Arsenal: Oh look, everyone is suddenly doubting again

Arsenal will never get the respect they deserve, and that is just a painful truth. There is a vendetta against them, and it is out and about yet again.

Arsenal lost to Southampton, which of course means that they are a complete failure, should never have sacked Wenger, were lucky all along, and need to rip everything out at the roots and start over.

Right?

You expect this sort of thing from the tabloid media. You expect the doubt and the naysaying and the “we knew they weren’t good all along, we knew they were lucky” bullcrap, but then the fans start doing the same. And while we should have expected it from the “fans,” it’s still disheartening that after such a promising start to the season, there are now people jumping ship based on one loss.

I have counted far too many people saying that our “luck has run out,” these past couple of days. What do you mean our luck ran out? Were we lucky to draw against Liverpool? To win against Tottenham?

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Why is it when other top teams grind out results, they get credit for being tough and bearing down, but when we do it, we’re lucky? And why are fans engaging in this kind of chatter, this doubting? It’s ridiculous.

You want to know what happened against Southampton? It was the perfect storm. We were down our top three starting centerbacks, we were up against a proud club who were at home for the first time under a new manager, and we were the victims of three bizarrely perfect crosses that turned into goals.

Yeah, that’s technically unlucky, but to disqualify the entire season, the entire unbeaten streak, as unlucky, is just woefully incompetent and it’s the mark of someone just feeding into their feelings, when they need to step back and look at the big picture of what is happening at this club.

Because, big picture, we are doing so many of the things we’ve never done before with player types we’ve never had before and a manager who is fired up to make things happen. That doesn’t constitute luck. That constitutes having a lot of the pieces already in play as we transition from two decades under Arsene Wenger.

Teams lose. It’s a shame that the streak came to an end, but when you look at the outliers of the match, it’s easy to see why it’s a perfectly reasonable outcome and certainly not early tidings of the armageddon.