You know things are bad at Arsenal when there’s actual genuine talk that Arsene Wenger may finally be about to leave.
Manchester United enter race with Chelsea to sign Alexis Sanchez That, and the fact that pretty much everyone seems agreed that this latest calamity is the Frenchman’s lowest point of his 20-year reign in north London.
Sadly for Wenger, we can think of a fair few more, serving as a reminder of just how long some Gooners __have been calling for his head.
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Credit must go to Arsenal, of course, because losing 10-2 on aggregate even to a club as great as Bayern Munich takes some doing, and this group of players really do go incredible lengths to out-bottle previous generations at the club.
And yet, fourth place and an FA Cup victory are still very much within reach for Wenger, and isn’t that all he wants at the end of the day?
Here are five other crises from his Arsenal reign where things arguably looked even worse than they do now…
2008/09 semi-final double bottle-job
This is when reality really started to hit home for Arsenal – they were no longer anywhere close to their greatest rivals Manchester United and Chelsea.
Despite reaching the semi-finals of the Champions League for only the second time in their history, they were beaten 4-1 on aggregate by United, who annihilated them in front of their own fans in the second leg.
Trailing 1-0 from the first game at Old Trafford, Arsenal should __have been able to make a game of this, but the tie was over after just eleven minutes as United scored two crucial away goals.
Weeks earlier, Arsenal were also dumped out of the FA Cup at the semi-final stage, losing 2-1 to Chelsea at Wembley. Having challenged for the title the season before, fans who expected that progress was finally being made were left bitterly disappointed as largely the same group of players totally flopped the following year.
2010/11 extraordinary collapse
2010/11 started so promisingly for Arsenal, before an absolute nosedive in the second half of the campaign, which included some of their finest work, if you’re a fan of specialist Arsenal collapses.
2010/11 Arsenal's last 11 PL games
February brought an all-time classic as Arsenal went 4-0 up against Newcastle in just 26 minutes, only to draw 4-4 at St James’ Park. Three weeks later, they conceded the comical goal to end all comical goals (to Obafemi Martins, as if it wasn’t bad enough) to lose the League Cup final to Birmingham City, who would go on to be relegated. Laurent Koscielny might have had an otherwise strong Arsenal career, but two minutes from the end at Wembley he made the bizarre decision to pretty much kick a routine catch out of Wojciech Szczesny’s hands right into the path of Martins, who rolled it into an empty net.
This made it six seasons without silverware for the Gunners, and with performances like that it looked like their curse would never end.
2011/12 relegation form
The start of 2011/12 certainly rivals now as the one other time people really felt – and in many cases, hoped – we might be seeing the end of Wenger at Arsenal.
If their end to 2010/11 was rough, their start to 2011/12 made it all the more worrying as their form resembled that of relegation strugglers for much of 2011.
Wenger’s side took just seven points from their opening seven games in the Premier League that term, and the 8-2 humiliation to Manchester United will surely forever go down as his darkest hour in the game.
Incredibly, however, Arsenal recovered in the second half of the season and finished strongly enough to finish third. They owe much of that to Robin van Persie, however, and he knew it. Clearly fed up of the under-achievement in north London, he moved to Manchester United that summer.
A sign of things to come with Alexis Sanchez?
2013/14 ‘specialists in failure’
In the end, 2013/14 was all about one game: Arsenal, on Wenger’s 1000th match in charge, against a manager who’d recently dubbed him a ‘specialist in failure’, still faintly in with a shot of the title, went to Chelsea and were trounced 6-0.
Yes, the 5-1 defeat at Liverpool was bad, but this was something else, and for it to happen on what should have been a memorable occasion for Arsenal’s longest-serving manager just rubbed salt into the wound.
Arsenal led the table for much of the first half of the season but after a run of just two wins from nine in the league over February and March, they finished – where else – fourth.
It was pretty much the cliche of an Arsenal season, apart from the fact that they finally ended their trophy drought with an FA Cup final win over Hull City – a game widely viewed, for better or for worse, as having saved Wenger’s job.
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2015/16 second to Leicester
For once, Arsenal actually thought they’d done everything right. By the end of 2015/16, they’d achieved their highest finish since 2005 by actually ending on more points than Chelsea, Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool and Tottenham. Unfortunately, they managed ten fewer than…Leicester City.
Everyone loves the Leicester fairy-tale and rightly so, but if anything shows Arsenal’s sheer allergy to first place in the Premier League, then it’s this.
Petr Cech joined and gave them their first decent goalkeeper for the best part of a decade, Mesut Ozil was in inspired form for much of the campaign, and literally all their rivals apart from Spurs (who ended up out-Arsenaling Arsenal by the end) were in crisis all at the same time.
Wenger will surely never get a better chance, but Arsenal again slipped up when it mattered most, winning five of their last twelve league games, allowing the craziest title story in history to take place.
Damningly for the Arsenal manager, it now makes his side lifting that trophy actually seem the more outlandish outcome.
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