Still dancing with the devil
It wasn’t merely a three-pronged attack that made the Mancunian side’s satanic moniker seem so apt, but the likelihood that their manager had mortgaged his soul to the Devil.
However, with the Gunners resolute reprise of our role as the irritating fly in the title challenge ointment, stubbornly refusing to be swatted away, we appear to have assumed this mantle of ‘the Late Late Show’ specialists, with events at the KC Stadium on Saturday culminating in yet another, crucial injury-time strike.
Perhaps opposition fans will now be casting similar aspersions about Wenger. But how can you question the virtue of a man who wouldn’t even be caught wearing horn-rimmed spectacles? The longer we continue breathing down the competitions’ necks, the more real becomes the spectre of the Arsenal’s threat. Yet despite Nicky Bendtner pouring another week’s worth of benzene on the flame of our Premiership title fantasy, once the incendiary euphoria of the 90th-minute mayhem on Humberside burned itself out, in the cold light of the Cottagers’ capitulation at Old Trafford, it’s hard to argue with the bookies odds.
The realist in me cannot escape the ominous portents that while Man Utd and Chelsea continue to perform in fits and starts, ultimately both teams know what it takes to stretch for the line and win by a short head. By contrast, although the Arsenal persist in conjuring up cameo moments of sublime magic, all too often I struggle to convince myself that they really want it. This is not a malaise that’s exclusive to the Gunners, it’s the curse of modern day football, as one could have the same qualms about the majority of the Premiership’s star-turns.
On some level the obscene salaries and the celebrity lifestyles of our superstars nowadays must bear some responsibility. In boxing it was said that a fighter only truly retained a taste for the sport, so long as they remained hungry and that they lost a certain edge, the moment they were lifted up, out of the poverty from whence so many came, to the lifestyle to which they’d always aspired. Surely footballers are susceptible to a similar loss of appetite?
Mercifully there will always be the rare exception, for whom their competitive nature and a love of the beautiful game runs so deep that they remain unaffected by all the trappings of a multi-millionaire lifestyle. In a world where a footballer’s status is measured in inverse proportion to the MPG of their latest gas-guzzling supercar, how on earth does a manager convince his young charges that all the millions in their offshore accounts won’t offer anything like the same feelings of fulfilment, as the opportunity of being able to reflect in retirement, upon the blood, sweat and tears required to earn the odd relatively worthless bauble on their sideboard.
Meanwhile it seems decidedly churlish of me to be having a dig, in a week when we’ve enjoyed the unadulterated pleasure of Samir Nasri’s slalom run in the Porto penalty area (a tad over-effusively praised on the radio as “shades of Maradona”). After his profligacy in front of goal only four days prior, what odds would you have got on a Bendtner hat-trick in our 5-0 romp into the Champions League quarter-finals? Nevertheless, as stand-in for Gallas, Sol Campbell has become the standard bearer for the Arsenal’s abiding fragility. Sol strikes me like an over-inflated balloon, pumped up to the point where he’s one catastrophic pin prick away from our campaign (and his career) exploding into smithereens.
While players pledge their allegiance to the cause (as their agents tout them across the Continent!), if all that is required in the modern game is for the Gunners to prove themselves that little bit more committed than the competition, then I say bring on Man Utd or Chelsea in Friday’s Champions League draw. Only by exorcising our inferiority demons can the Arsenal acquire the composure of genuine contenders and enable me to truly begin to live the dream.
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