Kevin Whitcher
The bookies had Spurs down as favourites in this fixture for the first time in many a year, and so it proved. At the end of the match, I was left thinking, what a shadow of an Arsene Wenger team we are watching these days. Not only was the defending at times atrocious, the possession was so often slack. The Spurs side that beat Arsenal were nothing special, but they didn’t need to be.
There are some that ventured this might be Arsene Wenger’s last game in charge. If only it were so. Stan Kroenke’s words of support for the manager last week had some preferring he’d stayed silent. It made bleak reading for those fans aware enough to realize that change in the manager’s office is the only way to get the club out of its current malaise.
There was a stat in the Sky Sports build-up to the game that in his 15 years at the club, Arsene Wenger had made a net spend of £12 million in the transfer market. To achieve what he has with such parsimony is unquestionably a remarkable achievement, but the point is that time waits for no-one. Wenger has been a great manager for the club, but the same was said of Brian Clough, whose final match in charge of Nottingham Forest saw the club relegated. Sometimes, you can allow people to stay on too long because of what they have achieved before. It is an irony that Wenger does not do this with his players, with his contract rules for over 30s, but when it comes to himself, his decline in managerial ability sees long contracts with no decrease in financial reward. The man is a busted flush and the players he puts out reflect the reality that this is a team on the slide.
Even forgetting the collapse at the end of the last season, the league record this season is Played 7, Won 2, Drawn 1 Lost 4. The attendances at the Sunderland and Stoke matches will be announced as close to 60,000 as the club’s staff have to work like dogs to sell 12,000 non-season ticket seats to the general public given that they are certainly not going to sell out to silver and red members. But there will be something like 10,000 season ticket holders that paid for their seats who do not bother to show up. And many of them, next May, will decide against renewing. Arsenal will not make the Champions League, so missing out on the attendant revenue and the gap between them and the top three will become the kind of gulf that used to exist between Arsenal and Tottenham.
The grand plan of investing in youth has reaped the dividends it was always going to. Inconsistency and failure to win the matches that matter. Now, we have an emergency repair job in the form of cheap experience that could do a job in a prepared, professional outfit, but are unable to perform the kind of Red Adair rescue mission required at Arsenal. It’s all gone Pete Tong, and with a huge wage bill to boot.
The legacy of allowing the manager so much power without any restraint is that, by the time UEFA’s financial fair play kicks in - even if it has any teeth - it will be too late. Wenger will probably still be in charge in 2014 if Kroenke is still the owner, and the club will have settled into a kind of Everton/Aston Villa pattern of league achievement. The stadium will on occasion play to 35,000 fans, but will still sell out for the bigger matches. The club will sometimes, but not always, partake in the Europa League. Current captain Robin van Persie will be winning medals with a new club that prioritises trophies over profit. Even Jack Wilshere will consider fresh pastures.
The good times are over, the final nail in the coffin the departure of Cesc Fabregas, who made the team look like contenders for the first three quarters of recent seasons.
Yes, it is only an away defeat in the north London derby, but I ask the AKBs to look at the bigger picture. P7 W2 D1 L4 Points 7. Since the Carling Cup Final, P18 W4 D7 L7 Points 19. The club will not be relegated, but it is just possible they may finish in the bottom half of the table unless things start to improve dramatically. Is that good enough for one of the top five money generating teams in Europe?
At the Lane, Arsenal occasionally produced glimpses of what once made the team something special. Echoes of better days. The goal was well taken and a few other chances fashioned. But the negatives far outweighed the positives, and to claim the Gunners might have deserved a draw and that Tottenham’s first goal was a handball would be clutching at straws. Spurs were poor in my view, but the visitors did not have enough to beat them. What was most worrying is that a supposedly committed defender like Bacary Sagna could not be bothered to track Van der Vaart with any sense of purpose in the build-up to the opening goal. And therein lie the danger signs. The lack of concentration in the build-up to Spurs’ winner stank of an absence of work on the training ground.
It looks like the 2011 Shareholders Q&A event with the manager will never take place, and the reason is that the manager does not want to hear justified criticism of his methods, rather than a full dairy. It is believed he will attend the club’s October AGM, which takes place after the home matches against Sunderland and Stoke. If he does, he will tell the assembled what an achievement it has been to qualify for the Champions League for 14 consecutive seasons. And although he gambled with selection against Olympiacos, as this season will be his last attempt at the competition for the foreseeable future, expect all the eggs to be in the European basket from here on.
It’s a slow, tortuous slide into mediocrity, one that will run and run until enough people stop caring enough to pay stupid prices to watch average football. Some say, well who would you get to replace Wenger? My answer would be anyone, a change is what is required more than anything just to freshen the place up. The players are not playing for the manager anymore and I am struggling to recall a more lacklustre approach to a north London derby. The easiest option would be to simply install Steve Bould as a caretaker manager for the rest of the campaign, which many wrote off after Old Trafford, and at least allow him to consolidate the defensive side of the team’s play over the course of the next few months, so that things are healthier for the new man the board go for next summer.
But you just know Arsene will be in charge this time next year, living off the memories and the balance sheets. One day, of course, it must end. Arsene Wenger is not physically immortal. But as long as the board’s main objective is profit rather than glory, nothing is going to change until they carry the man from Alsace out in a wooden box.
The current issue of the Gooner can be bought online here
Kevin Whitcher’s newly updated version of the book co-written with Alex Fynn, ‘Arsènal: The Making of a Modern Superclub’ is available in paperback from publishers Vision Sports for a reduced price of £6.99 including postage if you use the promo code ‘Gooner’ on the page that appears after you click ‘buy now’. Click here to order.
