You know that things have reached an unsatisfactory state of affairs when you can no longer be bothered to read any more stories about the hobby (obsession??) that consumes most of your waking hours.

A lot of us have currently reached that state at the moment. I was intrigued to see a Manchester United fan claiming that Arsenal have been treated with kid gloves by the media compared with the Man United situation when Van Nistelrooy left. What planet is that man on? The news of Henry’s departure has brought out every gloating anti-Arsenal journalist and blogger in the Universe. There are a hell of a lot of them. I’m particularly amused to see Spurs fans claim they will annihilate us next season with no Henry in the side. Did nobody tell them he didn’t play against them last season and they still came off worse in every game!?

But I don’t want to speak about Henry and the way we will adapt to his departure today. It will be much easier to assess our chances when we put together the squad we’re going to operate with next season and something tells me there will be a lot of change to come.

What preoccupies me on the evening of Henry’s departure is the way Arsenal’s Board operates. I am on three company boards and spent this evening reading papers for an upcoming meeting. It struck me that Arsenal Board meetings must be unusual affairs. Here is a Board that knows a huge amount about finance and next to nothing about football!

I wonder how Arsene Wenger reacts to these Board meetings? Does he find himself frustrated by having to justify himself to a lot of old geezers who know nothing about the business at hand or does he admire their financial acumen and their ability to securitize the huge loan they have had to take?

Wenger is, as we know a prudent and responsible man himself so perhaps he relishes the freedom he has been given to develop the club his way. As has often been pointed out perhaps he knows he would never get such freedom… and such respect at any other club.

The departure of David Dein seems to be portrayed as a massive alteration in Wenger’s relationship with the club, but possibly Wenger found him the only person he could speak to about football on the Board. I had the pleasure of meeting Dein on a few occasions and he struck me as someone who was almost obsessively concerned with what it would take to make Arsenal the best side on the planet. That is the difference between him and the old money on the Arsenal Board. I really doubt that most of them wake with the sort of longing Dein described to give him “a winning team”.

Dein and Wenger seem to have a deep telepathy and respect borne out of ambition. People who support Arsenal sometimes accuse Wenger of lacking ambition - as if a man who came to Arsenal when they changed for training in a glorified shed on a ground they didn’t own and who has overseen the move to the best club stadium in Europe just wants to idle along in the slow lane of European football. In fact that is probably where our Board naturally see Arsenal’s place.

It is easy to attack Peter Hill-Wood for being an anachronism, a bumbling old buffer who is a PR disaster because all the evidence suggests that he is! I’d love to sit with him during a game and discuss the match with him - does he really understand what’s going on down on the pitch? And if he joined one of our Arsenal trivia teams would he remember Joe Haverty and Tommy Coakley and the attendance when we played Leeds at Highbury in 1966?

It may be unfair to claim so but I am sure I know the answer. In an era when football strategy is inextricably tied up with finance it’s no good knowing about one and not understanding the other. I want my team led by someone who lives and dies by the club, who has football flowing through his veins and who isn’t satisfied by being solvent and mid-table. Peter Hill-Wood, Sir Chips Keswick, Lady Nina Bracewell-Smith (who looks after the family shareholding because her husband doesn’t like football!!) don’t represent or embody what I want Arsenal to be or where I want them to go.

I want my Board to ache for success and to explore every legitimate means for achieving it. That is how I behave as a director and how I expect Arsenal’s board to behave - somehow I think this lot may come up a bit short.

This feels uncommonly like the dark days of 1995 when George Graham was fired and the club floundered like a rudderless dinghy. The solution they chose was Bruce Rioch and it was David Dein who persuaded them to ditch him after one season for Wenger. I wonder if Hill-Wood considered that consistent with the Arsenal way.

The inability of the club to communicate meaningfully now is uncannily reminiscent of then although if Hill-Wood’s pompous ramblings about Stan Kroenke “and his sort” is the alternative perhaps it might be better if he said nothing. Developing a marketing arrangement with a company does not seem appropriate if it is with someone you disapprove of so wholeheartedly - even if you don’t know them!

The future for Arsenal seems to be portrayed as either Kroenke or Dein sail in to rescue the club and persuade Wenger to stay on or the old guard see off the nasty American interloper and Arsene walks with the consequence that the best players leave and the club falls apart.

Basically I feel that if Hill-Wood and his ilk call the shots for too long the club is in the deep stuff but could there not be a middle way? I was interested to see Kroenke volunteered to fund Arsenal’s transfer budget – not, I would have thought, the most unhelpful offer of the century – and maybe he might be a more benign owner than the Glazers or Gillette and Hicks. His sporting interests are not heavily leveraged and surely the concern is that Kroenke amasses huge debts to buy the club and dumps it on the club to pay back. Maybe Kroenke doesn’t want or need to do this and maybe Mr. Hill-Wood should have investigated this before he repeated his tendency to stick his foot in his mouth.

In the hard world of 21st Century Premiership football it is not only hard to preserve Corinthian values, it has to be questioned whether it is advisable to do so. I supported a team with Corinthian values for well over ten years before they won a trophy and in less forgiving times the Board would have had to walk.

Dein’s vision in pumping his “dead money” into Arsenal in 1983 was possibly one of the pivotal moments in Arsenal history. I find it hard to see without his return that Arsenal will be ambitious enough to retain Wenger (although I pray I am wrong) and ambitious enough to retain their place among the elite of English football. The signing of Anelka, Huntelaar or Babel may be good news in the short-term but it is much more important that we re-sign David Dein or someone of his stature and ability in the very near future.