From Brendan :
Myles,
I was shell-shocked when I heard the news of Monsieur Wenger’s imminent departure from AFC.
I had switched on the radio, and heard someone referring to him in the past tense, and thought for a moment that he had passed away – that the worry lines etched into his face through years of frustrated idealism had masked more than a frailty in just footballing terms.
I ran to my laptop and typed ‘Wenger’ to check. Then I found out. 30 minutes ago or so, the news had broken.
I remember the beginning of the Wenger era with so much fondness, and a sort of elysian glow surrounds it, since I was 26 years old, living in Highgate (well OK, Archway) and was rediscovering the love of football I had as a boy and which had been superseded and almost completely overshadowed by rock’n’roll and (electronic) dance music.
I threw everything into music, just about managing to keep up with studies enough to get a degree (eventually). Then the fickle and superficial music business spewed me out mercilessly and left me on the dump with so many others who didn’t have the resilience to withstand the endless posturing, or the financial back-up to afford the luxury of ‘developing my art’.
It sounds overblown and exaggerated, but football saved me to some extent. I started playing the game again, started exercising properly and feeling positive about myself.
This coincided with the arrival of Arsène Wenger. I had been an Arsenal fan as a child, before music had wrapped me in its mystique and wonder. It seemed that this new era was destined to coincide with a new me.
There is sadness to think about all those good times, when I had flown, soared on the back of the wonderful phenomenon that was Arsenal Football Club in those years, how it had all been reduced in the past 5 years or so to this rather unedifying and – frankly – boring debate about the man who we had attached so much significance to, invested so much belief in.
Over the years, football has become an increasingly large part of my life in a practical sense, becoming a manager in a grassroots youth team, helping to run the club, taking coaching courses.
My knowledge and understanding of the game is many times greater than it was back then. And I see the flaws of Wenger’s teams for what they were, but emotionally it is hard to break the connection with the man I associated with those glory days.
Having missed the Graham era for the most part, while I was busy watching indie bands and writing fanzines, or learning to play bar chords and sing songs that sounded like bad versions of The Pixies or Sonic Youth, I didn’t really grasp how important his contribution to Wenger’s early success was. I suppose watching the film ’89 helped with that. And talking to fans who had been there all the way through. Graham’s obsession with repeating drills, discipline and codes of behaviour, and his very intelligent reading of situations.
Has Wenger really been a greater manager than Graham at Arsenal? I don’t know if I can answer that, but I know that the importance of Graham’s legacy in Arsenal’s success is too often underestimated or not highlighted.
Of course we hear people saying that Wenger revolutionised English football. I don’t know how true that is. It’s a convenient myth in some ways. He was the right man at the right time for those players, the heart of the team – Adams, Parlour, Bould, Seaman, Dixon, Winterburn.
He popularised sensible, rational changes, like the famous diet, that in hindsight were obvious. He was a different type of football man – an intellectual, a thinker – than what we had become used to. His calmness and measured tone was refreshing.
But he wasn’t football’s first intellectual. Reading Jonathan Wilson’s “Inverting the Pyramid”, they were intellectualising about football already in 1930s Vienna.
And the great Arsene Wenger teams did not play any kind of ‘revolutionary’ football. It was effective, fast, mixing it up between short and long, and reliant on the guts and hard work of skilful grafters like Parlour, Vieira, Gilberto and the famous back 5.
It was only in 2006 that he seemed to fix on a footballing ideology, and that is when things started to go wrong, properly.
He appeared to want to recreate the Spanish style epitomised by Xavi and Iniesta, the two greatest midfielders of their generation, the attritional passing style. He has created some players who are excellent passers, who have technique in abundance, but lack heart and passion. Perhaps in his striving for harmony in the dressing room he has avoided difficult or complex characters – or sidelined them if he had them in his squad – who, if he had been a better/different manager, he would have been able to harness and turn into giants.
I’m a bit conflicted about the match against Atletico tomorrow.
Arsenal probably need the fates to be kind to them, again, to have a chance. Maybe Atletico will make a mistake, maybe Arsenal will show the intensity they showed only for short periods in the home leg, and that will force an opening. On balance, Wenger probably deserves a glorious exit.
I will remember the painful second half of his tenure at Arsenal with decidedly mixed feelings, but I’m sticking with the positives for now. He has developed a decent group of homegrown players who are very good technically, and he’s given them a chance to play on the big stage.
If the next manager can give them a bit more self-belief and shake them up a bit, impose a bit of urgency on them, he will have left a decent legacy. The next manager also has to coach his players how not to “get done” by a simple ball over the top a la Manchester City – Aguero v Mustafi. Shape, cover, balance etc. Basics. Same at Under-12 as it is in the Premier League. The best bet against Atletico is to not even let them have the ball for long enough to even try it.
I hope you’ll be able to enjoy the game, Myles. All the best.
Informative review of Inverting here: http://arsenalnewsreview.co.uk/wp/a-classic-book-for-t/