Arsenal: First step—stop rooting for Unai Emery to be sacked

Arsenal fans have a part to play in lifting the club out of the dumps, and the first step is to stop rooting for Unai Emery to get sacked.

I know, Arsenal fans think that if they are loud enough, nasty enough, they can pressure the board into firing Unai Emery and giving them who knows who as a replacement. Someone who will, naturally, immediately win a title. Isn’t that how it works?

Regardless, this negativity is a major contributing factor towards the club’s inability to lift themselves out of those aforementioned dumps. It’s the Catch-22, we aren’t performing the way we want, so it’s hard to support them. Things turn negative, and the support isn’t there, and the players have trouble lifting themselves up because there’s no support.

I can see why fans are desperate to make an impression on the board. They see the state the club is in, they think that they can make an impact. And they’re right. But rooting for the immediate termination of the manager is not the impact they should be seeking to make.

I don’t even think it has much to do with the lesson we learned wishing Arsene Wenger would be fired. For nearly half a decade there was discontent. Now he’s gone and people wish they would have treated him better.

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So yes, the grass is always greener, but that’s not even what I’m talking about here. Even though it is an important point to make.

The point that I’m trying to make is that if you really want to see the best of Emery, you have to give him time. Yes. We know that. We gave him a year before we started turning on him and demanding he be fired. Because, as I’ve been alluding to for weeks now, not giving the support that the team deserves is one way of preventing them from performing the way they should be performing.

You can call that “mentally weak” all you want, but at the end of the day, support is support, however you want to spin it, and without the right support, I can’t help but think that Emery is being crippled by his inability to replicate the environment that he wants.

Maybe that’s just me and my optimism, but I don’t want to make the same mistake we made with Wenger. If we never give Emery the proper chance, how will we know what might have been?