Arsene Wenger & The Exquisite Corpse

If I were an Arsenal fan today, I'm not sure I'd know whether to laugh or cry. Ok, that's not true: I'd definitely cry, but I would hope some small part of me could muster the strength to acknowledge the almost tragicomic scenario unfolding at the Emirates right now. Making his way toward the Old Trafford tunnel on Saturday evening, Arsene Wenger didn't look like a man possessed so much as a man haunted. Of course this wouldn't be the first time that his sides have suffered from a case of the springtime heebie-jeebies, but this time around it seems their troubles have almost reached the dispiriting realms of self-parody.

Let's consider the evidence. Three weeks ago the country was licking its collective lips in anticipation of their Champions League meeting with pass-and-move-wetdream-made-flesh Barcelona, a challenge they met with impressive vigour, leaving the field with a slender advantage and a handful of hope. With a League Cup final against Birmingham already secured, a tricky but wholly scalable FA Cup fifth round tie with League One neighbours Leyton Orient bagged and a decent run of league games to come, the view through Arsene Wenger's spectacles was for once appropriately rosy.

And then, before you could holler “hold that, Szczesny!”, it all started unravelling in the most inglorious of manners. A week after Orient gainfully secured a replay, Birmingham stood firm, profited from a slapstick piece of defending and rather rudely denied the Gunners a first trophy in six long years. The meanies. Zip forward to the Nou Camp, and Arsenal's uncharacteristically (if understandably) defensive gameplan fell foul of one nonsensical refereeing call and, not for the first time, a misplaced cutting edge. How achingly familiar it all seemed. Sprinkle in to the mix the requisite tally of injuries (most of which come with a hazily defined recovery time) and you end up with some sort of Arsenal-by-numbers colouring book. All the outlines are there; just shade in the spaces and – voilà! – the same old pictures.

The problem is this is no new tome, merely a reprint of an ageing edition. Take a peek at the first page: there's one of the midfield, buzzing around each other like ballet-trained wasps, pretty of pass yet wasteful of finish. Here's another: it's Mr Wenger, defending his troupe like a mother repudiating her son's bad habits, while he bunks off school and sets fire to the best rug. If Arsenal's shortcomings were a game of Consequences, everyone's story would end up pretty much the same. So why is this Arsenal side becoming a by-word for bottling it? For a team based around a fluid, wrong-footing methodology of play, their recent slumps have become alarmingly predictable. As undoubtedly talented as the current squad are, there seems to me to be some vital ingredients missing.

A few years back Wenger chose to address his team's shortcomings by repeatedly pointing to the youth and relative inexperience of his players, that this was a project in progress and that the finished product would blossom with time. Of course as said time passes, discussing how Wenger's teams are still growing and have not yet gelled has become almost as much of a cliché as the matter in hand itself. In a curiously roundabout way, some of what may be missing is born out of what should be a positive. The indiscipline of yesteryear has largely evaporated: time was you couldn't pop to the kitchen without Arsenal's ever expanding tally of red cards being discussed, and yet those days coincided with the club's most bountiful era under the Frenchman. The truth is those Arsenal sides were pretty, but also pretty tough; all the brainteasing football reinforced with a fiery resilience which, while sometimes spilling over into nastiness, cemented together players of unarguably high quality. Picture Patrick Vieira, Dennis Bergkamp and Freddie Ljungberg and you don't just conjure images of wonderfully talented ball-players, but men of fierce temperament and a throbbing desire to win. Wenger's teams of the time had, for lack of a more profound term, character.

Now character is something clearly built through experience – of disappointments suffered and misfortune met – yet many of those players were men in their twenties, just like Arsenal's current crop. It may well be no coincidence that, prior to arriving at Highbury, players such as Marc Overmars, Thierry Henry and Dennis Bergkamp had previously sampled both victory and pressure at clubs like Inter Milan, Juventus and Ajax. These players were brought in to form part of a singular footballing vision, to create an outfit not only of movement and grace, but also of grit, founded as it was on a long-standing defensive line that were no strangers to success themselves. Eventually they had to be replaced, and at times this proved to be a frustrating task, but now Wenger has a group of talented players who maybe require a bit of mettle to support their mastery. Theo Walcott is a long way off becoming the next Robert Pires, Nicklas Bendtner is certainly no Kanu, and while Wenger's current squad sparkles with undeniable aptitude, I'm confident I'd struggle to find a hardened Arsenal fan who could honestly place more than one or two of the contemporary bunch alongside the classes of '98 or '02.

It's also true to an extent that Wenger's working methods have changed over the past decade and a half. Instead of taking rough diamonds (Henry, Vieira, Petit) and polishing them to a shine, Wenger's recent mission has been to go back a stage further and create players (Clichy, Fabregas, Walcott) almost from scratch. While this can, if done successfully, lead to a group playing in perfect harmony (see those Barcelona comparisons), the inherent danger is that they must learn everything on the job. Most teams fail before they succeed, but the current Arsenal team are struggling to learn from the disappointments. Whether this is down to Wenger or the players is an argument you could have all night long, but the buck will ultimately always rest at the manager’s door. It may be blinkeredness, stubborn mindedness or just an unflickering belief in his principles, but Manchester United's reign of success (and Liverpool's before it) was built not just on creating well-oiled machines, but on knowing when they needed maintenance carried out; their respective managers possessing the nous to tweak and realign when certain parts were failing to perform.

Before I slump into Cowell-esque levels of gross negativity, I should say that not all of this is meant as criticism. Wenger helped reinvent how we saw football in this country, and not just on the field. Dubbed 'The Professor' for an understanding of the game that goes wider and deeper than the training pitch, he championed unusual ideas of diet and fitness, and made fashionable the intricate study of player statistics, the influence of which peers such as Sam Allardyce will openly admit to. Each of these aspects of his management are smaller pieces of an overall puzzle, one seeking to squeeze the very last drop of energy and ability from his players. It’s about resourcefulness, about waste-not-want-not. This home-grown (or at least home-taught) ideology will also go a long way towards solidifying Arsenal's long-term financial foundations, for which much respect must be paid.

Unfortunately, the bottom line may be that his current side are simply not good enough to triumph at the highest level. Wenger has never won a European trophy, but he took Arsenal to two finals during his first nine seasons at the club. Last Tuesday, they looked like a team light years away from repeating such a feat. Yes, they were playing Barcelona, but only because they stumbled unconvincingly out of their group.

In spite of all this, however, Arsenal remain in a strong position as far as the Premier League is concerned, just three points off United with a game in hand, and with Sir Alex's men yet to travel south to the Emirates. If they can hold their nerve, they could yet do it. But, as we all know, that's one hell of an 'if'. A quick glance at their run-in flags up a trip to Stoke (where Arsenal have triumphed just once in their past three trips), a visit from a rejuvenated Liverpool and a North London derby, as well as the aforementioned head-to-head with United. For all the artistry in the world, confidence is what they'll require to emerge from that particular minefield ahead of the pack, and that's exactly what is currently draining from their tanks.

Bob Dylan once sang about a girl named Sara – an object of his boho desires who was “so easy to look at; so hard to define”, and so steadily is this becoming true of Arsenal. Under Wenger they have always been pleasing on the eye, but just as much breath is now spent querying their ultimate direction as exulting the impressive scenery of their journey. Are they a harmonious unit or a grab-bag of unfulfilled talents? You sense that for every chunk of criticism volleyed his way, the more stubbornly Wenger will glue himself to his principles and you hope, for the good of his legacy if nothing else, that this doesn't prove to be an ultimately fruitless exercise.

~ Matt