Rambo on why Arsenal’s title challenge faltered

There are many different viewpoints as to why Arsenal did not win the Premier League title this season, despite storming to the top of the table and spending 17 weeks there, more than any other team. The likes of Paul Scoles and Michael Owen have not been backwards in coming forwards to lay into Wenger and various players, while TV pundits like Carragher and Re4dknapp were predicting our downfall almost before a ball had been kicked.

Aaron Ramsey has his own ideas, however, and has been telling Sky Sports about them. According to the Wales international midfielder, the Gunners brought some of it on themselves by being a bit naive in the away games against the big clubs. As we know only too well, Arsenal were heavily beaten by the top three of Man City, Liverpool and Chelsea and Ramsey thinks it could have been avoided with a bit more of a streetwise approach. For streetwise, read defensive.

Ramsey said, “The only games that have let us down this year are against the top-five away from home: if we’d managed to nick a couple of results against Manchester City, Liverpool, Everton and Chelsea the gap would have been a lot smaller and we’d have been right there.

“That’ll be something to improve on next season – we’ll need to be more streetwise in those games.”

It is also clear that Ramsey thinks the Gunners could have won the league this season, had it not been for all the injuries to major players. He is trying not to dwell on it and just look to the future, but it must have been so frustrating to watch from the sidelines as we slipped down the table.

He said, “We’ve had a lot of injuries to key players at the same time which did affect us, but that’s football. Things happen like that.

“Obviously you do have thoughts going through your mind about what could have been.”

What Arsenal need to do is find out why we suffered from all those injury problems and do something about it. Then maybe this time next year we won’t be thinking about what might have been.