Arsène Wenger: the blinkered visionary

by bloodless Sun Sep 04, 2011 10:06 pm

Ten days ago, after his team had successfully negotiated the qualifying round of the Champions League, the tall, austerely angular Arsenal manager, Arsène Wenger, complained about the public's pretensions to expertise. "We live in a society where everybody has an opinion on everything," he said. "I'm like somebody who flies a plane for 30 years and I have to accept that somebody can come into the cockpit and thinks he can fly the plane better than I do."

It was a characteristic Wenger statement, containing a wry piece of social commentary, a plaintive yet acerbic defence of his position and a tasty image for the insatiable sports media. Of course the notoriously independent-minded manager had no intention of accepting advice from outsiders. He was merely deploying his rhetorical gifts to point out the absurdity of being guided by the whims of public opinion. In other words, Wenger, whose nickname in footballing circles is "the professor", was being Wenger: sardonic, aloof, unapologetic and unquestionably the man in control.

Unfortunately, the analogy backfired four days later when Arsenal crashed to an 8-2 defeat at Old Trafford against their fiercest Premier League rivals, Manchester United. If Wenger was the pilot, the thrashing was the equivalent of plotting a flight path through a mountain. Suddenly, the manager, who has been a study in certitude since his arrival in 1996 at Arsenal, looked dazed and confused, as though he was struggling to find his bearings amid the wreckage of the team's heaviest defeat since 1896. Such was the pathos of Wenger's plight that even Alex Ferguson, his most prickly adversary, was moved to offer consoling words of support. That must have hurt.

For the first 10 years of Wenger's reign at Arsenal, he was viewed, at least by the team's supporters, as a kind of omniscient genius. In his first full season in charge – 1997-8 – he won the double and, for good measure, repeated the feat four years later. Two years later, the celebrated "Invincibles" side went through a whole season unbeaten. These were truly remarkable achievements, given even greater lustre by the exhilarating style of football upon which Wenger insisted.

In previous years, Arsenal were known as a dour, if effective, outfit, masters at eking out a 1-0 victory. But by scouting youthful talent from around the world and, in particular, his native France, to build on the solid defensive base he inherited, Wenger transformed the club into one of Europe's most attractive footballing sides.

He did so by gradually imposing his vision on the club in every detail, from the lunch menu through fitness coaching to the design of the training ground. Given that he was initially unknown to most players, having arrived from the obscurity of the Japanese league, this was a daunting task, made yet more challenging by the culture of hard drinking that ran through the club.

He dared, for example, to tell Tony Adams, the club captain and then recently reformed alcoholic, that he would have to eat raw carrots rather than his preferred Mars bar before a game. But Wenger won over the players because, although decidedly foreign, his ideas were successful.

Similarly, the policy of bringing in promising French players such as Patrick Vieira and Thierry Henry, and scouting African youngsters, also worked. Arsenal thrived on and off the pitch and in the summer of 2006 the club moved into its state-of-the-art stadium, lucratively named the Emirates.

It should have been the beginning of a new era, but the champagne went flat. Earlier that spring, Arsenal came within minutes of winning the ultimate prize, the Champions League. From that high point, Wenger's star has been in a slow, but perceptible, decline. Although the club remained among the elite top four, and continued to make inroads in European competition, Arsenal began to lose ground to their main rivals, United and Chelsea. Moreover, the Emirates' trophy cabinet has been conspicuously untroubled by new additions.

With each barren year, as other clubs have copied his innovations, Wenger has come under ever-increasing pressure to change his approach. A victim of his own success, he has created an expectation of victory that any team would struggle to satisfy. He has also had to contend with the superior spending power of the multi-billionaire-backed arrivistes, Chelsea and Manchester City. So it might be said that he is a victim of circumstance too. But perhaps he has also become a victim of his own conviction.

The more the media and the fans have called for him to buy seasoned players, the more responsibility he has entrusted to the young players under his charge. Alas, few have matured into players to compare with Henry and Vieira, and those that have made the grade – Cesc Fabregas and Samir Nasri – have moved on to clubs with greater resources.

Wenger grew up in the Alsace village of Duttlenheim, playing amateur football while studying for a master's degree in economics at the University of Strasbourg.

The area has shifted back and forth between France and Germany on countless occasions, making loyalty a flexible concept. But Wenger's upbringing appears to have instilled in him an abundance of that commodity. Football is a game that specialises in metaphorically one-eyed managers, but not even Ferguson can match the Frenchman's myopia. He has seldom, if ever, publicly admitted to seeing one of his players commit a foul and yet he is forensically aware of every infraction, no matter how inconsequential, suffered by his team.

The paradox with Wenger is that while he can give the impression of an urbane intellectual, he is in fact obsessed with football to the exclusion of all else. Nobody is more knowledgeable about the game, but critics argue that this strength is also a weakness, especially in times of difficulty, because he's not inclined to seek a second opinion. His long-term assistant, Pat Rice, is not what you'd call a dissenting voice, and since David Dein, the club's former vice-chairman, was ousted, there hasn't been a comparable figure with whom he could discuss the bigger picture. The result, say his detractors and even some of his supporters, is that his singlemindedness has hardened into wilful intransigence.

Or is Wenger making a virtue out of necessity, focusing on a youth policy because the club is not prepared to spend the money required for marquee signings? Dein is on record as saying that the Arsenal board left him, financially speaking, fighting "with one hand tied behind my back". If so, Wenger has cast himself as a heroic and silent martyr to the boardroom's cause.

Either way, it's impressive to note that as the clamour has grown for Arsenal to return to some of their more traditional virtues – aggressive, direct, ugly – the team has been pushed by Wenger to play with ever more elaborate artistry. Having started out as a pragmatic idealist, he has turned, as the team has faltered, into a kind of utopian purist. When asked recently whether he views football primarily as an art or a business, he replied: "I like a famous line from a great philosopher who said, 'The only way to deal with death is to transform everything that precedes it into art.' We have to make sure we try to make every day as beautiful as we can."

It has often seemed in recent seasons that he is feeding off the criticism, almost relishing the condemnation as he strides ever more determinedly towards vindication. But never before has that "I told you I was right" moment appeared so remote or improbable as now.

Under fierce pressure following the Manchester debacle, Wenger got busy before the transfer window closed last week, bringing in experienced pros such as Mikel Arteta and Yossi Benayoun, just the sort of players he had repeatedly been advised by his critics to sign. Whether the action is too little and too late, as many suggest, is a matter that will become clear soon enough.

Whatever happens, it should not be forgotten that Wenger has effectively waged a one-man campaign against the richest-wins model that has warped the game in Europe's major leagues. His failures are lent form only by the extraordinary standards of his triumphs. And those triumphs, it should also be remembered, have been the fruit of unyielding commitment.

Wenger tells the story of the promising young piano player who attends a performance by a great virtuoso. Afterwards, the novice approaches the concert pianist and says: "I would give my life to play like you." To which the pianist replies: "That's what I have done."

by Andrew Anthony

Source: http://www.footytube.com/news/guardian/arsene-wenger-the-blinkered-visionary-L11834?ref=hp_zeitgeist