Hopefully you are all familiar with the concept of Room 101. For the uninitiated it is a British gameshow in which contestants chose things or people from life/society that they would want to see locked up in the fictional Room 101. Well friends I present you the footballing equivalent of that very game show: Room 442. Yes I am aware that not that many teams actually play 442 anymore but after a heated debate with myself I decided that it was a better name than room 31411 asymmetric diamond so there you go. Each week I will be taking something from the world of football that has annoyed me in some way and locking it up in Room 442. Luckily I am a very irritable person so this column should have legs.
So for our inaugural entry into Room 442 I sort of have to go big so we’re starting off with a man who should have been removed from the world of football some time ago: Arsene Wenger. Yes the Frenchman is one of the most successful managers of the modern era but with the way Arsenal are playing at the moment its almost universally agreed he should be taking his ten million a year contract and spending it on a nice villa in the south of France rather than using it to buy exceptionally long coats that he can wear in the dugout.
Now I am no great fan of Arsenal, in fact quite the opposite. Their home atmosphere is fairly meh, their fans love whining unnecessarily and up until quite recently I routinely rub my hands together in glee after they lost knowing that an exciting edition of Arsenal Fan TV was just around the corner. However following the loss against Brighton I had a eureka moment. Arsenal losing has now become quite routine. Its no longer a special treat, it no longer feels like the world will end when the gunners do not pick up three points. Arsenal have become tiresome.
When I tune into Arsenal Fan TV I want to see DT threaten to murder someone, I want to hear Troopz say ‘blud’ so many times that it sounds like he’s giving a subpar medicine lecture. But now all I see is the same depressed blokes complaining about the same things every week with diminishing returns of entertainment. Arsene Wenger has lingered around Arsenal for so long he has turned the club from winners into a joke and now into some sort of weird charity case.
Wenger has sapped the life out of Arsenal so much that I no longer find Arsenal losing that funny. Wenger must be a rich man so he should just do the dignified thing and resign. Then he can take his money and start a life drawing class, or whatever retired French men do with their spare time. But it seems apparent that he is not going anywhere anytime soon so for that reason Arsene Wenger is the very first entrant into Room 442.