Arsene Wenger knows he is skating on thin ice now.
If he loses at Middlesbrough, that will be six league games lost out of 17 and fourth place will be in jeopardy.
That was why he rested seven players in midweek.
Many Gooners probably think that Arsenal have to beat Middlesbrough to justify the pathetic way they played at Porto.
Personally, I don’t want to dwell on Wednesday night. I don’t really want to write 25 pars about a Matchday 6 game that took place after Arsenal had qualified for the last 16 of the Champions League.
Was losing 2-0 important? No. Was losing in such a feeble manner embarrassing? Yes. Because a proper football club has to have a minimum level of performance, and this was far below any of the shabby efforts we’ve sometimes seen since 1996.
However, Porto wasn’t just an off-night or a bad day at the office. It was a game which exposed Wenger’s strategy and philosophy more vividly than any other I can remember. His squad players and his teenagers were simply not good enough to make a game of it. He has a decent first eleven when they are all fit. After that, not much. Just some promising kids.
We saw the unmarked Bruno Alves head in a corner. He is the kind of big centreback that Wenger refuses to sign to prevent such goals being conceded. Porto play a technical game but they are not so snobbish as to ignore the fundamentals of football.
Their second goal wasn’t a breakaway against an Arsenal team that was pressing for the equaliser. When Fernando had the ball in the centre circle there were five defenders in front of him and all of them showed how clueless they are, how undrilled they are, how they have no shape, no discipline, no understanding as a unit, no good habits to fall back on. Silvestre was five yards out of position, Eboue was playing Lisandro onside, Djourou raised his arm because he may have assumed Eboue was in line behind him, a very, very reckless assumption if he made it. And Lisandro cruised into the box and fired past Almunia. The only defender who saw the danger, the only one who reacted, was Gallas, who got there too late because he had to race across the box from beyond Djourou. Professional football? Don’t make me laugh.
As many people expected, Wenger threw away the Porto game because he believes Middlesbrough is far more important. He needs those three points to keep him in the top four and keep the Champions League money rolling in.
Unfortunately, it is now clear to me that the Arsenal team is in decline because of a failed philosophy, a strategy that has not worked. If any coach on this planet could make a kids policy work, it’s Wenger.
But it hasn’t worked and it won’t work and some of his best players are leaving because of it. Investing three years in Hleb and Flamini is no good if they leave to join clubs that can win trophies. Hleb and Flamini thought : we want it now, we’re a long time retired. Stay at Arsenal, stay with a manager who doesn’t teach defence, win nothing, expect to win nothing. Where’s the fun in that?
In general, a football club and its fans live on the hope of success. Right now, most sensible Arsenal fans no longer expect to win a trophy this season. What they’re watching now is an unbalanced and vulnerable team whose season could end in February.
As we all know, football is about players. Is it too much to expect to see a reasonably balanced team of men who can compete for trophies? True, Arsenal beat Manchester Utd and Chelsea but what use is that if you lose to Hull, Fulham and Stoke? Anyway, United had a bad day at the office. As they say in the City, that 2-1 win was a rally in a bear market. The overall trend is downwards. On a bad night Liverpool are never as bad as Arsenal were in Porto. Same with Man Utd and Chelsea. They can stumble and stutter and bore you to tears but they’ll never be as comprehensively hopeless as poor Almunia’s rabble were on Matchday 6 in the Dragao.
The unpalatable truth is that Arsenal can no longer compete with the best, so fans are starting to change their ideas about what they are seeing, starting to stay away, starting to examine their own blind loyalty and see the squad for what it really is, an unreliable, divided outfit which is a shadow of the vibrant team that topped the table for six months last season.
In May, The Guardian summed up each team’s 2007-2008 season in five words.
Man Utd : Glory, goals, Munich, harmony, Ronaldo.
Chelsea : So near yet so far.
Arsenal : Scintillating until squad depth exposed.
Liverpool : Thanks heavens for European football.
Aston Villa : Good but can get better.
Since then Liverpool have become consistent, Chelsea play more attractively and will get key warriors Carvalho and Essien back next month, Cristiano Ronaldo isn’t red-hot any more but United still have by far the best strikers, four of them, and Arsenal’s squad depth has been exposed before Xmas rather than after it.
What will happen in the January transfer window? Only one thing for sure : President Obama will be sworn in.
But 2009 might be the year when change could happen at Arsenal, which is still, undeniably, a unique club with a DNA like no other among the 92 in England, and potential like no other.
No other club with so much potential could have been a sleeping giant for all those years before they won the Fairs Cup in 1970, when the club was run by cautious Ken Friar, a former tea boy and wages clerk who feared debt and risk and oversaw 16 years of respectable failure. Arsenal lacked ambition because the directors were semi-detached and let Friar run the whole club. The arrival of one new director, David Dein, in 1983, pushed the club forward at last, George Graham took two titles off Liverpool, and Dein brought a brilliant, modernising French manager to the club in 1996 and Arsene Wenger took three titles off Manchester United.
It was a lot of fun when those two rivals had a duopoly for eight years, unless you were a supporter of the other 18 clubs in the Premier League. Dein and Wenger was the most entertaining partnership since Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid but in 2003 they realised that they faced a new ball-game when Abramovich arrived.
The duopoly was broken by Chelski, which brought bitter rivals Sir Alex and Arsene a bit closer to together. Danny Fiszman knows that Wenger is no quitter, so he knew he would not walk when he sacked Dein. But that left Wenger surrounded by a bunch of yes-men who owed their careers to him, all except physio Gary Lewin.
In 2008, Arsene Wenger has lost Dein, Flamini, Hleb, Lewin and club doctor Ian Beasley, who will now join Lewin at the FA to work with England. Lewin was instrumental in bringing Beasley to Arsenal six years ago, so theirs is a strong relationship.
After all that, Wenger must now feel very isolated, especially as the club has had no chief executive since Keith Edelman was sacked in May. I’ve said for years that he needs a strong No.2.
He is a workaholic who does not delegate and does not want to be contradicted. He would rather do it all himself and work 16 hours a day, so he must have done 25 years of work in the 12 years since he arrived. That’s why he’s lost the plot and that’s why Arsenal are in such a precarious position now, in danger of losing their top four spot to Aston Villa.
Sir Alex Ferguson believes that every great manager needs a strong No.2. Brian Clough had Peter Taylor, Bill Shankly had Bob Paisley. I know for a fact that Sir Alex has told Arsene he needs a sounding board, somebody to bounce ideas off.
So that’s where we are. Arsene Wenger has lost the plot and needs help. Maybe he can get it from new CEO Ivan Gazidis and Stan Kroenke. Stan was at Thursday’s board meeting. Something good might happen soon. You never know in this game. It’s full of surprises.
If you like ANR, you’ll love The Professor.
It’s the best Arsenal paperback. Vividly captures the golden years.