Why last season was a success and Wenger can lead us to the title again

Petr Cech won the Golden Glove award for keeping the most clean-sheets and Özil broke the record for the most chances created in a season. Defence and midfield alright then but what about attack? A poor conversion ratio puts us at a lowly 5th position in the league and gives us a clue to what is our main weakness and why we came up short in the title race.

Squawka puts Arsenal way on top of the League in terms of team performance as defined by the aggregate of their measures of a team’s attack, defence and possession. The Hypothetical Premier League based on how the League would look with the use of video technology to check key referee decisions – makes us top of the league and we came top of the Fair Play League too.

Leicester lost only 3 games (2 to us) but we lost 7 – West Ham, Swansea, Man United, West Brom, Southampton and Chelsea twice. Of these 7 losses, 3 were at home.

On paper, our home record was better than our away record – where we gathered 8 points less than Leicester. I believe that the main cause of our failure to win the league was the failure at home of our strikers from February through to April. Whilst Özil was on his way to breaking the chances created record, we squandered chance after chance – confirmed by our poor conversion ratio of goals scored from shots taken (16%) – hardly the stuff of title winners.

Arsène, as team motivator and squad selector, as well as the players must take responsibility for that fundamental and critical shortcoming. In addition, the manager put his head on the block before a ball was kicked and was roundly criticised for only signing Cech and not a single outfield player before the summer transfer deadline and just Elneny in the January window. Both of these players were good signings but the glaring shortcoming that all of us could see before the season started was our lack of a top quality striker.

I am certain that Arsène was fully aware of that shortcoming — he referred to frustrated attempts to sign such a player. This season, I don’t believe the failure to sign a good striker was because of a lack of awareness or an unwillingness to spend big but was rather down to the appropriate, top, top quality target(s) just not being available. I wonder how much the board regret not getting the Suarez deal done properly when they had the chance! Oh dear…what might have been!

How much Arsène is responsible for our failure to sign a striker I do not know – we will have to await his biography to learn about that one. I certainly know that it is not through a lack of interest from top players to join the Arsenal and I’m sure that when they sign they do so mainly because of the chance to work with Arsène Wenger — just ask Özil, Alexis, Cech and Xhaka (Suarez seemed keen too). Let’s hope a top quality striker out there feels the need to spend some time with Arsène before the great man goes.

Is now the time for a change of manager? At 67, that day is coming soon regardless of where you stand on the manager. I will greatly lament his going and still don’t subscribe to the view that this failure to win the league warrants a change of management.

Handicapped

Our failure to win the title fundamentally boiled down to not winning the race between ourselves and Leicester from February to May. We came second to Leicester mainly because of the much greater demands on the squad from our competing intensely on 3 fronts, playing 2 tough games every week without any respite. Conversely, Leicester had only one game a week and crucially were given 2 weeks off to rest and recover their energy levels – over a period in which we were handicapped by many injuries, loss of form and confidence to key players whilst Leicester had no such handicaps.

In addition, Leicester were never expected to win the League and their manager did brilliantly to eliminate that expectation whilst Arsenal carried and felt the full and very heavy weight of history and 12 years of expectation on their backs particularly at the Emirates which no-one could shield them from.

Once Leicester opened up a big lead it was very difficult to chase them down.

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