Piers Morgan - Time to join the big spenders, Wenger, or it will be time to say goodbye
Since the shocking, embarrassing, disgraceful capitulation of Arsenal's season at Wigan last weekend, I've been feeling so dangerously enraged that I didn't want to write about my team at all today - for fear I'd say something reckless and over-emotional again.
But having recently demanded that Rafa Benitez be fired (Liverpool should just get Roy Hodgson - he'd cost half the money, spend a tenth of the cash, play better football and desist from the incessant whining that 'Bizzo' persists in) and Sir Alex Ferguson stand aside for Jose Mourinho before it's too late (after Inter's sensational demolition of Barcelona, I'd say United have about two weeks to get him now before Real Madrid pounce), it would be journalistically remiss and cowardly of me to now avoid the yawning problems in my own manager's backyard.
Arsene Wenger is now facing the biggest crossroads in his Arsenal career, of that I am certain.Five years without a trophy of any kind is simply too long for a 'Big Club' and everyone at the Emirates knows it, including Wenger himself, because he's not a stupid man. In fact, he's probably the smartest manager the Premier League has seen.
Year after year since he unceremoniously - and, in my opinion, way too speedily - dismantled the Invincibles team of 2004, we've heard the same excuses: the team's in 'transition', the young players are 'maturing', glory is 'very close now'. Yet here we are, half a decade after the youth experiment began and we've ended up with nothing again. Not a sausage. Not even a Carling bloody Cup.
Eighteen months ago, I suggested in this column that Wenger should stand down, sparking an unprecedented furore from Arsenal fans. It was like a devout Catholic calling for the Pope to stand down, you just don't do it. And anyway, Wenger deserved more patience than I'd given him until that point. But are we really any nearer a winning team now?
Part of me says that with a fullstrength team, we are. That inopportune injuries to key players like Robin van Persie, Andrey Arshavin, Cesc Fabregas, Alex Song and Theo Walcott kept us from fulfilling our potential this season. But another part of me isn't so sure.
I watched us getting hammered by Chelsea, Manchester United and Barcelona, with pretty strong sides out. Not just beaten, but thrashed.
Real men against boys stuff. And all this after a January transfer window when Wenger bought nobody apart from Sol Campbell. I've been saying for two years, like most Arsenal fans, that we needed a new goalkeeper, striker, and midfield hard-man. Wenger ignored us all, persisting with the hapless Manuel Almunia in goal, relying solely on the keen but naive Nicklas Bendtner up front throughout van Persie's lengthy absence, picking weak links like Denilson in the middle, and the clunk-footed dinosaur Mikael Silvestre at the back.
Either he did this because all the Arsenal boardroom chatter of £30 million to spend was nonsense. Or he did this because he's obstinate and believed he didn't need to.
One thing's for sure, though. This cannot go on. Something has to give. Are Arsenal's board misleading fans about the funds available, in which case they must now say so?
Or do we have the money and, if so, the board must now order Wenger to spend it this summer and spend it big. Because the reality is that to get the right players in the current market, he has to.
I'd break the bank for Fernando Torres and Steven Gerrard. Both will want the Champions League football that Liverpool can't offer them and both would be magnificently complementary partners for Van Persie and Fabregas. And in goal, I would go for Shay Given, consistently the safest pair of hands in the country.
It's time Wenger stopped priding himself on being Mr Prudence and played the game that all his biggest rivals are playing. Otherwise this great man, who has achieved so many amazing things in his 13 years at Arsenal, will reach the end of his contract in 2011 with six consecutive years of failure on the second half of his scorecard. And if that happens, I believe he will either walk away or he'll be asked to.
