There’s plenty of chatter going on about Nuno Espírito Santo at the moment. He’s the bookies favourite at the moment, in front of Arteta, Allegri and Benitez, the latter two being free agents shortly (Chinese Super League finishes soon) and therefore right up KSE’s street if/when they decide time is up for Emery.
And it does feel like it right now. There was a talk the Arsenal Coach was supposed to give on Friday which has now been cancelled because of some of the online abuse received when he was announced as a speaker, with the college in question sending email reminders out to students to watch what they say online because of their digital footprint, and with a man who’s stock is so low that he can’t even do basic talks like that you have to assume that everyone knows his time is up.
Unai Emery is walking the football managers equivalent of the metaphorical Green Mile it seems.
It does seem weird that the club are happy to let this drag on though and I think even David Ornstein was saying – on the Athletic podcast and website – that the expectation was he’d be in charge for Frankfurt, but what’s the point? What does anyone get from him being in charge? The stadium will be half empty by the sounds of it, Frankfurt won’t have any fans there, it’ll be a really weird vibe.
Perhaps the thinking from the board I.e. “why would we want anyone to take that as the first game?” and I can kind of understand that. It would be a depressing start to a managerial career and then with Norwich coming up on Sunday that’s when you’d hope that we can have a new man in. I guess that’s why the chatter has upped last night. The timeline for a new manager feels right. If they’re looking at Norwich away as the potential game then they will have looked at the Southampton game on Saturday, discussed on Sunday and Monday whilst the players were off. If they’ve made the decision on Monday then they’ll use yesterday and today to be sorting out finer details. If it’s agreed that it doesn’t matter one way or the other about Thursday’s game then you might as well keep Emery in charge, but Friday feels like the day you give him his marching orders. Whether a new man comes in for Saturday I’d expect it unlikely, but if you bring somebody in over the weekend they can watch the game with a view to taking over on the Monday, ahead of a home game against Brighton that you’d hope we could get points from.
That kind of feels right to me. It feels like a timeline the works and so now all eyes are on the football exec team to do their jobs. We’re outta time right now and quite frankly they’d be sleeping at the wheel if they didn’t have him out by this time next week.
The next step for us as fans is to unite behind anyone who is the next man in charge. I saw an excellent tweet today saying that in many ways the Unai Emery tenure was always going to be a hangover period for those cultists who wanted Wenger to stay forever and ever and ever. They’ve now spent just under a year and a half bashing the current manager for not being Wenger, so if they can’t get behind this manager, you’d have to question whether they were fans of the club at all. Perhaps they should just go and support FIFA instead, where Arsène is currently employed.
As for me, a new man gets my backing and if we can get somebody to instil some belief and get us playing some good football again then you’d have to say we’d take that, because we’ve had none of it all season. It’s time to hit the reset button on the club in terms of the coaching staff. We’re all ready for it.
Catch you all tomorrow.
Dream on, Nuno is already at a massive club were he is provided with everything he needs, he also said not so long ago that he wouldn’t manage any other club in the UK.
If the new manager was Mr Wenger, would you get behind him?
Benitez doesn’t fit the time line. His season ends 30th. It would be a logistical nightmare