On Sunday morning we went to Brighton for the day, so I didn’t have to field calls from Gooner pals moaning about Arsenal’s feeble surrender at Manchester City.
When we came home I returned a phone call from my youngest brother.
Paddy said, “All the pundits and ex-players have been saying today what you’ve been saying for two years. Wenger’s very narrow in his views, he doesn’t organise defences, he’s very stubborn. It’s now common currency.”
I said, “As long ago as 2001, in The Professor, I said that someone had defined genius as the willingness to risk excess in the pursuit of your obsessions. He’s creating Monaco II before our very eyes. There he unloaded his all his senior players and packed the side with youngsters, mainly Africans or French players of African descent. He had money to spend but he pursued his own private experiment. Monaco slipped down the table and he was sacked. That didn’t matter because Monaco is a team without a crowd. Now he’s in command of a much bigger train-set, an operation with a turnover of £200 million. He’s built a bigger laboratory.”
I chatted to Paddy for a while, then returned another phone call from a season-ticket holder. This Gooner said that Lee Dixon had been at the training ground in the summer and said, “Are you sure Gallas should be captain?” And Wenger apparently said, “If I took it off him, he’d blow up.”
“Really?“ I replied. “So he bottled it. He’s abdicated the challenge of managing egos, which is a big part of the job. Fergie does it, Mourinho did it, Rafa’s does it, Capello does it, Scolari’s doing it. But Wenger wants every player to owe their career to him. He’s rebuilt the team, so it’s his team now. But what has his team won? You need a British core. You need bottle and organisation. Our best player was RAMSEY !!! ! He’s rebuilt and this is his team, completely his team, and it’s won nothing and will win nothing.”
“Apparently we tried to buy Upson back in the summer at the last minute. And we might try again in January.”
“Dunno about that,“ I said. “It sounds like lazy journalism. British hacks have a horrible tendency to make up stories about players going back to their previous club.”
And so on and on and on……
When I previewed the Man City game, I thought Adebayor would be playing. That’s one reason why I don’t write so many previews these days. If you don’t know who is playing, it’s very hard to call a game.
But when I saw the Arsenal line-up I knew it was the bet of the season. What a rubbish team ! And the shambles we saw should be a coaching visual aid : How Not To Play Football. Arsenal were shapeless, hopeless, tactically inept beyond anything we’ve ever seen before, with three or four players chasing the same ball. Song is an idiot! I wish I had a DVD of Man City 3 Arsenal 0. Every pro should be made to watch that over and over : Here is everything you should not do as a professional footballer!
Arsenal were so bad, it was comical.
Clichy and Silvestre panicked and Clichy gifted Stephen Ireland the first goal, Robinho’s dinked shot over Almunia was pure brazilliance, and then Djourou panicked and brought down Sturridge in the box for a penalty. Djourou will never be a centreback, he’s too nice. Wenger took off Gavin Hoyte, the youngest player, who was terrible in a terrible team performance, but Diaby was worse and he left him on. He is still slavishly devoted to his precious pecking order.
His midfield of Nasri, Denilson, Song and Diaby looked like the worst midfield Arsenal have fielded for 20 years. Bendtner wore pink boots and had his fourth stinker in a row. His value is sinking faster than the pound. Van Persie is an enigma who will never give you two games in a row if he plays till he’s 35. Adebayor is flaky. Nobody I know thinks Eboue and Song are footballers. Toure is a reliable yeoman now past his sell-by date. Almunia wouldn’t get a game at any other Premiership club. This squad is crap, apart from Sagna, Clichy, Fabregas, Ramsey, Wilshere and Fabianski. This team is crap. Fabregas is wasting his time at Arsenal, a club that will never be a big club with this board. They’ve given Wenger far too much power. The board should have sold Highbury Square to a developer for £70 million and said: “Arsene, buy a keeper, a centre-half and an experienced ball-winner who will kick anybody who kicks Cesc. If you won’t do that, collect your P45. We’ll hire somebody who will.”
But the board sat on their hands and looked backwards at Wenger’s seven trophies and ordered a bust of former chairman Dennis Hill-Wood and didn’t notice that the Arsenal team is getting weaker every year, and dramatically weaker since they kicked out David Dein, so that this season’s feeble outfit now loses 2-0 at home to Aston Villa and then goes away to Man City and is humiliated in a 3-0 that could easily have been 6-0.
This isn’t a blip. It’s a meltdown.
And it’s the inevitable consequence of having a delusional manager. If you keep telling ordinary players that they’re good, and you keep telling your fans that ordinary players are good, there is going to come a time of reckoning, and that time has arrived in November 2008. Chelsea won’t stop at three goals on Sunday.
Since Wenger is now revealed as a supremely arrogant fantasist, we have to wonder : Does he realise he’s got it badly wrong?
On Match of the Day, Alan Hansen talked over some clips of their embarrassing attempts to do the basics, and asked : “Where do they go from here?”
On Match of the Day 2, loyal Lee Dixon said, “He’s a great manager and he’ll get it right.”
I doubt that. To get it right he’d have to admit he got it wrong. He’s got it badly wrong but he won’t admit his mistakes.
Right now, demand for Arsenal tickets is soft and getting softer. Although you’ll still get an AFC email saying, “Hurry up, there’s only a few left !”