The reason behind poor start of the season

Wenger slams Fabregas and Nasri responsible for this seasons problems:

 

Arsene Wenger has had arguably his worst season since he first became Arsenal manager 16 years ago, and he and the club have been severely criticized for selling Samir Nasri and Cesc Fabregas and not replacing them with similar world-class players.

But Wenger believes that one day the truth will come out and it will be Nasri and Fabregas that should shoulder the blame rather than Arsenal.
He said: “One day I’d like to write a book about last summer. There’s a wrong understanding about what happened.

“The club has been treated very badly because of that and I don’t think the club was guilty of anything during that transfer period.

“They can say they don’t like the players we bought, but the way it happened was not the responsibility of the club.

“Last season it was not because of us, but because of players going out. We do not master when they go out, apart from some times you can say ‘no means no’.

“I was very adamant on Nasri but, at the end of the day, it was a difficult situation to manage. We do our best to keep our best players. If a player didn’t want to extend, where do we go from there? But we’ll see.”
Obviously Arsenal are in danger of the same thing happening this summer with both Robin Van Persie and Theo Walcott approaching the final year of their contracts, but Wenger has clearly said that Robin at least will stay even if he doesn’t re-sign.

“We will not lose anybody to Manchester City, or to anybody else because we want to keep our players,” Wenger continued. “We will do everything possible to extend his contract,”

“Our plan is to keep Robin van Persie even if we buy any player. Our desire is clean and clear. Robin is the leader of our club and I would just like to specify that he is not at the end of his contract.

“He is under contract until 2013. So I would say focus on your job, which he does very well and enjoy your games.”

I would love to know what really happened last summer, but the priority for Wenger this year is to make sure that the same thing doesn’t happen again, or there will be a lot of very unhappy Arsenal fans around…