Peter Le Beau
I find Talk Sport the intellectual equivalent of a game of marbles but, driving home from the Leeds Cup-tie still buzzing from Thierry’s marvellous return, I was surprised that Jason Cundy expressed very obvious disbelief when an Arsenal fan concluded by saying he thought it was time for Wenger to go. “Surely”, he asked, “there can’t be any other Arsenal supporters out there who feel the same”, making a quite reasonable caller feel fairly intimidated. Only when further Gooners, not convinced by having to call on a 34-year-old former hero to save us against a very average Championship side, supported the first fan’s call, did the penny begin to drop at Talk Sport Towers that there was a serious tide of dissatisfaction among Arsenal fans.
On Monday, I had an email from a Man United fan who was sitting at the E******s on Sunday among Arsenal supporters. He was actually quite shaken by the animosity from the fans towards Wenger when he took off Oxlade-Chamberlain. He felt there needed to be a sight more gratitude after all that Wenger had done for the club.
For me, the decision became clearer during the anaemic first half display against Stoke at the Britannia Ground last year. A side ostensibly contending for the title went into meltdown in the most gutless and unnecessary way. To lose to Stoke is unpleasant, but to be outplayed by them really indicated that the Wenger way wasn’t working any more. It was clear to me that what Wenger saw (or said he saw) was profoundly different from what was happening on the pitch.
So, as I went home after the game, I was pretty clear that we need a change of manager. I tried to take a straw poll of mates about who the new man should be. It was not an easy task. Whatever you think of Wenger, he has delivered Champions League football on a relative shoestring and his sides play some of the best football in the country. Would David Moyes, Alan Pardew, Paolo de Canio or Martin O’Neill be able to do both of these things? Of course that’s setting our sights too low. We are looking at Pep Guardiola, Jose Mourinho or Carlo Ancelotti surely? Really, would any of those three swap life with their current clubs to move to Arsenal? If not, surely we could identify the next European superstar - the Levante manager, Klopp at Dortmund or the Valencia coach. In last year’s Gooner survey, I had identified Andre Villas-Boas as my choice to succeed Wenger. Not such a great choice possibly? These European wonderboys aren’t all they are cracked up to be - remember Juande Ramos? Never mind: the answer is an Arsenal legend - Henry, Vieira or Tony Adams, fresh from his exile in Azerbaijan. The more you think about it logically, the more difficult it is.
But really, that’s not the major problem, huge though it is. The problem as I see it is that fundamental change is needed right across the club, and it begins at the very top. We are owned by an American who is seriously into building a massive empire of sports franchises. The problem is that a lot of them are fairly mediocre, and Kroenke remains aloof and silent as he calculates the minimum that he needs to do to protect his investment. He went from “not our sort” (what a hopelessly out-of-date and pointlessly elitist remark that was by PHW) to the partner of choice because he wasn’t a hard man from Russia who really wasn’t going to be their sort. In his one very enlightening remark about the Glazers, Kroenke has revealed everything we hoped not to know about his philosophy. Arsenal is a commodity protected by his man Ivan, who was obviously appointed as the guardian of Kroenke’s interests some time in advance of a fairly obvious put-up job. Danny Fiszman’s sad illness, and the decision to dispense with David Dein, got rid of any Arsenal-based dynamism on the board. As a result, we now have a club that is slowly and perceptibly declining as a major force while returning very tidy profits to Kroenke, who has a bigger task in rejuvenating the worst franchise in the NFL (which he is likely to uproot and remove to Los Angeles - fancy watching your future football in the USA?).
We have a hopeless, hapless embarrassment of a Chairman, a CEO being operated by remote control from 5,000 miles away, and an owner who is so bowled over by acquiring Arsenal that he’s watched us all of three times. I’ve watched them as much as that in a week!
So, even if Kroenke feels that Wenger has lost his lustre, who else is he going to appoint who is good enough to change all that needs to be changed on the field and who would be willing to work with a Board of Directors who have just let Wenger get on with it for far too long and have lost their competitive drive? Who would be happy to keep them competitive for a transfer budget that is dwarfed by the major clubs in the Premier League? Who would be willing to lose his best players on a regular basis because money, not success, is what really matters to Silent Stan? And we’re supposed to be grateful because he hasn’t dumped a mound of debt on the club...yet? Oh thank-you, Mr Kroenke; I only pay £3,000 a year for two season-tickets. Please let me know if it's not enough.
The Board and a lot of the supporters have been hoodwinked. Usmanov may not have the perfect CV, but at least he likes football and is an Arsenal man. So getting rid of Wenger is only the beginning of what might need to be done to revitalise the club. Oddly, thinking about it, I think Wenger, with a good coach, David Dein breathing down his neck, and Usmanov as an ambitious owner who will make Abramovich look like a miser, would be able to make Arsenal competitive again.
He needs to reinvent himself. All the innovation that he brought in 1996, the new diets and training methods, the statistical analysis and the emphasis on pace and power, have been copied by lesser men. All the brilliant networks with overseas contacts have been replicated by all the top clubs. Liverpool have 26 people working in their Academy and they are below us in the League. Can he do it? Personally, I doubt it but, although he has turned Arsenal into his personal fiefdom, he’d have to change with a new owner. That’s an even bigger problem than substitution by rote of the best player on the field for a useless Russian. It might be a different Russian who is the best hope of getting a successful club back.
