Gilberto Silva: Wenger’s time at Arsenal is up

Ragged Arsenal conceded five second-half goals to Bayern Munich at the Emirates Stadium last night to slump to a 5-1 loss in the second leg of their Champions League last-16 tie, going down 10-2 on aggregate.

In the United Kingdom, fans who subscribe to BT Sport can watch a live stream of Arsenal vs. Bayern Munich using BT Sport Player, which can be found at this link.

Arsenal were the better team for nearly an hour and were in the lead until Laurent Koscielny was sent off for conceding the penalty that led to Bayern’s equaliser.

“I still must say my team has produced a huge effort tonight and played very well”.

“We need to take the positives as I think they were a lot early in the first-half, take them on board and finish the season well”. I checked it on television.

For star winger Alexis Sanchez, benched for the Liverpool game on the weekend (Which they lost far too easily) was warming the bench for the second time in a week.

“But on the other hand it’s very hard to replace intelligence, and we all know he is a very intelligent man and manager and he’s still got the fire”. At that moment in the game, not only was it not a penalty, but Lewandowski was offside.

He also blasted Sidiropoulos’s decision to change Koscielny’s yellow card to a red after discussions with the assistant referee behind the goal. It leaves me very angry and frustrated. Rather than credit the opponent that just humiliated him, Wenger went after the referee for his “unexplainable and scandalous” decision-making. “I can understand that I am criticised after these results, but it’s not down to the players to choose the manager”, Wenger snapped. It doesn’t make them right.

Wenger is by far the longest serving manager in the Premier League now, but has just three months remaining on his contract with the Gunners and a string of poor results has left a dark cloud hanging over his future at the club.

The vast majority of Arsenal fans would have loved nothing more than seeing their club’s most successful ever manager bring success to North London again, but the prospect of that has scarcely felt so distant.

He is not thought to be under any pressure from above, with American majority shareholder Stan Kroenke said to be happy with Wenger given his repeated success in qualifying Arsenal for the Champions League.