Kevin Whitcher
Often there is a period in Arsènal’s season, in February / March when the team have a sequence of bad results that signals the end of their interest in two or three competitions. If we imagine their interest in the Premier League this season is to get back into the top four, defeat on Sunday at Brighton might make that realistically too big a target now. The Carabao Cup saw a losing appearance in the final, and next week might see the third Thursday in a row in which Arsènal suffer defeat. I’d wager decent money that’s never happened before. A bad defeat in Milan could make the second leg of that Europa league tie academic and another very low attendance at the Emirates.
Last night, approximately 25,000 – 28,000 brave souls turned up at the stadium. Certainly, the weather was a factor, but long before the snow hit, people were trying to shift their tickets. I’d estimate that maybe 40,000 would have turned up if the weather was not so bad, which for a game of this nature against top opposition says a lot. The club failed to sell out (hence the official attendance figure of 58,000 odd) and the match never went to ticket exchange for season ticket holders to try and get rid of their unwanted seats. Interestingly, in spite of the weather, City fans managed to fill their section. If the game actually mattered, there might have been two or three thousand fans that couldn’t make it because of the weather.
Arsènal, being at home, played a more attacking formation, with Mkhitaryan, Koscielny and Welbeck replacing Chambers and the injured Monreal and Wilshere. City demonstrated more skill and far more intensity than their hosts, and the goals, although very good, exposed the lack of determination in the Arsènal side to compete. City don’t need too much space and time to score goals, and Wenger’s team presented them with enough. It was ironic that Arsenal were put in their place by a team playing the kind of incisive attacking football the Gunners’ manager aspires to. This was how to do it properly.
3-0 down before the interval, there was some disquiet amongst the home fans. But the overwhelming emotion was apathy. And personally, a sense of amusement. Because it is comical these days, on the basis that if you did not laugh you’d cry. Arsene Wenger has achieved something pretty phenomenal in regards to my support of this football club. I’ve stopped caring now. Defeats? So what? We’re just marking time now. It doesn’t hurt like it used to, say, in February of 2008 when we dropped two points at Birmingham and you could tell the players were psychologically shot. The club is on a gradual decline. As the manager himself apparently said in the post match conference, “You go up by the lift and you go down by the stairs.” He followed this by saying, “We go through a difficult patch”. But in terms of seasons, this is not a patch. This is the norm now, only, in terms of the gap between Arsènal and the teams above them, it’s gradually widening.
Before the interval, I received a text message from Gooner contributor Marcia Milnes and season ticket holder, one of a large number of supporters who decided to give this game a miss, which read “More goals than bums on seats”. I had to chuckle. She followed by asking what I thought the actual attendance was. “Less than 30,000”, I responded. She came back with “Goals?”. It could have been a cricket score, but I knew before the teams came out for the second half that Guardiola would have told his players to ease off. In the press conference afterwards, Arsene Wenger said, “We dominated well in the first 20 minutes of the second half”. That was because his opposite number had too much personal respect for him to rub it in. City could have doubled their lead if they’d had a mind to.
At half-time I bumped into Tim Stillman, and he had an interesting thing to say about leadership during matches in the modern game. The old-style captain on the pitch was the player that ensured the manager’s instructions were carried out by his colleagues, and even made in-game tweaks as required – the Tony Adams / John Terry type. Nowadays, with the arguable exception of Vincent Kompany, the top six sides generally have quiet types as skipper who largely get on with their own game. Hugo Lloris, Jordan Henderson, Laurent Koscielny, Antonio Valencia. The in-game leadership is coming from the technical area far more now. Managers are far more pro-active. Klopp, Mourinho, Guardiola, Pochettino, Conte. Kicking every ball, passing frequent messages to players during stops in play. Arsène is the exception. Sitting on his heated dug-out seat waiting for his players to express themselves and let events unfold without his influence. And it’s not as if the players are especially prepared for their opponents. The left-footed Bernado Silva played up against Kolasinac on City’s right side and Kolasinac showed him onto his stronger foot for the first goal.
Really, this doesn’t require too many more words or analysis. Everybody knows where the club is heading and it’s almost a certainty now that Arsene will go in the summer, sacked ignominiously, unless he has the humility to understand the game’s up and he cannot turn it around. In that case he should either resign as soon as possible (if he really cares that much about the club, he should have done that years ago) or announce he is going at the end of the season. He isn’t going to win the Europa League and hopes of making the top four are looking very slim with every passing defeat.
The elements were not kind to Arsene yesterday, and when the snow fell in the second half, it took me back to 2006 and Paris, and the sight of Wenger getting absolutely drenched as his ten man team were finally overcome in the Champions League final, and the heavens opened for a few minutes, with him ending up looking like a drowned rat. He faced similar at Wembley recently when Arsènal played Spurs.
His lack of ability to do tactics and motivate players was less of a handicap in his early days at the club, because of the players he inherited and the quality of the ones he signed. Now, this is very much his team, there is no influence from the past anymore. And his eye in the transfer market is not what it used to be. So Leroy Sane was bought by City from the Bundesliga in the summer of 2016 for £37 million, whilst Arsènal picked up Granit Xhaka for a couple of million less from the same league. The arrival of Sven Mislintat to take over the identification of player talent will at least allow Arsènal to buy better players, but equally key is what happens when they arrive at the club. Players improve under good coaches, as Sane stated last night after the game.
It’s interesting to note that Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain is really starting to find his feet at Liverpool. He told someone recently that the training and coaching he was getting under Jurgen Klopp’s regime were a world away from London Colney, and that his game was benefitting on the pitch as a result. One imagines that young players who developed under Wenger may actually have improved because the real instruction they were getting was from players who had learned their trade before being managed by Wenger – the likes of Bergkamp, Adams and Keown. Once the Invincibles broke up the ‘older’ heads tended to be those who had not experienced as much coaching elsewhere. So ultimately, the standard has dropped and less young players actually get any better, and in some cases become worse.
It seems a matter of when rather than if a very proud and obstinate man will end his tenure at the club in this horrible atmosphere of total apathy on and off the pitch. But for the good of the club, the board need to realise it would be better, assuming Carlo Ancelotti is the man to take over, to give him the remaining matches of this season and start the recovery process as soon as possible. Arsene created history, but he’s now history himself. No-one thinks he is going to turn this around any more. The best anyone can hope for is that he can make a dignified exit. But he’s too stubborn, to proud to fall on his own sword. So we drag this out until the board or the majority owner have the balls to take action, and re-inject some enthusiasm into the very stale and unappetising state of affairs they have allowed to develop by indulging one man for far too long.
Ivan Gazidis, May 31st 2017: “When you look at the world of football, and you think about the great candidates that there are, you don’t find any better candidates than Arsene Wenger.”
I mean, seriously?
Attending Arsènal matches at the moment is akin to visiting a sick relative in their final days in hospital. You know it’s going to end soon, and a bit of you would like to see everyone’s suffering end. Why delay the inevitable?
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