent chance of winning (unless some of Liverpool's CB's come good) On top of that, since the first set of home and away fixtures finished, we've played 5 out of 5 games against good teams (teams which could beat us even if we play well). You could argue Southampton, I suppose. So that means we've got 7 games against good teams left, and 7 games against 'bad' teams (including Palace and Brighton in this definition) So, we're good enough and the fixtures are good enough for us to go on a good run. Problem is, we're 8-10 points off top 4 and top 6 races. So we need to have a great run. Leicester is arguably the hardest of our remaining games. Knock them off and it gives us a fighting chance to go on that great run. #optimistsmath

Since we dropped out of the champions league we’ve spent close to £400m in transfers not even including loan fees/wages, i feel like the idea of the “rebuild” completely restarting every time we get a new manager and it’s another 4yrs before we can see real improvement in league performance and position and in Europe is asinine, if the players were so bad that an underperforming squad had the potential to finish midtable *again* why didn’t Arteta and Edu sell anyone besides the guy who put in a transfer request in the summer? We know for a fact we had the opportunity to. It feels like for some reason this season you have to ignore how much of a genuine risk it was to give a new manager the job of a declining Arsenal. Why are we so happy to write off seasons and continue to make dumb decisions, we haven’t won the league in almost 20years 😕

Enjoyable as always guys 🙂👍 although I’m now terrified about Benfica after the chat at the end 😂 I kind of think at this point that Bellerin is a bit in that Kieran Gibbs category and just not really kicked on how we hoped from being a promising young player - I mean being in that PFA team was like 6 years ago...😬 he had the big injury but was running through treacle for a good year or so before that. I really want to back him but it’s a bit like Paul said about Arteta a while ago ‘being in the results business, not the culture business’ and for all Bellerin’s off-field stuff that’s positive, those are things that make for a fantastic ambassador for the club, but ultimately it doesn’t help us get to where we want to go on the pitch. I love the guy but after being at the club this long and with so much experience and different managers and coaches, for him to not be an obvious first choice over Cedric probably says it all about where he really is as a player and that we probably need to go and get an undisputed first choice right back long-term.

Tom Laverick