Robert Exley
According to Jon Spurling’s book ‘Rebels for the Cause’, back in the summer of 1999 during the long protracted negotiations over the destiny of Nicolas Anelka, David Dein had complained to Arsene Wenger: ‘you’ve left me to deal with the sharks’ after he was left alone to deal with Anelka’s contingent all by himself. Wenger’s clever and articulate response to Dein was simply: ‘Don’t worry David… sharks always eat each other in the end’. The greatest piece of advice however which Wenger should have heeded with regard to dealing with sharks is that when you’re on a jetski, it is never a good idea to try jump them.
The internet since its inception has created many phrases which may well have never gained currency (certainly on this side of the Atlantic) had it not existed and the phrase ‘jumping the shark’ is one such example. It originates from an episode of the popular U.S. sitcom ‘Happy Days’, which for anyone too young to remember is a 1970s sitcom which eulogised a golden period of history around fifteen to twenty years prior to a depressed contemporary audience, who were suffering a period of relative decline in comparison (if you’re an Arsenal fan, I’m sure it’s not a concept too difficult to understand).
In essence, it’s a phrase which describes the moment in which a previously great TV show has reached its peak and never returns to its previous level of glory. With Happy Days it came in an episode in 1977, when the show’s iconic character, the Fonz (played by Henry Winkler), jumps a shark in a cage on a jet ski while wearing his trademark leather jacket. As explained by Fonzie’s co-star turned Hollywood director Ron Howard, the shark jump moment was when stars of the show started looking over what their script writers and directors were ordering them to do and began to wonder what direction the show - and by extension their careers - were starting to take as a consequence of the daft orders those above them expected them to execute.
The ironic thing about the ‘shark jump’ moment is that it was far from the end of the show’s run. It carried on for another seven years, despite daft storylines involving aliens, which though it introduced Robin Williams to the wider world, ruined the credibility of a once great sitcom. The network also flogged the show to death with a ludicrous spin off kids cartoon called ‘The Fonz and the Happy Days gang’ (the link being an episode called ‘May the Farce Be With You’ - again, if you’re a modern day Arsenal fan, you’ll know the feeling).
The curious thing about TV Shark Jumping is that historically, it often tends to be a very American thing and was usually rare to British Television - by way of an example, the original British version of ‘The Office’ lasted for just twelve episodes. Its American version however clocked up over two hundred shows. One explanation for this is that British TV until relatively recently was much less commercial than its U.S. counterpart. The American ethos was always that generating revenue was the central purpose of a show to the TV networks and if a show brought in a lot of revenue, no-one cared too deeply about the quality of it.
Aside from arguments about whether this comparison between British and American TV shows still exists today, this mentality isn’t too far away from the general mind set of that which Corporate America has always held about the produce it sells to the wider world. And in 2017, it’s something which Arsenal fans seem to be finding out to their detriment. You see, for all the vitriol, for all the internet trolling, for all the In/Out hashtags on Twitter, for the all the factions among the crowd fighting each other and for all the accusations of him being ‘le fraud’, the Arsene Wenger Show has simply jumped its shark. It’s easy to forget all these years later that Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal circa 1996 to 2008 were truly great. Arsene Wenger was great (in fact, the older he gets the better he was!), but a moment came when, quite simply, his Shark was jumped.
Ironically, I’ve been writing pieces for the Gooner for nine years now. My very first was written and emailed over to the Gooner probably less than an hour before the Arsene Wenger Show’s very own shark jump moment in February 2008. You’ll all snigger now, but the piece was lauding Wenger’s greatness. This wasn’t a ‘Wenger In’ piece, it was pretty much the definitive Arsene Wenger position at the time. The factions simply didn’t exist. We were top of the table, we’d lost just one game all season. We were out of the League Cup after being thumped by Spurs, but we didn’t really care about that because we thought bigger things were being pursued.
We hadn’t won a trophy for the previous two seasons, but we’d reached our only Champions League Final, our pretty much second string side had lost a League Cup final to a first string Chelsea side by the odd goal, we’d lost Thierry Henry to Barcelona and a couple of years prior Ashley Cole humiliated us by joining Chelsea. Aside from that though we felt that good things were ahead of us. Later that afternoon, our replacement for Henry was horrifically injured, we blew two points with a defensive lapse which conceded a penalty from which our opposition equalised and then our ‘inspirational’ captain decided on a post-match public melt down in the centre circle.
For the rest of 2007/08, though there were only two league defeats between then and the end of the season, there would be just one win in the next eight games. By mid-April, we’d lost a Champions League Quarter Final through conceding two late goals and our title hopes were blown with a 1-2 defeat to Man United at Old Trafford. With the pressure off we suddenly managed to string together four straight wins, but the damage had been done. Our weaknesses were found out, players suddenly no longer had unquestioning deference to Wenger and though not everything since February 2008 has been bad, the confidence in the ancien’ regime had gone and things have simply never been as good since.
Kroenke came on board at Arsenal that same season and in the years since, Wenger has always done just enough to keep the club within a position where they reap high revenue and by extension Kroenke simply doesn’t want to ‘fix what isn’t broken’ with regard to a criteria of revenue generation alone. For most years since 2008, Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal have still remained box office – people might find that an odd thing to say, but even with the club’s obvious gerrymandering of the attendance figures toward the end of the last season, Arsenal’s average attendance for 1970/71 was just 43,776. I highly doubt that the genuine attendance figures for many home games since 2006 have ever fallen below this figure.
The hapless attempts of Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal to become Champions over the last thirteen years have kept people entertained, pretty much in the same way that Delboy and Rodney’s hapless attempts at being millionaires entertained more people than watching an actual millionaire being all boring and methodical on the Money Programme. In fact, on mentioning ‘Only Fools and Horses’, one lesson which Arsene Wenger and Arsenal had seemingly failed to heed is knowing the right time finish, even if the Shark probably has already been jumped. The Trotters ended it on a high in 1996 by finally becoming millionaires in front of a record audience of 24.3 million. Only a plonker would have brought it back after that, but that’s exactly what happened. No-one remembers the Only Fools Christmas Specials from 2001-03 fondly, but that became the show’s anti-climactic finale.
Similarly, Arsene Wenger finished the turbulent 2016/17 season on a high after winning a record seventh FA Cup and denying Chelsea a double. Undoubtedly, this was the moment to go and most probably will be the last chance to call time on his career in N5 on a high. Instead of that, though admittedly I have no inside knowledge within the Arsenal camp myself, from a basic observation of body language it seems to me that Arsene Wenger has simply lost the dressing room. This thought had struck me last month, when I attended the Member’s Day Q&A session held in the Club Level at the Stadium (after queuing next to AFTV’s Claude and Ty, looking like best buddies rather than ripping each other’s heads off like they normally do when a camera is stuck in front of them).
Among the players that had lined up for the Q&A had been Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Mesut Ozil and Aaron Ramsey. From their responses and general demeanour you could tell just by looking at them they were less than happy and in the case of at least one of them, clearly wanted to be somewhere else. In fact, if you showed Delboy this as a picture of what being a millionaire would look like, I doubt he would have bothered spending sixteen years and seven series pursuing it as an ambition. One can only think these players probably cheer themselves up by saying to themselves: ‘this time next year bruv, we could be somewhere else’.
With regard to Arsene Wenger, this time last year - regardless of the long protracted Gooner civil war which has become the Wenger In/Out question - he still had three things left in the bank with regard to his legacy. He’d always finished in the top four, he’d always finished above Spurs and had he quit tomorrow he wouldn’t be passing on to his successor a basket case of a club. Sadly, the first two have now gone. Every inch of me dreads that the last one could well be disappearing anytime soon.
Robert Exley can be found on Twitter@robert_exley and is the editor of Upstart Football.
