LARRY RYAN: A team with a ceiling
It could only ever have ended this way. They wrote him up as a learned professor knowing well that, one day, they would send him packing, in the final act, as a fool.
‘Wenger is in meltdown,’ the excited clamour goes. And since the Bard’s stuff doesn’t sell as well any more, they have begun to liken him to Basil Fawlty again, their greatest clown.
Now they have quotes to run alongside the touchline theatrics, verbal absurdities to match the water bottle abuse and the agitated zipping of a hideous coat.
“We are champions of England in the second half.”
“Why are you looking at me?”
Arsene has started worse weeks with better sound bites.
In celebration of his downfall, Huffington Post UK this week ran a quiz with a selection of not-so-bon-mots. Who said this, Wenger or Fawlty? There were a few you mightn’t have got.
Certainly, there have been shades of the highly-strung hotelier in the dealings that have brought Arsene to this point. Two lofty men with loftier aspirations, who prize big picture thinking above the nitty gritty of salad ingredients or the threat of Van Buyten at corners.
There has always been a sense that Arsene’s teams would have achieved that little bit more if it wasn’t for the imposition of opponents and their unchivalrous insistence on making use of tactics.
“You ponce in here expecting to be waited on hand and foot, while I’m trying to run a hotel.”
Two men with tight fists and a shared nose for cheapish, unreliable labour. Who would you rather build your wall: O’Reilly or Big Per? But as Arsene’s woes deepened this week, perhaps we’d be better served considering a man who has knocked about better kitchens than Basil. A compatriot of Wenger’s, of similar vintage and comparable vision, even if he is a United man since Big Ron took a shine to his tucker; restaurateur Patrick Gilbaud talked, on Newstalk, about the drive that brought him two Michelin stars and the endurance to keep them.
“Are you still a chef or are you a patron now?” wondered George Hook. Once a chef, always a chef, insisted Gilbaud. “But could I do the service again in the kitchen? I don’t think so. I’m 60 years old and I pass my sell-by date.”
Arsene also reached for the stars. He revolutionised a sport, forged an identity, created a brand, in the modern parlance of the shyster. He balanced books from a position where ordinary men would need snookers.
But he is still doing all the cooking.
His confections have mostly been light. “We merely ask the players to play the way in which they feel most comfortable.” he once said, in better times. “Collective improvisation,” Fabregas called it. “We achieved this, but it is always dangerous because you never know too much in advance,” Wenger reflected of his jazz recipe.
Lesser men, who aim for the ceiling rather than the stars, know everything in advance. Maybe Wenger knows a little more too, since August 2011, when a lot changed.
As Gilbaud admitted this week, whatever the recipe, it is all about the ingredients.
Panicked by the betrayal of his fleeing protégés, Arsene’s supermarket sweep at the beginning of last season no longer targeted players who might blossom into what he wanted. Instead he settled for men who were already ripe, but never would.
It was fitting that Mikel Arteta sat beside Arsene at the Champions League press conference that made headlines, glancing nervously at his boss as he briefly lost control. It was a face we would see Mikel make many times the following night as Bayern poured through his patch.
Arteta is a symbol of the new Arsenal. Competent, diligent, nearly up to it. A symbol of scaled back expectation. A team with a ceiling.
To make anything of these men, the great patron might need a new recipe or a little help in the kitchen. Otherwise, you fear Arsene will soon have cause to utter Basil’s immortal line: “A satisfied customer! We should have him stuffed.”
Hold off, for now, on that lead helmet you acquired to stunt your promising nipper’s growth as he perfects the rondo in the back garden.
The resurgence of the big man continues apace.
Mario Mandzukic read his Emirates performance straight from the textbook of centre-forward play. You’ll find it under Leading The Line. A barrel chest to collect the odd speculative one. A velvet lay-off. A forehead that gave his wide raiders a purpose and a target. On hand, when it counted, for the killer close-range bundle.
A true nine, he was the lighthouse around which a carousel of attackers shone.
The day after, around the time Plan B missed out on a gong at the Brits, plan B showed up in the San Siro. It involved, as it tends to on the rare occasions we get to see it, a trundle forward from Gerard Pique and a punt or two in his direction. An acceptance from Barcelona, particularly on the potato field they complained about, that sometimes there needs to be another way, as Milan’s classic catenaccio reduced Messi to a single touch inside their box. It is not a new story.
But perhaps more worrying for Barca’s ambitions in this year’s competition was their inability to protect their own danger zone anything near as effectively. Such has been the scale of their magnificence in recent times, they have habitually been able to defend their own half rather than their penalty area. When there was fire-fighting to be done, Pique and company soon found this was no false alarm. The question is; can a false nine undo the damage at the Nou Camp?
Wow — it appears the ethics committee at Nike Towers has sharpened up its act. The swoosh swooped this week to suspend all its dealings with Oscar Pistorius, having seemingly sequestered its own jury at the brand’s Oregon HQ.
This is a rather faster reaction time than Nike managed last year, when the childcare centre on its main campus still bore the name of famed Penn State University football coach Joe Paterno nine months after the start of investigations that would conclude he had covered up decades of child abuse.
Due process was the phrase du jour then, something Nike also pointed to in 2003 when it stuck with Kobe Bryant through sexual assault charges, a stance vindicated when Bryant was cleared and made them a pile more money.
Away from court, the brand stuck with Lance Armstrong to the bitter end, presumably because it remained profitable to do so. Nor did Tiger Woods’s prolific insistence on just doing it cost him Nike’s patronage.
To be fair to Nike on the awful case in South Africa, even the best case scenario for Pistorius — that he wanted to riddle an unsuspecting burglar, rather than his girlfriend — with bullets, isn’t a good look.
But should global brands really be making big, possibly prejudicial, calls on criminal cases?
Or should they, at least, be required to make them consistently?
(pictured) A stunning recovery from Olympic disappointment.
High praise indeed from ‘cousin’ Morrissey. “To watch him on the pitch – pacing like a lion, as weightless as an astronaut, is pure therapy. Robbie, the pleasure, the privilege is mine.” Just the obvious question remains: did Robbie support The Smiths as a boy?
Still refusing to talk to USADA. So much for coming clean.
The world’s oldest marathon runner, at 101, is retiring tomorrow after the Hong Kong marathon. Lazy.
