My life as a Gooner 2010/11 part 54

The Kroenke era begins

And so the Kroenkes took over. They brought their share up to 63% which meant they had to take over. Their quiet plan of buying up shares and staying out of the limelight meant they were a bit of an unknown quantity to us fans. I didn’t want Americans because they don’t know soccer, with Ted Lasso the exception. But they had beaten off all other contenders and they were now the bosses. We were stuck with them, it seems.

Maybe they should have brought him with them?

14 years later, with hindsight, they have been good bosses mostly. Arsene Wenger was coming under fire for not being able to win trophies and we had won nothing since the Invincibles. But they stuck with Wenger. He was still performing miracles with our squads, and we really had quite a few players who were below his old standard.

We bought badly

We bought 8 players of which Laurent Koscielny and Marouane Chamakh where the only ones to make any real impact, particularly Koscielny who was often our best player. We sold 15 players of which four were defenders, Campbell, Gallas, Silvestre and Senderos. Senderos was definitely better than Sebastian Squillaci whom we had bought. It seems like Wenger was losing his eye for a player. We loaned out 19 players of which Aaron Ramsey was the most prominent, with Francis Coquelin and Carlos Vela also notable. It is amazing when you look back at how many players that we thought could make it, didn’t.

Sebastian Squillaci - our best buy of the century

The thing that strikes me most about that season was the amount of good wins we had. 6-0 against Blackpool early on and also 6-0 against Braga in the first match of the Champions League and many other comfortable wins. We started well in the league, drawing with Liverpool then trouncing Blackpool, beating Blackburn and sending Sam Allardyce home crying after 4-1. We were looking like Arsenal. The team against Liverpool was Almunia, Sagna, Clichy Vermaelen, Koscielny, Nasri, Arshavin, Wiltshire, Eboue, Diaby, and Chamakh. Koscielny had the distinction of getting sent off late in the game on his debut. We had some very good players but no-one of the calibre of Henry, Bergkamp, Pires and Ljungberg for example.

Dreadful finish

Winning the league or Champions League seemed like a fantasy but I always held to these fantasies until they were no longer possible. We were in with an outside chance of the league until the finish where we fell apart. We drew with Liverpool, Tottenham and Fulham, and lost to Bolton, Stoke and Villa, with our only win against Manchester United 1-0 out of the last 7. Six  wins and a draw would have got us the league. Considering we were above all those teams except Man Utd which we beat, it was possible to have run Manchester Utd harder. We didn’t.

5-1 against a good Shaktar side. Surely this was our year?

The Champions League? Here we flew out of the blocks with 6-0 against Braga, 3-1 against Partisan Belgrade and 5-1 against Shaktar Donetsk. Finally we are back, the Arsenal are back. Eh, no, we lost our next two against the two teams we hammered, Shaktar 1-2 and Braga 0-2 to finish second to Shaktar despite beating Partisan again 3-1, Which meant we got Barcelona in the round of 16. And what did they do?  We took them 2-1 at home but David Villa scored early and it was all looking a bit bleak until Van Persie and Arshavin scored two in five minutes towards the end. We did have a chance against Josep Guardiola’s side after all.

Please, bye bye tiki-taka

I have to say one thing, though, I never liked tiki-taka and it has led to all the possession football it means. Sometimes a nice Sam Allardyce approach is better, more exciting, and quicker. Often in the modern game the ball is just being passed around aimlessly while we go to sleep. I feel that someone will get a good team, have them play a very direct game, and cause mayhem to the rest and hopefully banish tiki-taka to whatever hell boring football goes to.

Thanks Pep, for boring football

But Barcelona did have amazing players, among the best we have ever seen and it is to Wenger’s credit that we pushed them hard over the two matches. At the Bernebau, Messi scored in the dying moments of the first half to give them the lead as it was still the away goals rule at the time. But Busquets did us a favour from a corner early in the second half and the game was still live. Until a very harsh second yellow against Van Persie for having a shot at goal whilst offside put us down to ten just after that goal. Xavi and Messi again soon after put the game to bed leaving us to wonder if we could have pulled off the impossible against the megastars with 11 players. And once again my dream of the Champions League was shattered.

We won the league cup, or did we?

The FA Cup, our own trophy? We did ok, I suppose. We beat Leeds after a replay in the 3^rd round, then Huddersfield 2-1, but then we had lowly Leyton Orient at Brisbane Road who drew 1-1. What cheek? We hammered them 5-0 in the next to continue our run of big wins only to get league leaders Man Utd in the 6^th round. They beat us 2-0 and that was us out.

As for the League Cup, we battered Tottenham 4-1 then Newcastle 4-0, Wigan 2-0 and on to Ipswich in the semis where we dispatched them 3-1 over 2 legs. This led to Birmingham in the final.

Surely we should have had a win against Birmingham?

This was a bad-tempered match with 2 bookings for us and 3 for them. We had an early heart attack as Szczęsny fouled Lee Bowyer and could have been sent off and a penalty kick awarded. But lucky it was offside and our hearts went back to beating normally. But it was a portent as to how the game would fan out. Zigic scored on 28 and then Van Persie on 39 made it level. But despite us having many shots and Ben Foster in goal for Birmingham getting man of the match, a mix up between Koscielny and Szczęsny very late on gave the game to the Blues as Martins scored. 2-1 and another trophyless year. The pressure was mounting on Arsene Wenger and the silent Kroenkes didn’t really inspire much confidence that big money would be spent. Mean old Arsenal, always misers.

Would the silent Kroenkes spend?

It is fair to say that we had a good team and a good manager but the big spenders now had teams of experts to help them. Wenger didn’t believe in such appointments and did everything almost by himself. I suppose he may have slept occasionally. We were able to get into the Champions League and were probably consistently a couple of positions above the level of the players as Wenger squeezed good performances out of us.

It's against the religion to spend money at the Arsenal

I still had belief and hope but that was all I had. The bad end to the season didn’t help. Would 2011/12 be any better? I couldn’t see much reason to believe. What about you out there? Can you remember what you felt? We had many years now without a trophy, the big boys were getting bigger, and new ones were appearing and all we had were the silent Kroenkes.