Gallas wants out - Wenger has to get tough

By now, most Arsenal fans will have read William Gallas' rant concerning his team mates' on-pitch squabbling and dressing room confrontations.

Why would Gallas make these comments? Because he doesn't want to be Arsenal captain anymore and wants to leave the club. He's 31 and probably has one move left in him and doesn't want to spend the remainder of his days at a kindergarten full of squabbling children.

First of all, I don't agree with what Gallas has done. A team captain simply cannot come out in the press and throw accusations at players and reveal inner dressing room turmoil. How can the players trust him now? How can they confide in him?

Gallas must have known this - he must have. So to me, it's a clear signal he is fed up at Arsenal and wants out.

Playing for Arsenal has not been a happy experience for William Gallas. He arrived from a hugely successful title-winning Chelsea side, and therefore the Arsenal supporters have never truly been on his side; often throwing unwarranted blame on his shoulders rather than the guiltier culprits surrounding him.

Gallas arrival coincided with Arsene Wenger's youth experiment, which has lead to a physically flakey team. Night and day compared to what Gallas was used to at Chelsea.

At Chelsea he had the mighty Peter Cech behind him, and played next to strong, never-say-die warriors such as John Terry and Ricardo Carvalho. He had men in front of him, fighters - Makalele, Essien, Lampard, Ballack.

At Arsenal, he has the indecisive Almunia behind him, 'Calamity Clichy' on the left, panicking Toure on his 'right' and powder puff tacklers Walcott, Denilson, Nasri and Fabregas in front of him.

Wenger's solution? Bring in a French faded ex-Man Utd defender to placate him. After 3 years, Gallas must still be wondering what he's walked into.

However, if Wenger does not strip Gallas of his captaincy, it would be utterly farcical. You cannot have a captain come out in the press and betraying his team mates by criticising them and revealing their dressing room disharmony. Even Roy Keane didn't get away with it.

But this represents another huge headache for Wenger, because love him or hate him, Gallas is Arsenal's best center back. He has made mistakes, no doubt, but any top class center back would make mistakes having been so continually exposed by this current Arsenal team. He has also scored a lot of important goals - he's scored more goals than Hleb.

I do have sympathy for Gallas, he is far from a perfect captain - but he was not asked to be made captain and is, or was, the best captain Arsenal have. This season, Gallas has - for the most part - played like a captain, even if he's not a natural leader and does not cajole the players nearly enough on the pitch.

Looking around the squad, who else can realistically captain Arsenal? There is hardly anyone suitable. Silvestre? No thanks. Toure? No chance. Fabregas? Bad idea. Clichy? Don't think so.

In my opinion, the only suitable captain is Arsenal's most consistent player - the quiet man, Bacary Sagna. Although knowing Wenger, he will either hand it to Almunia or conjure up an excuse about how Gallas was misquoted and just leave him to get on with it. We'll find out in 24 hours.

Unfortunately, Arsenal are in a bad way right now both on the pitch and off the pitch. You can criticise Gallas for making such comments but you cannot ignore them, and rest assured he's not giving us the full picture. He's almost certainly watering down a worse scenario.

Arsenal is a team full of spoilt brats paid far too much money for achieving precisely nothing. Part of the reason they are spoilt brats is because Wenger is giving them too much rope. No matter how ineptly they perform, Wenger never criticises them, he just continually mollycoddles them. He talks them up so much to the press that his words eventually become transparent and meaningless.

Too many of these players are strolling around Arsenal, in their own little world. We've had the embarrassing Eboue rolling all over the pitch for three years - clearly without a word said against him (he is likely the player Gallas was directing his ire at), you have in-fighting between the egomanical Adebayor and the arrogant Bendtner, and you have the petulant Van Persie shoving players to the ground, getting himself sent off - then being publicly defended rather than admonished by the manager.

Then you have nobodies like Alex Song strolling on the pitch laughing his head off and high fiving all his teammates shortly before Arsenal collapsed in the last 2 minutes to Spurs.

Where is the discipline, where is the professionalism?

Gallas is 100% right in everything he says, even if he should have kept his mouth shut. There is no fight on the pitch - unless it's a glamour game with a worldwide audience, too many players are grossly overpaid and believe they've 'arrived' based purely on salary rather than achievement, and worst of all, they're squabbling with each other like children.

Wenger needs to get tough, because not only his team not good enough, but squad mentality is falling apart due to lack of guidance, monitoring and discipline. Perhaps another indication that Wenger has too much on his plate.

Evidently, Wenger and Rice need to call a team meeting sharpish. They need to get to the bottom of more than a few things and firmly ensure the players know exactly what is expected of them.

Arsenal is an institution, not the scouts, and Wenger has to do a lot more than print off motivational team sheets and hand it to the players on the team bus for them to ignore whilst listening to their iPods. He also has a big decision to make regarding William Gallas.