Arsenal last lifted a trophy in May 2005. Patrice Evra recently called this a “crisis”. When you consider that Manchester United haven’t gone longer than just ONE YEAR without a trophy since Sir Alex Ferguson’s first in 1990, it makes the five trophyless years of Arsenal look dreadful.

The problem with Arsenal is they’re soft lads and cry babies, a trait they have picked up from the manager, who never sees anything his players do wrong, but is quick to blame someone else for everything.

Wenger was slagging Shawcross off for a challenge he made in a game that didn’t even involve Arsenal, yet when Jack Wilshere was making shocking tackles weeks later, the Arsenal boss was quick to defend him and play it down. He launched an attack on all bad tackling which totally imploded when he failed to criticise the dangerous tackling from his own players. Any credibility he had over kicking bad challenges out of the game was lost.

After committing 17 fouls on United players last night (more than Stoke or Bolton committed against us), after forcing just one good save from Edwin Van der Sar in 90 minutes, the Arsenal boss complained about the pitch. I mean, this stuff has to make you cringe. As if Arsenal were playing on a different pitch to United, regardless of what state it was in (being honest, from the stands, it looked bloody great for December!).

The problem with having a soft lad for a manager is that you are going to have soft lads for players. Instead of having gutsy players, who wear their heart on their sleeve, who are straight talking, want to get stuck in and do the business, you have namby pampby cry baby sorts, just like Wenger.

Step forward Jack Wilshere.

Today he was moaning on Twitter:
“To be honest the pitch was shocking! Wanted to stop us playing!”

The Emirates pitch is beautiful, obviously, like Arsenal’s football, obviously. The last two times we’ve played on their beautiful pitch we’ve spanked them, beating them 3-1 in the league and 3-1 in the European Cup semi-final. Aside from the fact it’s obviously a cry-baby excuse, why does Wilshere think we would try and stop Arsenal play by fucking up the pitch? As if the mighty Arsenal, who’ve lost to the likes of Newcastle and West Brom this season, could only be beaten by United on a dodgy pitch. We played them off the park at the Emirates on what I assume Wilshere believes to be a perfect pitch (he later went on to call the Emirates ‘the home of football’. Maybe he’s young, maybe he’s thick, but the Emirates is the home of a side that hasn’t had a piece of silverware to its name since playing there. It’s not like an Arsenal player/fan/manager to be arrogant though is it…)

Regardless, long may their bitching and whining continue. For as long as they look for any other excuse or reason to blame, the longer they will ignore the flaws in the squad and way of playing which have seen them fail so miserably at being successful for over half a decade now.