Stubborn Wenger needs new route to promised land
Instead, the full-backs cruised to victory while Arsene Wenger rubbed his face and yanked at his tie like Roy Hodgson in his last days at Liverpool. It’s time for the annual sport, as much a part of spring as Paddy’s Day or Easter, of mocking Arsenal’s mental weakness.
Wenger hates the way that judgement in football hinges on outcomes. Three years ago, Arsenal conceded two late goals at Anfield to lose the Champions League quarter-final. Deflecting the predictable questions about his team’s brittle mentality, Wenger complained that too often “the winner is praised beyond reason, the guy who does not is slaughtered”.
The phrasing was curious: “the guy who does not”, as though he could not bring himself to say the word “loser”. Wenger keeps telling us Arsenal are not losers but the pattern of failure is telling us something else.
The problem for Wenger is that now the supporters are getting bored with the team, the failures, the excuses. They have seen this movie too many times.
Lately they aren’t even winning points for style.
Having revolutionised Arsenal’s style of play once, Wenger has done so again. Obsessed with finding players who can pass, he has neglected to ensure that they also possess power and purpose. The Wenger style has evolved into decadence. Passing was once a means to an end but now appears to be an end in itself.
Arsenal’s passing at Old Trafford may have been fluent but it was not exciting, it was not inventive, it was not beautiful and it never gave Manchester United’s defenders anything to worry about. It was just a waste of everybody’s time.
Afterwards Wenger talked as always about intangibles, blaming the “subconscious” damage from the defeat in Barcelona. Lamenting refereeing errors, defensive mishaps and the other acts of God that have confounded his team, Wenger reflected that, “We have lost three challenges in a strange way”. Except that taken in the context of the last few seasons, these defeats were not strange, they were characteristic.
The more failures the team racks up, the wider the gap between Wenger’s rhetoric and reality. For years he has been telling us that there is a world class striker waiting to get out of Nicklas Bendtner. Yet in the 87th minute at Camp Nou, Jack Wilshere gave Bendtner the chance to become the new Michael Thomas, and Bendtner wasn’t good enough to take it. If that was not a moment of truth, what is?
If Arsenal are going to win trophies, they need better players than Bendtner. Wenger has explained before that if he spends big money on world-class stars “it will kill” the likes of Bendtner, Diaby and Denilson. But football is ruthless; as Wenger might say, there are winners, and then there are the guys who do not. Imagine Ferguson had refrained from signing Peter Schmeichel in 1991 because “it would kill Gary Walsh”.
These days, the best argument in Wenger’s favour is that he has kept Arsenal competitive towards the top of the Premier League running what is effectively a balanced budget. His shrewd use of their resources has helped Arsenal grow into the fifth-richest club in the world. Paradoxically, Wenger’s greatest strength might therefore become a weakness: Arsenal have grown so rich on his watch that they can afford to try another way.
Arsenal’s board are entitled to wonder: what is the point of charging the supporters the highest admission prices in English football if they are not going to use the resulting financial clout to strengthen the team?
By sticking with the balanced budget and Bendtner approach, Wenger is like a man who insists on fighting with one hand tied behind his back.
Wenger has lately had some tetchy moments that hint at the pressure he is feeling. In December, he met Nani’s claim that Chelsea were Manchester United’s main challengers with the reply: “Nani must be 1,600 times more intelligent than I am.” At a press conference two days after Arsenal lost the 4-0 lead at Newcastle, Wenger snapped at a journalist who had irritated him: “Do you think I am stupid? Do you?”
You could say these remarks were laced with a measure of sarcasm. Wenger has a deservedly high opinion of his own enormous brainpower.
Yet it now looks as though he would rather cling to a failed strategy than betray his principles by going to the market for proven players. That is intellectual vanity, and the sense is that the patience of a critical mass of Arsenal supporters is close to breaking point. The club is more than simply a means for the expression of Wenger’s ego.
Unless Wenger accepts the need to change, he will be remembered as Arsenal’s Moses: the flawed leader who delivered his tribe to freedom but could not quite lead them to the promised land.
