Hello Myles,
Like Lawrence Bowen, I find myself compelled to read your writing.
Despite disagreeing with 90% of your murmurings I often find myself refreshing my iPhone and PC’s internet browser. I thought :Why do I do it to myself? It only winds me up! After a walking the beagles through the forest I now understand why. It’s because I (like most football fans) am a masochist.
There is no doubting that you are still capable of delivering some excellent observations, well thought out, and hit the nail on the head. However, it appears that it is amongst some below-par performances (due to your frustrations). Your posting of people’s responses are inspired. This is bringing out the champion in you.
Being a psychologist and an avid football fan, I take on board many thoughts and accounts on the “beautiful” game. One that has remained rattling around in my consciousness, more than most, is that by the excellent French journalist Philippe Auclair.
In light of some rather despicable media coverage to the Aaron Ramsey leg break, Philippe stated that only in this country do we pay such homage to ex-players. In other countries people listen to well-educated intellectuals talk about football. I would rather this than listen to players who were devoid of an education because they were talented with the ball.
Football is like a chess game. And like chess, anyone can understand the rules, and how to play them, only intelligent philosophers can forward the game. Your pundits, ex-professionals, and Talk-sport listening fans fall into the first category. They understand the game. No doubt some of them can play the game. Very few of them can read the game, with even fewer being able to progress the sport. Arsene can! Arsene is able to introduce new strategies to counter the dominant style.
You fall into the second smaller category, but you’re allowing yourself to be influenced by those who don’t. Your best observation is stating that Arsenal is not a super club. As you have previously said, the current board will always hold Arsenal back. Ivan and Arsene may be the only ones that could promote us from being an upper-middling English club, as Roman Abramovich, Peter Kenyon and Bruce Buck did with Chelsea.
Arsene Wenger is a football philosopher. If you look back through his time in the premiership he has evolved the game. Look at Man Utd (the only team worth analysing) prior to AW’s two great teams. Sir Alex has interpreted and bettered. He has never created. Creativity is rare. After the 98 team SAF decided physicality and pace was the way forward. He paid the extra money to replicate and evolve Arsenal’s swift counter attacking football. He could take AW’s recipe, and use better ingredients in order to make a tastier dish. He did not create that team style. He did however win the champions league and three straight titles. AW couldn’t compete, so he went on to create a new recipe.
AW then created the “Invincibles”. A team with no striker. No Striker!! That has never been seen before. Where the win strategy relied on movement, pace and guile. Again the board did not allow him to buy the ingredients the recipe deserved. Sir Alex has since copied and evolved this blueprint. He was able to snatch Cristiano Ronaldo from under AW’s clutches. They bought Rooney and Tevez and became European champions. AW must wish he was at Utd.
AW is now trying to create a third recipe for success. This team is close. They are much closer than you give them credit for. AW is not the problem, the board is. So is 90% of Britain.
When Barcelona went 5 years without winning their league, they were building. The club was building upon their philosophy and ideology. This has seen them win two Champions Leagues. They even won the World Cup!
Barcelona was able to take the best ingredients from around the world and create a football masterpiece. Ronaldinho was the catalyst. Arsenal is still looking for theirs. The problem of cooking a gourmet meal is that fact you need the best ingredients. You cannot cook a Michelin star dish with ingredients you find in Asda!
Cesc is not the catalyst, he is the backbone from the team, but the catalyst will see the team come together. I too thought Arshavin was the ingredient that would see us win the league. We need someone who can ignite the geniuses in the team. When that happens we will be able to sit at the top table.
I see the thinking behind AW’s new recipe. Technique, passing and movement are the fundamentals. It’s not hard to see it. It’s even easier to see that it works. Barcelona and more recently Spain have shown it works. It works there because they are void of the moronic English press.
In the SkySports News, Talksport and tabloid culture we live in, we will always listen to ex-professionals, because they have “played the game”. 98% of ex-professionals will always harp back to when they played. Why? It’s because that is when they understood the game. Football has moved on.
Before I conclude, football in this country needs to get to grips with the times. The tradition behind the British game is dated and is holding Arsene back. Dr Samuel Allardyce and his disciples are the issue. The “get in their face”, and “show them you’re there” are two euphemisms that are holding back AW and now England. The Kaiser was correct, England do play “kick and rush” football. The roll up your sleeves attitude does not suffice in today’s game. It’s all about technique these days. Physicality is for dinosaurs. Have we realised this? No! What do we do? We give an honorary doctorate to the problem. I repeat “Dr Sam Allardyce”!
If Arsenal and now England are to win, there needs to be a change from British football’s identity. People need to stop thinking Arsenal are soft, and don’t like it “up ‘em”. We need to realise that we should protect players of technique and not allow them to have their legs broken. Britain is an island country, with an island mentality. It is insular.
We need to think beyond our shores. If this does not happen (or if AW is not prepared to accept this will never happen), AW may have to concede that even though he has the perfect recipe, it is wasted on the English!
Sincerely.
Myles replies :
There is something deeply warped about people reading ANR when they disagree with 90% of what I write.
But there’s a lot to be said for walking your beagles in the forest. Or even walking in the forest without dogs
Watching Almunia trying to be an Arsenal goalkeeper for the last three years, and playing a total of 160 games since he joined the club, you must be a very tolerant, forgiving man, and, above all, an extremely patient man.
How much longer are you willing to wait for the mythical success that’s always just round the corner? Having bought the future for the last five years, will you buy it for another five?
Since you’re are a man who takes the trouble to write a coherent 1,000-word letter to ANR, my guess is that you’ll go on deluding yourself till 2015 at least.
About 12 years ago, Wenger used to talk about knowing when to go, knowing when a coach should move on. Now he shows no signs of moving on. Mark my words : He’s looking for an unbeaten run of games into October and a two-year extension.
GET SERIOUS : You can’t compare Arsenal with Barcelona because Barcelona are, historically, a very ambitious club who signed phenomenal players and created spectacles: Cruyff, Maradona, Romario, Stoichkov, Figo, Ronaldo, Rivaldo, and Ronaldinho, as you mention.
You’re 100% right to point out that ex-players dominate TV coverage too much. Where are the educated, football-loving journalists? In a stupid culture, BBC, Sky and ITV have to have a face interviewing a face. These days footballers only want to talk to other footballers or ex-footballers.
In England we are ignorant and we will remain ignorant. Having watched Capello’s morons win only one game out of four, and seen them crash to their biggest-ever tournament defeat by 4-1, I’m still wondering whether I will ever write about England again
Premier League superstars live in gated mansions. They’re obscenely rich and very insecure, very scared. Cut off from the world they used to know, they’ve lost touch with reality. Many inhabit a parallel universe. If you’re not a Premier League player, they don’t want to talk to you.
It’s different in other countries.
Last Saturday my pal Darryl rang and we had a long chat. He is the Pogues bass-player and I used to manage him in another band. He lives in Munich and London.
We talked about Nigel De Jong, Howard Webb, England’s World Cup flop, the FA, the Bundesliga, the Allianz Stadium, the festivals the Pogues are doing this summer, loads of things.
Darryl said German players are not paralysed by fame like ours.
“They’re all quite down-to-earth. Schweinsteiger lives round the corner from me. He’s often seen on the street. He goes to a coffee shop with his mate, it’s all quite normal.”