Beautiful

4:  Beautiful Football

When Wenger first came to Highbury none of us really knew what was going to hit us – true we started to get an idea when Vieira came on as a substitute for his first match, and we realised that here was a manager who could pick a player we had never heard of who could turn the game.

But it wasn’t until Pires returned from the Euro tournaments for his second season that we suddenly saw just how different football was going to be.  We were not going to be winning things like doubles, and all that stuff, we were going to be winning in a style that no one had ever contemplated before.   A style of playing that was so fluid, so fast, so effective, that everyone just looked on in utter amazement.

Of course adding Henry, and then persuading him that the goal was that oblong thing at the end of the pitch (rather that somewhere up near the clock) was the ultimate master stroke.  As Henry matured we found just where we could go.  The speed of the game that was already at an unprecedented level just went up another gear.  And then another.

By 2006 with Wenger introducing Arsenal version 3 we were already familiar with this style, elegance and speed – but familiar or not, no one else was able to copy the approach.   This is exactly what happened with Total Football which the Dutch national team developed.  There it was argued that no team could ever play total football because you needed the resource of a nation (even if it was a little one) to have the quality of players to develop this.

But of course Chelsea and Man U could have tried to copy Beautiful Football – and maybe they did – but even if it was ever part of the plan, it flopped, because you need Wenger at the helm to see the potential in young players, bring them in, get the approach into their souls, and then play a team full of players who understand Beautiful Football.

That also explains why so few players let go by Wenger ever manage to do very well with other teams.  They leave with the ability to play Beautiful Football – and then find themselves surrounded by players who simply have no idea of what it is all about.

But it is also a pointer that beautiful football is tough to play.  Henry coming back from a short break after the 06 world cup looked very short on performance.  It wasn’t fitness – it was the fact that he had lost a little of the touch and understanding of Beautiful Football.   By the end of September it was on the way back and in the games that month against Sheffield U and Charlton A it was clearly there – not perfect, but still enough to put him beyond the class of most others.