Arsenal News » 2010 » January » 25

There were a couple of comments yesterday that in the face of an exit from another competition to the effect that I should not be so positive in my comments on this site.  A defeat, an exit from the Cup, is a time for sadness and reflection on what we should have done.

So, in response, I thought I would attempt to write down what seem to me to be the main Wengerian failures we have witnessed since he joined the club.

I found five, and here they are…

1.  A failure to predict the response of small teams (like Stoke, Bolton, Blackburn, Hull…) to the Arsenal revolution.   As we know now Blackburn introduced rotational fouling and then rotational time-wasting and were quickly followed by the other little teams.   We might have assumed that the laws of the game could be changed so that teams could be punished rather than players, but there is no move in this direction.  It reduces games to nothingness and has taken us quite a while to find a way through the problem.

2. A failure to predict the response of the big teams to the Arsenal revolution. Other teams could see how quickly the Arsenal revolution was happening under Wenger, and they realised they would have no chance to catch up and change their clubs in the way Wenger changed Arsenal.  So they decided to spend, spend and spend again.  We all might have expected some expenditure, but I doubt that Wenger realised it would reach the insane levels of player salaries and transfer fees that we now see.   He could not follow, because as we know this approach is doomed to failure, but the collapse of financial systems such as football can take time.  Trouble is, I don’t know what else he could have done.

3.  Failure to see how far the authorities in football would go to stop change. It took the FA etc a year or two to see just how sensational the Wenger revolution was going to be, and they needed to stop him, before his revolutionary methods were copied elsewhere.   So as the new methodologies rolled out the powers of reaction got moving.  They stopped the Breveren experiment, they let it be known that having influence over a team outside your territory was not going to be allowed, and they went on the offensive.   They cranked up the number of international friendlies and mindless competitions, and they started moving towards limiting the number of “foreign” players in a team – even attempting to change the law in the EU over employment – one of the fundamentals on which the EU is built.  I suspect the original idea was to have two or three nursery teams in Europe, all feeding Arsenal.

4.  The failure to recognise that as the clubs decided to kick Arsenal to death, the FA, UEFA and FIFA would step back and invite them to carry on. Whether you look at the match in which we won the league at Man IOU or this week’s game against Stoke where Cesc was stamped upon, or last week’s where he had his hair pulled…  It is everywhere.   Kicking players has been legitimised as a way to stop the revolution.

5.  I doubt also that Wenger saw that there would be such sheepishness among the other clubs in taking on UEFA. I suspect he might have thought that the big teams would stand up against the mindless internationals, the wreckless injury to players, the stupidity of playing Theo for England and the under 21s at the same time.  But he was wrong.  Only Ferguson stood up – if you recall Saint Giggs never played any Wales friendlies in most of his career – he always had a muscle strain.   Not following that line was an error.

I suspect that Wenger imagined that by now we would have our international league, we would have a second Arsenal club either playing in the second division as they do in Spain, or playing in another country, with players moving freely between the two clubs – thus giving our youngsters a chance to play.   I doubt that he expected to lose two important players for virtually the whole season because they got injured playing internationals.

In the great plan therefore, these are the mistakes I see – mistakes of pre-cognition.  In the world of sport you are forever making predictions as to what will happen, and that influences how you behave.   He made his call – and I still think it has been infinitely better than any other call anyone has ever made in football.

But he is not done yet, and he is aware of this developments.  His responses are already being seen.

Tony Attwood