Don't forget that we pretty much managed to ruin Vermaelen who also picked up a long running achilles problem with Arsenal, which we mistreated for a year, and now the guy can't get fit at any club. I think we basically broke him and whatever caused it appears to now be happening to Kos
Absurdly and I called it at the time, going into the busy period of the season we loaned out Coquelin after refusing to play him sometime around mid November. Had we actually played him and Rosicky in sensible games it's highly likely both would be in better form now and we'd have had less injuries to better rested first team players.
Hell in the run up to Ramsey's injury he played 76 mins of one game, the full 90+ in the next 4 games, then was subbed after 45mins in the away leg at Gala where we had effectively no reason to play any first team members. Two of those full 90 min performances Wenger only made two subs in the game, both 1-0 games where the opposition had a single shot on target(southampton/west Brom, both having poor games). Into a busy period and Wenger needlessly played at least two players longer than they needed to by not using all our subs, didn't rotate well AND sent supposedly our best player on a needless away game when he's both injury prone and he was being overplayed.
It's not hindsight when as these things happened I was saying mental to not rest/rotate, anyone except Wenger could see these injuries coming a mile away, Wenger is an oblivious idiot.
I would say get Koeman in for Arsenal next year but he'll unlikely want to leave a club with CL football for one without
Team - Arsenal, half way point, rubbish, predictable nonsense. In previous years we've actually played well in most of the games we won but played poorly in the losses, predictably poorly against the big teams and not an awful lot has changed with that in the past 8 years. odd slip up against a bottom team but mostly just pap against top teams with no changes in tactics.
The problem this year is.... we've played abysmally in a huge portion of the games we've won even against the worst teams in the league. We've barely beaten anyone top half of the table let alone the top 4-6 teams we usually struggle with. We've had lucky result after lucky result, performance wise we deserve to be sitting 8-9th at best. We've picked up at least 12 points with late fluky goals in games we've played like crap in.
Gaffer - as above, useless, idiotic, hasn't changed anything in years. People make excuses for him, the worst being that we sold players actively due to the stadium move, ALL the big players that left FORCED THEIR WAY OUT and at no stage have we not had a MINIMUM of 40million spare cash in the bank that was available to be spent, not once, the maximum spare cash we've had is around 180mil(this doesn't include the 24mil we also have in spare cash that we are obliged to keep around... it's a condition of the loan basically stipulating we keep enough spare cash to cover an extra year loan + interest payments around). Our cash account has grown from basically 70mil when we moved to 210mil or so last year(pre Ozil buy), not sure what it is end of last season yet(finances usually come out around now for the previous season).
Most improved player - none? No youth players have been given a shot, no existing players have done better than the year before at all, only Sanchez really has performed well at all but he hasn't improved.
Worst player - how do you narrow it down, idiotic manager, awful Cazorla, at least he tries and isn't a lazy **** like Ozil who was both awful and lazy and didn't seem to remotely give a damn how bad he was, telling everyone he was a world cup winner and didn't need to improve at all. Though in overall effectiveness and end product I don't think any player has actually dropped as far as Ramsey has. Ozil only genuinely effected a very small number of games last year, a few assists against Norwich and some goals usually against a weak team but anonymous for half the season. Ramsey when he was fit last year was incredibly effective, this year he's had a few good games but many very poor ones.
Prediction for end of year.
Chelsea
City
Utd
Southampton
Spurs
Arsenal
West Ham
Liverpool.
... crap teams
If Chelsea get a semi serious injury to Fabregas, Matic or Terry then I think City will probably beat them to the title.
