Christ, Shanks is some revisionist. So Wenger didn't instruct the club to buy Vieira prior to his arrival, fluked his way to success, and couldn't win anything without Adams. Interesting.
@jtb, your problem is you keep arguing this strawman. The same way you seem think everyone here views Wilshere as England's saviour (he's been the overrated kid who isn't a patch on Barkley for ages now). Pretty much everyone was in agreement that if we didn't make top 4 and win the FA Cup his position would have been untenable. Even Wenger implied as much after the final.
On your other point, Simeone did for sure. Klopp? He's in the similar situation to Arsene now in that a richer club is taking his players. Let's see how he competes with them. FWIW, all 3 of their CL Final losses were a similar story (losing in close, brutal fashion to spendthrift clubs) which should put things into a better light, never mind the fact the "tactically incompetent" Wenger broke and still holds the EC/CL clean sheet record. I like Conte, but you can't compare the competitiveness of our leagues. He's not in the same bracket as Klopp or Simeone.
My point is that it's all well and good looking at individual seasons, but the fact is in football, over an extended period of time, you either perform at (City 14/15) or below (Chelsea 14/15) expectations. You get the odd amazing campaign (Liverpool 14/15), but it never lasts more than a year or two. Klopp had great success, but didn't his team get battered by Real last season and win nothing? (ditto for 12/13, just like us in 05/06). Simeone's got a different, more efficient style, but how long can he use 17 players in such a brutal setup without them dropping like flies as they did at BVB?
You said it yourself a couple weeks ago, Wenger has performed "at expectations" for about a decade. You would have liked to see more "exceptional" seasons, I'd agree that we were a few internal changes (reverting to a defensive style earlier/more often; greater focus on our ongoing injury situation) from doing that, but I don't see how it's reasonable to want to sack someone for not overachieving. Never mind the fact that, yeah, we do owe him our loyalty because he could have left for Barca/Bayern/Real during the good times, we would not be in a position to spend £40m on an Ozil at Highbury (we would be struggling financially with no improvement on the horizon, unlike 06-13), and we don't have the status or pull to have Simeone, Klopp etc rushing here for the job. Arsenal are a club that featured in the EC/CL twice before Wenger arrived, never mind made the semis, final, or won it. Too many Gooners have a wildly bloated opinion of just how big we are, and you seem to be in that group tbh.
