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Under Pressure: Arsene Wenger is as obsolete as Tony Blair
Arsene Wenger is now open to offers for Jack Wilshere, it is reported. Wilshere was sent off in a meaningless reserve game after losing his cool, reacting to a harsh tackle. To some degree, that’s understandable – Wilshere has had several broken bones in his career, and so he is more alert than others to the dangers of reckless tackling.
But with Wilshere, it’s always something. It’s cigarettes, red cards, injuries, an inertia when it comes to improving. Wenger’s patience has come to its end, which makes sense if things had been any different for Wilshere over the last four years.
But it hasn’t. It has been apparent since he was 22 that there was nothing to be gained from indulging Wilshere in his mediocrity. Wilshere could have been made an example of, instead he is the template. That wasn’t a problem at Arsenal, though, because the mediocrity of most of the team has been allowed to fester for more than a decade.
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With the increased value of broadcast rights, and the emergence of Spurs with it, the slack approach to management from Wenger is finally catching up with him in a way that could cost him his job. It should have cost him it at least five years ago, but it seems the board have a similarly excessive amount of patience as their manager. At some point, patience transforms into complacency.
This patience has been extended, bafflingly, for an array of nonsense at Arsenal. Theo Walcott offers Arsenal little more than the chance for Arsenal fans to call a player by his first name, something that they will do for literally every other player in their squad.
He isn’t resilient against injury, and after a stunning, world class two-week period last season, he has shown he is incapable of any meaningful improvement in his play as he approaches his supposedly peak years.
Wenger has a squad of 28. That’s three more than the Premier League rules allow. And yet this is not a case of trying to fit a surfeit of excellence in just 20 or so important squad roles. It’s a case of trying to find 11 players of that 28 who have enough talent, strength, nous and determination to get back into the top four.
More players have been allowed to dawdle, to the point when you have to wonder if Arsenal to do anything in training except exchanging incredibly witty banter (another plus point for Walcott, if you like that kind of thing). Laurent Koscielny is such an average defender that Rafael Benitez wanted to buy him. David Ospina can’t catch and yet regularly features in goal. Mohamed Elneny, Granit Xhaka, Aaron Ramsey and Nacho Monreal – all these players are absolutely fine, but have no business being in a serious team. Luckily for Wenger, they are not a serious team.
You can tell, because a serious team would have fixed its chronic problems with injury by now. Instead, Wilshere, Danny Welbeck, Mathieu Debuchy and Santi Cazorla have all fallen victim to Arsenal’s two-week syndrome. A jam tomorrow of afflictions.
Tomorrow, you are always two weeks away from a return to fitness. Looking at those players, as an example, Welbeck, Debuchy, Wilshere and Cazorla aren’t especially talented, but to lose players regularly drains the team of the ability to rotate and maintain freshness, and stops the side ever settling into an effective understanding with each other. The more Wenger stays, doing the same thing, the less Arsenal will ever build up enough familiarity on the pitch.
Wenger knew all this at the end of the season. Or at least, we all did and Wenger should have. The failure to qualify for the Champions League should have demonstrated the need to change. If not manager, then approach. But nothing has been done.
Turfed
Arsenal have signed Alexandre Lacazette and Saed Kolasinac. It’s often asked, ‘If a player is any good then why has he signed for Arsenal?” When it comes to Kolasinac we don’t know the answer, yet, but for Lacazette we know it’s because they’re his second choice.
Mesut Ozil and Alexis Sanchez, turfed out of Real Madrid and Barcelona respectively, might well like Wenger, Arsenal and London, but there is no escaping that for them, clearly, Arsenal was their second choice, too. As they dither over a contract renewal, it is apparent that they have no special interest in remaining at the club.
We can assume that while they’ve had fun at Arsenal, they might like to actually win something meaningful again before retiring. Should any of Arsenal’s other players ever become good enough for the best teams, then surely they will attempt to leave too. Like Cesc Fabregas, Robin van Persie and others.
If Wenger can fix all this, then he deserves a huge amount of credit. But if Wenger can fix all this, then he is not the manager he has shown himself to be over the last decade. “You were the future once,” was an accurate barb aimed at another Islington figure. Just like Tony Blair, Wenger also stopped being effective in his job more than 10 years ago.
