This football season moered a man right in the feels.
It’s been a tough week for this journalist after seeing some stalwarts of the game finally meet their demise.
When I started working for the Daily Voice way back in 2007, Ajax and Arsene Wenger were very much big-time players in the game.
The Urban Warriors had just won the Absa Cup at the end of Muhsin Ertugral’s first stint at the club.
Meanwhile, Wenger and his Arsenal were still title contenders in the Premier League and had led his team to the Champions League final the season before.
But this week, both of them are gone.
LE BOSS: Wenger in happier days. Photo: GETTY IMAGES/IAN WALTON
And while, in an industry where you have to be impartial and critical, these two have been pretty much all-present and are “special” to me.
That, however, doesn’t stop me from being critical of them.
Somehow, it feels right that things are changing. And anyway after all, change is the only constant.
Last week I wrote that Ajax’s relegation would be a disaster and that has now come to pass, even though the club is fighting in court for their right to be in the relegation playoffs after being punished for fielding an ineligible player.
Merits of their case aside, they should never have been in the situation in the first place.
Since making the 2014/15 Nedbank Cup final and winning the MTN8 at the start of the 2015/16 season, they have been on the slide.
Things were looking really bright of the club under Roger de Sa then.
Then there were all sorts of problems all of a sudden.
And you can only hide those issues if you win on the pitch.
The results never came and there was no real revival under Stanley Menzo and little evidence once Muhsin returned to the club for his fourth stint in charge.
GOODBYE: Wenger is a goner. Photo: MIKE EGERTON/PA
The Urban Warriors are where they are because they can’t win.
And that is something that they will have to rediscover in an even more unforgiving environment - the NFD.
Ajax are an elite club, make no mistake about it. Their facilities are some of SA’s best and they have a great blueprint to follow.
But in the NFD, things are going to be bumpy and they will find that it’s tough out there in South African football.
On the bright side, some of those players will see just what they have at Ajax and that playing football is not a privilege, you have to work hard to make it to the top.
Seeing Wenger leave is an end of an era at Arsenal and the Premier League. I've had the suspicion for a while now that the old Frenchman was falling behind the times.
For all the innovation he showed in his first 10 years in England, the game has overtaken him.
Back then, Wenger’s romanticism could flourish unexposed.
But in a world where things move on all too quickly, dreamers like Le Boss and Ajax just get caught sleeping.