If You Care About Wenger, Make him Leave

A few thoughts on another, entirely predictable shambles.

* The team selection was, yet again, bizarre. Chamberlain is shoe-horned into the team as a RWB with Bellerin, hardly a natural defender at the best of times, pushed onto the other flank. Holding, apparently dropped last week, goes straight back into the starting XI. What a great way to re-build his confidence. Lacazette, our record signing, dropped to the bench. Kolasinac not at CB and not even in the team. It says a lot when the club's social media team actually struggle to work out how we're meant to be playing, and still get it wrong. Mustfi, one of the most expensive defenders of all time, watching on from the bench, apparently days away from leaving.

* Once upon a time, maybe thirty years ago at this point, there was a simple theory to away games at big teams. You keep men behind the ball for the first 30 minutes, make sure it's tight, and don't give away a cheap goal. You let the opposing team become frustrated, and look for chances to pick them off on the break. It doesn't always work, but it usually keeps the game close. Instead, we simply attack from the start. If there is a game plan, it's simply to play the same way we play in any situation, regardless of the team or context.

* It's difficult to muster the effort to analyze any of the individual goals in depth. A common theme, instead, is a lack of defensive thought and anticipation. For Firmino's goal, we actually have a decent number of defenders in the box, but there is no organization or anticipation of a relatively late run into the area from a Liverpool attacker. Watching him throughout the move, he is never closely marked at any point, and has a relatively easy header to put them ahead.

* The Mane goal was perhaps more representative of the mess we were in. It's easy to blame Holding here, and he does deserve some blame for being turned inside-out by Mane before the goal. But where is the protection? Why is Mane able to take all day to twist and turn Holding about before he scores?

* The answer lies in the system. It is useless, absolutely useless, to blame individual Arsenal defenders for goals at this point. They are all slaves to a system of defensive ineptitude. When defender after defender fails in our team, perhaps it's not due to individuals  Jonathan Wilson wrote an article in this week's Guardian about the so-called 'red-zone' between a team's defence and midfield in their own half. Failing to stop teams here is lethal.

*And for Arsenal, we haven't so much abandoned it as deemed it an everlasting no-man's land. A place where no Arsenal player dare set foot, less their total commitment to attacking football be brought into question. This stems from the formation. Ramsey and Xhaka are both good central midfielders, yet, clearly, neither will defend our box unless explicitly told to do so. Ramsey now spends most of the game bombing forward, while Xhaka tries to pick passes from deep with middling effect. Behind them is a wasteland. Re-watch the match and pause it virtually anytime Liverpool win the ball from us. In most instances, they will outnumber the Arsenal defenders and have acres of space to play between our midfield and defensive lines, as much as these exist in the first place. And they are the home side.

* Our failure to defend this zone is both tactical and philosophical. Clearly (surely!) neither Ramsey nor Xhaka is being told to patrol the area in front of our defence, except when we are looking to re-start attacks and distribute the ball. Ramsey, as far as I can tell, is being told to play as an auxiliary centre-forward at this point. The conclusion, is that Arsene sees 3 at the back as an even greater licence to his midfielders to abandon their defensive responsibilities. The constant overloads we've seen in midfield are a consequence of this.

* The other major failure is the space behind our wing-backs. The whole basis for success of the 3-4-3 lies in the willingness, and ability, of the wing-backs to tuck-in and defend without the ball, and then sprint forward to overload with it. Clearly, Chamberlain and Bellerin get the second part, and are more than willing to bomb forward at a moment's notice. Defence? Not so much. In the first week of the season, NBC interviewed Vardy after the Leicester game. He said that they knew to target the space behind our wing-backs as an area where they'd find joy. Leicester put 3 past us in that game. Liverpool similarly destroyed us today on the flanks, and this team we had no answer up front. If before the season even started teams knew how to exploit our system, and Arsene has been unable to prevent this in all three games so far, something badly wrong.

* At 2-0, the game was lost. All that was left was the familiar, bizarre cavalcade of substitutions. Coquelin on for Ramsey. Lacazette on for Sanchez, to play as a left-winger. Nothing improved and were simply picked off twice more on the counter.

* Six years ago I moved to America.  My first season over here was the 2011/12 season which we started in catastrophic style. A horrendous 2-0 defeat to Liverpool followed by the nadir of the Wenger era, the 8-2 at Old Trafford. Shortly thereafter, we went on the trolley-dash and eventually salvaged our season.

The 8-2 was the moment I became Wenger out. It's been a shorter or longer journey for others of you out there, but surely we are all here now. Incredible as this may sound to the final loyalists out there, it's possible to respect his previous achievements and still want him gone from the job.

Every post-game interview makes my heart wrench. Today's was typically awful. A hero, a true hero of mine forced to face up to his latest failing. One he will never be able to resolve. The past is a foreign country.

The only question left is what comes next. Does the club have the guts to do what's best and finally end it? Or will it be two years (at least) of further decline? Two years where we watch, almost each week, our greatest manager stripped further and further of his dignity.

Let's end it now and get working on his statue. Every day he stays is another blow to his legacy. The faults are obvious and we'd be hard pressed to find someone who' do a worse job.

Gb.