Do the Wenger Out brigade still want him sacked ?

No, its down to the squad.
If we had the 2005 squad and were looking fragile, you could blame the manager, but our defence at the moment doesnt have the players required to be tight. JT is past it and Luiz and Cahill are too error prone. Doesnt make for a tight defence.

 

Once again everyone is falling into the trap of thinking that just because Man City were better at the week-end it means that they have always been better and will always be better.

Were Man City better when they were losing to Crystal Palace? Are they better now with Aguero injured? Will they be better during the run in?

Everybody is so eager to make definite pronouncements on who will win and who will lose. Who is better and who is worse. Teams will have good patches and bad patches, ups and downs. Believing in your team and supporting them through the rough patches is part of what makes a good fan. I firmly believe that we are the best club in the world, with a fairly large section of the worst supporters in the entire world.

We have a team that is just growing up - if you expected them to win everything like the Invincibles did, then you were dreaming. If we do win the league, and I still think we have a really good chance to win it, then it will be ugly and scrappy, and it will be a tremendous achievement. The team needs our support, they need the supporters to believe in them, now more than ever when they are possibly doubting themselves.

We joke and banter and argue on here, but the poor support is part of the challenge Arsenal are facing and there is no point in only supporting the team when support is not needed, because it is already obvious that they are going to win.

 

Ah, I see that some people are still equating pessimistic predictions with a "lack of support" in order to make everyone they disagree with seem like a pernicious traitor to the club. I guess some things will never change.

 

So what's the excuse when we lose this weekend and end up 4th in the table?

 

I'm not saying you are a traitor, I'm just saying you are **** at being a supporter.

 

You're no better... but I'm basing that just on what you write on here, and no-one can do that accurately (although you seem to be trying to).

 

Could we get a **** smilie for this board?

 

I don't understand the point you are making.

The point I am making is that belief is very important in a team and that comes not only the team but from the supporters. Very often it isn't rational. Goodness knows Manchester United, by all logic, should have been mid-table 5 years ago. Yet their fans and Fergie kept them near the top by sheer will power.

If you tell a kid they are crap at everything when they are growing up, they will be crap at everything. The power of confidence and self-belief is real and pervasive. As a supporter if you continue to believe that your team is bad and will not win, and you keep saying that, in whatever form, then you are clearly having a negative effect on the team.

Any way you look at that, contributing negatively to your team is poor support.

 

The negativity that surrounded Aaron Ramsey certainly affected his confidence, he said so himself, so it's true that fans attitudes do have an effect. There was an argument that it was because they were slating him, it made him buck up his ideas, but that for me is bollocks. It was the same as saying that slating Wenger made him go and buy Ozil, pure delusion and an excuse to try and justify slagging of the manager and team etc.

I think fans should be allowed to voice their opinions and criticise when things don't go well, but with that comes a massive responsibility to get it right, because most of the time it's fairly wide of the mark and based on very little other than personal opinion, yet its effect as we saw with Ramsey can be devastating. Ask any footballer and they will tell you that the fans can either give you a lift or make life really difficult, the effect of the ​12th man shouldn't be underestimated.

 

United were only kept at the top by 'will power', not by the world class players they bought for hundreds of millions of pounds???

So, by the sounds of it, you're suggesting that Arsenal87 has as significant an impact on the Arsenal players as a parent does to their child?

So an armchair fan who watches at home, never goes to a game and never has any contact with the players of the team they support... just by believing that their team is rubbish and will always lose... then somehow, ignoring all the laws of science and logic... somehow they will mind control the players on the pitch to lose??

I need to try this Toledo logic... I'm going to believe really hard now that Cristiano Ronaldo and Messi will sign for Arsenal in January. To be clear, I'm going by Toledo logic here... let me get this right... if I continue to believe that they will sign for us and I keep saying it, in whatever form, then I will clearly have a positive effect on those signings happening???

In that case it's near enough a

 

The real problem is that you are being entirely negative on a fairly reasonable point that I am making.

You of course miss-state it by claiming that I said that United ONLY won because of their support, and that the ONLY reason we don't win is because of poor support.

Your positions in the argument are of course very much weaker, because you are claiming that this vocally negative section of fans either doesn't exist, or has NO effect on the team, which is stupid

If you are saying that you don't believe that there is a section of our fans that are vocally negative about our team and their chances then you are a liar or a fool.

If you are saying that you don't believe that this negativity has an effect on the team then you are also a liar or a fool.

Which is it?

 

None of the above. I'm just standing up for arsenal87 as you're picking on him and bringing his credentials as a fan into question.

There IS no proper argument here, just baseless slagging off, and I only got involved because you were trying to take some sort of moral high ground against A87 and present your opinion as fact.

EDIT. and after reading your post again it appears you're trying to do the same to me now.

 

second that motion

 

And yet, Ramsey has turned his form around and become the best player in the league this season. Seems like he took the criticism on board, realized he needed to improve, and knuckled down hard. The first thing that improved with him was his work-rate, which says it all really. If he was "devastated" he wouldn't be here... he'd be on loan at some Championship team trying to recover. Criticism and encouragement are both useful for helping people improve. It's not one or the other.

 

Toledo just wants to piss off everyone who disagrees with him by saying they're hurting the very club they support. This has been going on for months if not years; I'm amazed the troll is still here saying it, and even more astounded that a moderator is here backing him up.

Any sane person knows that criticism and encouragement are both useful for helping someone improve. The only reason someone might say otherwise is to troll the people they don't like. On an Arsenal supporter forum, the best way to troll someone is by saying that their opinion is hurting the club they support.

 

So, if you can't shake the logic that a vocal lack of faith in the team exists, and that it is detrimental to the team, then it isn't baseless.

In fact the only baseless slagging off is what you are doing to me!

 

Yes it is baseless slagging off. I’m doing it for no other reason as to mimic what you were doing to Arsegun. I’m just copying you. So if you claim that I’m slagging you off then that only proves my point that you were too.

(However, it was still amusing to read that you think believing in something strongly enough will make it happen… you've been reading too much J.M. Barrie )

You were informing Arsegun (I realise before I was thinking it was A87, but it was actually Arsegun, whoops!) that he was a poor supporter because he wrote some comments on here, NOT because of vocal lack of faith at the stadium. Maybe you could write a rulebook of 'What not to do if you want to be the perfect fan, by Toledo' and file it under Hypocrisy in the library.

Most of your posts are completely inaccurate. Let me highlight another of these for you:

Why are they ‘of course’ weaker? Because YOU say so? Are you resident argument settler on here? Or, more likely, someone with ludicrously misplaced arrogance to think they’re always right?

And ignoring that previous point anyway, where did I claim that the vocally negative section of fans doesn’t exist?

 

Irrelevant to any point I'm making.

I'm having a go at TT for suggesting that just believing in something while you're sat at home on a PC is enough to make it happen (and thus believing that Arsenal are poor will make them lose matches).

 

So how does negativity start? Why do people believe Arsenal are poor when they are top of the table? How does that idea get spread around?

Probably because somebody wrote it on their PC.

 

It wasn't addressed to you specifically fella, I was making a general point about how the negativity affected Aaron Ramsey.