By Myles Palmer
A continuation of a conversation in an Italian restaurant in Whetstone.
Yes, the one where Ginola, Ziege and Freund sometimes eat.
NOTE : This was on Tuesday, before we knew Thierry Henry would miss Saturday’s game with injury.
In the light of what you’ve just said it’s important that Tottenham do something THIS season, like get into
Europe. Hoddle never struck me as somebody who was good at
listening. I first met him in the car park at White Hart Lane when he was manager of Chelsea. There was something strange about the way he handled himself, something different to other managers.
He was more like a superstar tennis player, somebody from a solo sport, a self-contained star who had lived in a fame-bubble since he was a 12-year old wonderboy in Harlow.When he managed England he had not yet worked out the traumas and disappointments of his own playing career, and that’s why he was not sympathetic enough to Beckham and Owen.
I think that’s a very accurate analysis. Here is somebody who surrounds himself with friends who won’t challenge him, feels that he has the answers, gives you that kind of withering look that ex-pros reserve for people who have never played the game,and feels that the only people who could ever teach him anything are those he’s learned from along the way,like Keith Burkinshaw,like Arsene Wenger.
But now he firmly believes that he’s his own man and it’s a sign of weakness to take counsel from anybody else.
If you look at the team now and you realise that all the stars, all the people he depends on, are well into their thirties.
They’re all experienced people who can roll with the punches, they have no sense of tilting at windmills as Beckham was doing three years ago – and therefore Hoddle feels much more easy in their company. But it’s obviously a short term solution. As you say,he has to do something this year.
Signing Christian Zeige from Liverpool, and playing him in his preferred position, looks like a masterstroke. He’s scored five goals already and he crosses a very good ball.
Well, Hoddle says 4-4-2 puts us in chains. So he believes in movement and flexibility, coming from the back. He has an attacking attitude to the game. What has been a priority is to use the width and use the midfield – and that’s what he’s done.
The definitive player at Spurs is Teddy Sheringham.
Because the style of play they now use employs Teddy at his best.And Arsenal’s style of play is defined by Thierry Henry.
Not Patrick Vieira?
No, not at all.Patrick Vieira is their best player but he’s not the player who defines their style. Henry is a player who can elecrify the crowd, but also frustrate the crowd.Fantastic talent, but a bit fragile, a player who needs the ball to run for him.
Henry is like the skilled, exciting but inconsistent Spurs attackers of yesteryear.But what Arsene Wenger wants for his team is a framework which is solid at the back, and can play through the midfield. He isn’t too keen on the wings. It beats me why they haven’t actually learned that they can score from crosses. But they still haven’t.
Is it an example of self-defeating stubbornness for Arsene Wenger to refuse to cross the ball? And to say to the assembled reporters that our strikers are not good at heading the ball and don’t want to head the ball, so we don’t practice that.
It looks as if Glenn Hoddle accepts that winning high balls in the box, scoring from headers and knockdowns, is probably about 25% of football. And if it’s 25% of football then Arsene Wenger is only playing 75% of the game.
How can you win trophies by playing 75% of the game? It’s almost another sport, don’t you think?
Well, people have to play to a pattern. That by definitionexcludes certain tactics. The successful managers are those whose pattern is more flexible, more all-embracing.
I didn’t realise till quite recently that Wenger’s pattern was as restricted as it was.He’s never played with a big centre forward since he came to England.
Well, he signed Mark Hateley at Monaco, he brought
through George Weah, and after that he had Klinsmann.Not a big centre forward, but a guy with a big presence.
Right, he bought Hateley at the same time as he bought Hoddle and Hateley suited the French League, which lacked pace and power.So people like Hateley and Weah would destroy
defences. And Klinsmann was a world class player wherever
you put him.
As I understand it Klinsmann fell out with Arsene, big time, because, Jurgen claimed:he made me play up front on my own.Is that right?
I only know Jurgen through Gary Mabbut, whom I know well.Through Gary Mabbutt, at one remove, I’ve come to like Jurgen Klinsmann because he wears his fame quite easily.
However, when he was playing he was very conscious of what he was and how important he was. And therefore he felt he should be indulged simply because he was an important part of the team,maybe the most important part.
And as such he had arguments with successive managers. He
had arguments with the German national team manager, he had
arguments at Monaco,he had arguments at Tottenham with Christian Gross.
Wherever he went. At Stuttgart, where he first started, he had arguments, and then latterly at Bayern Munich.So here was a player who knew his own value and felt that that value had to be recognised in the way that the team played.
But Klinsmann was a phenomenal player for his first season at Spurs. The best player in the country by a mile. He was Footballer of the Year by a walkover – he was so far ahead of whoever was in second place, the others were irrelevant. He was five times better than Alan Shearer at that time. But you wanted him to be modest as well?
No, I didn’t. I just think you have to indulge those sort of players.
You have to if you are Alan Sugar and Klinsmann comes to you and says : Alan, can you please tell me your plans for next season?
He wouldn’t know, would he? But when Ardiles was fired he got Klinsmann, Thorstvedt and Mabbutt to come round to his house in Chigwell to discuss the future. They were all men of stature.
But as you say in your book, when the BBC television asked Sugar what were the highlights of his time as chairman of Spurs he made a chilling reply.
Yes : “Highlights? No highlights.”To a man in his position, every week should have been a highlight, shouldn’t it?
Where are Arsenal going with this new stadium? Do you
think there’s a division in the board between the Etonians who have never had a mortgage and don’t want the club to owe £300 million, and the modernisers who insist that we have to make this bold jump into Ashburton Grove?
I think that’s polarising it in a way that oversimplifies the issue. Arsenal have ambition as a football club. To be compared to the mega clubs of Europe they need to do well in the Champions League and have a stadium of the capacity that rivals Real, Juventus and the like.
At the moment it doesn’t look like they’ve got either.They need the stadium and they need the success on the field and the two are interdependent.
When you have the status and the power and the financial clout that the stadium would bring you, it’s so much easier to retain that status.
At the moment there’s a bigger club elsewhere waiting to take whatever players want to leave Arsenal.Those big clubs will pounce at the end of the season.
You could see the team being decimated, you could see the manager leaving. He could well leave simply because he isn’t able to control the situation as he was able to previously.
The new transfer regulations mean thathe can’t build a team in the way that he did in 1997.As David Dein put it the players can leave at the drop of a wallet.
It’s a nonsense to say : He hasn’t signed his contract. He has honoured it and people should always remember that.
Secondly, if he isn’t gonna re-sign it could be because he isn’t gonna have the power to mould the club in his own image any more,because players can come and go as they choose. The players have taken over the game and they may well kill it.
So the satisfaction he got from being able to build the club has gone, or has been severerely dented. So that’s one option : stay at Arsenal and work within a restricted system.
Option No.2 is to go where he can always choose the strategy and pick the players accordingly and that is as a national team manager. His favourite national job is France and they won’t have him at the moment.
He’d also like Japan but Japan isn’t Germany, Italy or Spain.However, if England do well under Eriksson, these countries could countenance an expatriate like Wenger coming in to run their teams. So that’s option No .2, but it’s a couple of years down the line.
So what could he do in the interim? Well, he could do what he has always been tempted to do.
He could be the coach of a mega continental club, where he would just coach the first team at Real or Barcelona or Internazionale or, more probably,Bayern Munich. He could do that happily for a couple of years before moving on to a national team manager’s job.
So you’ve got these three options, all of which are quite tempting for him. At the moment I would say that re-signing with Arsenal is No.1, and Bayern Munich is No.2, and a national team manager job is No.3.
But within six months we could see him having three No.1
choices. As Bob Dylan said, For the loser now, Will be later to win, Because the times they are a-changin’.
But would you work at a club which already employs
such heavy personalities as Franz Beckenbauer, Uli Hoeness,
Karl-Heinz Rummenigge?
Yes, for a couple of years. Because he’s never done it. He knows he’s gonna move on.
He’s already done what he wanted to do, mould a major English club in his own image, given them a sound financial footing,given them more playing success than they’ve ever dreamed of,and you’ve built them an infrastructure which will help them cope, certainly with the demands of the English game.
And maybe you’ll help to bring them a new stadium which will help them to compete with their continental rivals.
Having done that, why not just be a coach? Take the money and try to win the Scudetto or the Primera Liga or the Bundesliga,with more resources than you’ve ever had before.
As things stand at the moment, Arsene Wenger’s done a
Bosman, he’s done a Steve McManaman. I regarded it as a
cardinal error for Liverpool FC to allow Macca to pretend to
negotiate, and then leave on a free.But now Arsenal have allowed a similar situation to evolve with their manager.
I repeat, he’s honoured his contract. So you can’t fault him.
You can fault the club! It is now November and Arsenal don’t know who their manager will be next season !
Isn’t it ironical that that’s how they were able to get Campbell.Because Tottenham mishandled the situation so badly.If Campbell was gonna go they should have done what Arsenal did with Petit and Overmars. When the die was cast, and they weren’t gonna re-sign, they got their pound of flesh.
That’s the only reason they make a profit, from player sales. They didn’t want to sell those players. But having faced reality then they should have faced reality with Wenger.But because he’s such a special case they didn’t force the issue.
But there’s gotta be life after Arsene Wenger and Patrick Vieira. Neither of them is bigger than the club.
Well, I’m afraid they probably are. Because Arsenal’s a smaller club than it could be. It’s only operating at half its potential. So at the moment they are the people who are performing the miracles that allow Arsenal to punch above their weight.
They have done exceptionally well without the financial
wherewithal of Manchester United or the bigger continental
clubs. They’ve done exceptionally well because of the manager,who has found these players and developed them.
Of course, you might be able occasionally to point to faults,picking the wrong team, playing the wrong tactics, you want him to be more adventurous, you can’t believe that goals are being leaked in the way they are.
Maybe you have worried about Seaman. What on earth is he
doing there now?You’ve had enough warnings about that by
now. But the blind spot is shared by Erikssson .
But the bottom line is that Wenger has brought Arsenal more success, more financial stability, and more renown than they’ve ever had in the modern age. He has fulfilled his brief.
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That was most of our conversation.
Listening back to the tape, it might have been good radio, but only for the small audience who would appreciate this kind of riffing.
Maybe I can write a short preview of the Spurs game on Saturday morning.Maybe Friday afternoon.
Or maybe not, since I can’t solve these technical problems….
15th November 2001.