Despite hinting that he might secure at least one more midfielder before the transfer window closed, deadline day came and went without Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger adding to his squad. So when the players report back to their clubs later this week after the international break, with Wenger keeping his fingers crossed that the injury list at Arsenal has grown no longer, he will be working with a squad of wholly familiar faces.
Among Arsenal fans many will say that’s fine, echoing their trusted manager’s view that while a new face might have been nice, it wasn’t essential. Others, more impatient, more vocal, less tolerant and certainly more nervous, will wail that Wenger’s short-sightedness has again written off the club’s chances of silverware before the season is even out of nappies.
Apart from an anaemic and aberrant display against Fulham, when three early points were squandered, Arsenal have made a decent start to the season, winning four of their five games in Premier League and Champions League, scoring ten goals and conceding just that one against Fulham (from a set-piece - a corner - which highlighted a long-standing failing). Moreover, in their two most recent matches - against FC Twente and Newcastle United at the Emirates, where they won 4-0 and 3-0, respectively, the Gunners looked fluent and incisive.
Yet they continue to be the one member of the Premier League’s ’Big Four ’ deemed most vulnerable by pundits and critics to an erosion of their status. Given the evidence of last season in particular, when the knives were also out for Wenger and his team pre-season, yet they lost just three League games and were pipped to the title by Manchester United by the narrow margin of four points, Liverpool may be more at risk than Arsenal should the likes of Manchester City or Aston Villa convert potential into achievement and secure a Champions League place at someone else‘s expense.
The case against Wenger seems to gather momentum almost weekly, but does it bear serious scrutiny?
One of the popular brickbats thrown his way is that he has subordinated the winning of trophies to the greater glory of playing entertaining, attractive football. Yet it’s a claim almost too banal to justify with a response. Of course Wenger and all his players have a winning mentality. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t last five minutes in the rarefied atmosphere of current top-flight football. They certainly would not be able to point to 12 successive years of top-four finishes in the Premier League, or 11 consecutive qualifications for the group stage of the Champions League.
Wenger’s Arsenal have won three Premier League titles, four FA Cups, two domestic doubles, and have been beaten in two European and two domestic finals, as well as finishing runners-up in the Premier League five times. That, surely, is the record of someone with a winning mentality. True, they haven’t actually lifted a trophy since 2005, but for anyone seriously to suggest that’s because they are no longer too concerned about winning silverware is frankly bizarre.
From an English perspective, in any one season, there are three domestic trophies up for grabs, and two in European competition (though the latter are mutually exclusive - in other words you can’t win both the Champions League and the Uefa Cup in the same campaign). That means an awful lot of teams are disappointed every season. Does it also mean they are not interested in winning?
Last season, the winners were Manchester United (who claimed the two biggest), Portsmouth, Tottenham and Zenit St Petersburg. No Chelsea or Liverpool on that list (and on the European stage, no Barcelona, AC Milan or Juventus, either). Yet for some reason Arsenal are the club popularly perceived to be most in decline. Where Wenger can be criticised is that while he has not given up on winning, he has been prepared to wait for trophies while his young players mature. And - to the derision of people like Jose Mourinho - he has been allowed to ‘get away with’ that because the Arsenal board and the majority of Arsenal fans have afforded him the luxury of time, believing on past evidence that his team will soon be winning trophies again.
In the last three seasons, when the Gunners failed to capture any silverware, they did reach a Champions League final, a League Cup final and a Champions League quarter-final while continuing to qualify for Europe’s premier club tournament, so the interval since their last trophy has not exactly been a barren wasteland - particularly since the football they’ve played along the way has often been outstanding to watch.
Nevertheless, there are plenty of fans who would put up with dull, functional football as long as it yielded cups and titles. They are growing tired of Wenger’s ‘principles,’ whereby fantasy is always given a higher priority than pragmatism. Rather than allow another talented youngster to find his feet and begin to flourish, they want to see some seasoned campaigners brought in to stiffen the defence and midfield, and at least one world class striker acquired who will terrorise opposition defenders on a consistent basis and produce a quantifiable end-product.
These fans begin to despair, therefore, of Wenger’s contentious transfer policy. The notion that Arsenal’s building of the Emirates Stadium put such a strain on the club’s finances that they can no longer compete at the top end of the market is consistently refuted by the board. Only this week, director and second-largest shareholder Danny Fiszman told the News of the World: "We are a profitable club, self-sustaining, the cash is there. It's up to the manager. Our repayments on the stadium are under £20million a year and it’s producing an extra £50million a year. Our annual costs are fixed for 25 years. They will not rise. Our income will rise and our gate income will rise. Those payments are fixed. So in not too long it will look like a few pennies."
So Wenger has the money to splash out on a Barry or a Torres, even a Robinho, should he wish to. The fact of the matter is, he chooses not to. He prefers to recruit raw, unhoned or at least relatively unsung talent and mould it into the Wenger way of playing, which has become the Arsenal way of playing.
It has to be said it is neither a foolproof nor an inflexible approach, but then no manager boasts a 100% success rate in player transactions. Wenger has been prepared to bring in older, established stars from time to time: the likes of Sol Campbell, Oleg Luzhny, Davor Suker, Robert Pires, Tomas Rosicky, Jens Lehmann, William Gallas and Mikael Silvestre were all famous but no spring chickens when they arrived at the club. On the other hand some of his recruits hardly covered themselves in glory while at Arsenal: Jose Antonio Reyes, Richard Wright, Francis Jeffers, Jermaine Pennant, Pascal Cygan, Luis Boa Morte, Stefan Malz, Christopher Wreh, Igors Stepanovs, Philippe Senderos and (to date) Emmanuel Eboue, for example.
But against all that you have to set the great successes in the transfer market of Wenger’s Arsenal reign: Thierry Henry, Patrick Vieira, Emmanuel Petit, Marc Overmars, Nicolas Anelka, Pires, Freddie Ljungberg, Cesc Fabregas, Lauren, Kolo Toure, Gilberto Silva, Edu, Kanu, Bacary Sagna, Emmanuel Adebayor, Mathieu Flamini, Alexander Hleb…. Samir Nasri? Aaron Ramsey? Carlos Vela?
Nevertheless, Wenger stands accused of doing too little in the transfer market at a time when his main rivals are busily snapping up ‘big names,’ and thus allowing those rivals to leave Arsenal trailing in their slipstream. That argument doesn’t really stand up either: alarmists may claim that the gulf between Arsenal and the other members of the ‘Big Four’ is widening, yet last season, the Gunners reduced the gap between themselves and Manchester United from 21 points in 2006-07 to just four points, and between themselves and Chelsea from 15 points to two. As for Liverpool, the Arsenal went from level pegging in 2006-07 to seven points better off. Wenger’s team also finished last season with 18 more points than Everton, 23 more than Aston Villa, 28 more than Manchester City and 37 more than Tottenham. True, there is no room for complacency, but nor is there compelling evidence of terminal decline.
Ah, say the critics, but what about this summer? Wenger allowed Flamini, Hleb and Gilberto to leave the club without adequately replacing them, and as a result Arsenal are now (or will soon be shown to be) critically weakened in midfield. It is argued that he could and should have done more to keep those players by making them feel more valued - in other words, paying them a lot more money. Perhaps; but if a player wants to leave a club, my gut instinct is always to let him go rather than bribe him to stay. In the case of Flamini and Hleb, it seemed that AC Milan and Barcelona, respectively, exerted a special pull on the players concerned that they found irresistible. This despite Emmanuel Petit’s telling revelation this week that, “The only regret I have in life is that I left Arsenal for Barcelona.” And who knows, with youth and hunger on their side, Nasri or Ramsey may yet prove to be better long-term bets than those who left the club this summer.
Having said that, it is tantalising bordering on frustrating to learn that Wenger failed with a deadline-day bid to sign Xabi Alonso from Liverpool. He is a player who might well have complemented Fabregas effectively in the centre of midfield: the Basque and the Catalan have dovetailed neatly enough in the middle of the park for Spain. Personally I am no fan of transfer windows (I liked it when you could wake up on a November morning to read that your team had signed a new player out of the blue and he’d be making his debut at the weekend). But it strikes me as ludicrous brinkmanship to leave potentially pivotal deals to the final day or hours. Manchester United nearly lost Dimitar Berbatov that way; Chelsea did lose Robinho and it seems that Arsenal missed out on Alonso. If Wenger thought he could do a job for the Gunners he should have made Liverpool an acceptable offer in good time. After all, how often is a player’s fee significantly reduced on deadline day? If anything the price goes up.
Price is not the only consideration, of course. A buying manager should feel confident that a prospective signing can fit in with the existing personnel and the style of play they are all used to. Given Arsenal’s distinctive way of playing the game, that’s a key consideration for Wenger. Having the talent and the reputation is all very well, but will a big name necessarily fit in smoothly? Shevchenko and Veron are just two whose experiences are a reminder that square pegs and round holes exist in football teams too. The corollary of that is underlined by the relative lack of success enjoyed by players who’ve left Wenger’s Arsenal, where they excelled playing a particular way.
As to Mourinho’s jibe that Wenger is effectively insulated against the consequences of failure by an indulgent, adoring board and fans, it was Fiszman again who this week suggested otherwise.
He said Wenger's head “is on the block” after three trophy-less seasons, insisting that while he is still fully behind the Frenchman, Wenger isn't bullet-proof. "We believe in him but it's his head on the block in the end," Fiszman told the News of the World.
But he added: "People talk just because Flamini left. He had one great year. One. Before then, he was just a squad player. And while Alex [Hleb] was a lovely player at holding the ball, there was no end-product. We have swapped him for Nasri, who already has two goals."
Clearly Wenger’s job is not yet hanging by a thread. But by his adherence to a definite view of the game (which some call principled and others decry as stubbornness or arrogance) he is putting himself on the line and needs to be able to back his judgement with a swift return to trophy-winning ways, ideally this season. Can he achieve that? I won’t be betting against it. Nor, presumably, will AC Milan, who were today linked with Wenger as a possible successor to their current manager, Carlo Ancelotti. The Rossoneri obviously see plenty in the Frenchman to admire. So, still, do Arsenal, who for my money remain a lot better off with him than they would be without him.
Source: Graham Lister
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