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Ferguson shows why Wenger no longer deserves patience

We are all now aware that Alexis Sanchez was in the red zone, and was unlucky enough to succumb to injury. Just because he was in the red zone didn’t mean that he would injure his hamstring, it simply meant that there was an additional risk of suffering one. Arsene Wenger believed it was a risk worth taking. It is true that the rest of the world saw this coming, but the benefit of hindsight makes mockery and criticism slightly more easy than it should have been. Had Laurent Koscielny, for example, not been injured in the first half, Arsenal may well not have needed Sanchez to be straining for a ball at that particular time. It might be that the injury that nobody saw coming was the factor in Sanchez’s own misfortune.

Regardless, it’s undeniable that there’s a sense of deja deja deja deja deja deja deja vu when it comes to Arsenal. In one sense that’s because Wenger never learns, but it’s slightly more than that. When a manager has been in one job for over 20 years, just as Wenger has at Arsenal, it’s possible to spot enough incidents to create whichever trend you fancy.

You can pick out the quips about financial doping and everyone thinking they have the prettiest wife at home, and suddenly he is a witty Gallic presence in the league. You can mention Pizzagate, Patrick Vieira gobbing at Neil Ruddock, pushing Jose Mourinho and Dennis Bergkamp elbowing every single opponent he ever played, and he’s a poor loser.

You can list Richard Wright, Francis Jeffers, Jose Antonio Reyes, and he’s a profligate spender who never really worked out how to sort out a defence, or look at the Invincibles, Cesc Fabregas, Robin van Persie and Hector Bellerin, and there’s a man who can organise a back four and spot a bargain.

None of this matters now, except to say you can find whatever you want when you appraise Wenger, according to your own biases. This blog will obviously not be able to escape that, but then the point is to say now, as Arsenal and Wenger exist in this moment, is Wenger the right moment. Using just the last few seasons, it’s possible to suggest that he isn’t. Using two decades and more, you can see why he still inspires fervent support in fans and press. The board, seeing Champions League qualification yet to be missed, will care about little else other than a healthy turnover, and Wenger can obviously provide that.

In the last few seasons, Arsenal have suffered injuries so many times that in any other industry, the insurance company would descend on the team to work out if there was some kind of ruse going on to keep a regular crop of compensatory payments coming. Wenger regularly makes it clear that he doesn’t dope his sides, and looking at the injury records, you’d have to say that his is one of the few clubs that don’t arouse particular suspicion. Certainly, if they were doping, they’re making a horrendous job of it. Wenger has changed the backroom staff, to no effect. This is now what Arsenal do.

Recently, they have been unable to take advantage of the league when their rivals for the league are struggling. Take the year that Liverpool came close to making Manchester United fans think about emigrating to North Korea. Chelsea threw away the title with a collapse at the turn of the year. Manchester City won it because Liverpool decided to implode under the pressure of their own confidence and certainty. Arsenal did nothing that year, and even managed to go four down to Liverpool in a matter of minutes. Last season, it was the same, when they put on an impressive amount of points in the calendar year, not the football year. Essentially, they are most recently a team without backbone. Against Norwich and before that, West Bromwich Albion, they were bullied off the ball and weren’t able to keep control in defence. The Invincibles (very vincible in Europe, the League Cup and the FA Cup, it turned out) had a smattering of bastards that would prevent things like that happening too often. Now, they don’t even have the snide Van Persie to keep an eye on things. When Ozil and Sanchez lead, they do by example rather than personality. That is no bad thing, but you want players who can do one or the other, or at least both.

These criticisms are repeated because they keep happening. This is what the Arsenal side is, and there’s no indication that it will change. But they aren’t the first side this happens. When you see what happened to Manchester United under Alex Ferguson, perhaps it’s natural for things to get stuck in a rut.

In the last years of Ferguson, he dumped the players who would answer back in favour of Luis Nani, Ashley Young and Michael Owen. He abandoned the idea of football as fun as he set his sights on the remorseless accumulation of trophies on a tightened budget. Where Wenger took on the burden of a stadium, so Ferguson did the Glazers. Not exactly the same, but no other manager at a club would have been given such patience for working under such strict parameters to the obvious detriment of the side. And that’s because, for Ferguson, there was the Treble, there was the first league title for more than two decades, there was the de-perching of Liverpool, there was Ronaldo, and that wasn’t even half of it.

But it allowed him to get on with the sterile stuff, and the whiff of underachievement on what really could have been done, because people were inclined to look back and pick out the best to justify the present. The same is happening with Wenger. People will dismiss this as the same old criticism, and they’d be right. But this is criticism of his last three years, for Arsenal, it’s becoming further and further back that they have to look in order to pick out the positives that make Wenger worth keeping around.