Robert Exley
They say the Brits, in comparison to the French, have always had a suspicious adversity to intellectualism that almost borders on hostility. In his 1963 book ‘A State of England’ Anthony Hartley claimed that “no people has ever distrusted and despised the intellect and intellectuals more than the British”. In some ways this very British attitude to the intellectuals even afflicts the British intellectuals themselves, for example the author George Orwell once stated that ‘there are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them’. The poet W.H. Auden also too once quipped with a tinge of Francophobia that ‘To the man in the street, who I’m sorry to say is a keen observer of life; the word ‘Intellectual’ suggests straight away a man who’s untrue to his wife’ (Disclaimer: any resemblance to a real person in either Auden and Orwell’s examples, whether their reputation as footballing genius is living or dead, is purely coincidental)
European political and social commentator Dr Roderick Parkes on the other hand, disputes that we Brits do actually have such a mistrust of intellectualism per se, but rather intellectual arrogance. He states with regard to British political life that ‘all intellectual exercises are necessarily abstract and far removed from the complex realities of life. This in itself is not a problem. But if politicians are so arrogant as to impose their grand thinking on British society, it can only end in disaster’. Many say that this very British attitude was born from our nervous reaction to the French Revolution as it was happening just across the water in 1789, the most noted of which came from Whig politician Edmund Burke. Burke had criticised the intellectual basis of France’s revolution, which centred on the then leftfield ideas of liberty and the rights of man, for their over-idealism and ignoring the complexities of human nature and society. Burke had stated ‘‘what is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to food or to medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In this deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor’.
A lot of the British antipathy to intellectualism has probably shaped the attitudes of many in the game toward French Economics Graduate Arsene Wenger. This is particularly the case among that little club of British managers who, conventionally speaking, are among the category of the least intellectually refined and on the whole, un-academic of us Brits. This club that Wenger has had numerous run-ins with include Tony Pulis, Sam Allardyce, Alan Pardew, Alex McLeish, Phil Brown and of course the daddy of them all - the old Govan shop steward son of toil himself, Alex Ferguson. Back in 2003, Fergie, dismissing the notion that Wenger was more intelligent, said of his rival, ‘Speaks five languages! I’ve got a 15 year old boy from the Ivory Coast who speaks five languages!’
Sadly the arrogance of intellectualism, which every reactionary Brit since 1789 has pleaded in mitigation, seems to be increasingly embodied in Arsene Wenger. As a natural intellectual, Wenger loves his football to be articulate, being of course the man that helped to mould the skills of Henry, Van Persie, Cesc Fabregas, Samir Nasri, Ashley Cole, Freddie Ljungberg and Patrick Vieira as well as giving a new lease of life to the existing skills of Bergkamp, Pires, Silvynho and Overmars. But let’s not be under any illusions – a team made up entirely of footballing articulacy is no more functional than a society composed of nothing but intellectuals. A society doesn’t need its bin men to have a PHD. However, in order to meet a society’s most immediate basic needs, society requires its dustmen long before it requires its cultured intellectuals. Let’s be entirely straight about this, Stoke are on the whole, the dustmen of the Premiership – you know, the Paul Calf-esque figure who hates the students. With the lumpen attributes of the Rory Delap long throw and Ryan Shawcross’s thuggery, the nearest they get to get to articulacy is Arsenal reject Jermaine Pennant. To those of us who have spent a considerable amount of time in semi-skilled/unskilled employment, you would recognise Pennant as the equivalent of one of those who often shows a flair for things far above the station of a bin man, but is where he is through natural laziness or spending too many nights in the student union bar on the beer when he should have been working on his dissertation.
A starker realisation on Sunday however was watching Robert Huth, who is very much an imposing ‘immovable object’ figure in the mould of the central defence which Wenger had inherited in 1996. The uncultured, un-articulate, meat and drink, old fashioned centre halves are the bin men of football – they do an unglamorous job, but as long as someone clears the mess up who cares, right? Robert Huth is of the exact breed we require at the back and have long missed since the likes of Keown, Adams and Bould hung up their boots. Also, he’s spent a lot of the season as Stoke’s top scorer from a batch of goals mainly from headers, set pieces and long range shots – three departments where Arsenal have been utterly useless for too long. Also, he only cost Stoke £5 million when he signed for them in 2009 from Middlesbrough. Wenger’s apologists may whinge about how people fail to understand the financial constraints the man is under, but Robert Huth for £5million is exactly the kind of bargain central defender that Wenger’s footballing ‘intellectualism’ would have been utterly blind to. In the defenders we do have – Vermaelen, Kosielny and Djourou – they are decent footballers, but none of them can defend for toffee. In fact, let’s be honest, they’re far too reminiscent of a batch of job seeking Philosophy graduates going for a bin man job they’ve spotted at the local job centre plus, in that their collective schooling holds no relevance for the job at hand, where practically and a willingness to get your hands dirty is everything.
