Wenger may need saving from himself
Posted on 23 August 2013 - 04:32am
ARSENE WENGER is beginning to resemble the millionaire who scrimped on his heating bill and died of hypothermia. He’s not dead yet and was given a welcome touch CPR in Istanbul, but it really does look as if he’s lost the transfer acumen that made him rich in the first place.
Frankly, rumours of Arsenal being rubbish are exaggerated. From this vantage point, they are the proverbial couple of players from being the fourth best team in the Premier League.
But when you hear Wenger angrily demanding of his interrogators: “Who? What players?”, when they mention the lack of signings, you feel he may just have lost the plot. An impression confirmed when he insists: “We are looking at players from all over the world 24 hours a day”.
With more than a week still to go, it has been one of the busiest transfer windows ever with players being traded like stocks in a bull run on Wall Street.
The massively-increased TV pot of gold has enabled even the more down-at-heel likes of Swansea and Southampton to wheel and deal, bringing in decent acquisitions in order to ensure they stay at the top table. Yet Arsenal have still only signed a little-known French freebie from Auxerre.
But even before the influx of those extra tens of millions, Arsenal’s pockets were bulging. A combination of fleecing their fans with those extortionate ticket prices and their time-honored frugality has enabled them to accumulate a massive war chest.
The mistake they made – and Wenger must have cringed when he heard this – was when chief executive Ivan Gazidis spoke of “the escalation in our financial firepower.”
Finally, it seemed, Arsenal were going to buy big and no longer rely on Wenger knowing every item on the shelf in the West African Five Ringgit Shop. Many Arsenal fans, re-mortgaging their houses to pay for their season tickets, remained sceptical; others waited like kids on Christmas morning. Just who would Santa Arsene buy for them?
The rest of us watched with more than a mild curiosity. Scrooge with money to throw around – it promised to be quite a spectacle.
It is sad therefore and not a little mystifying to see the haggard figure and sometimes tortured soul that Wenger has presented to the media in recent weeks.
Yesterday’s picture of him holding the Premier League trophy with Tony Adams showed how much he’s aged. Those were the days when he could rustle up a diamond from some pretty unlikely rough; now he’s in Hatton Garden, he seems dazzled by the choice.
The two biggest names he has been linked with are Luis Suarez and Gonzalo Higuain and his pursuit of them – if it can be called that – has been pathetic and degrading.
Like the shy boy at the dance with no chat-up lines, he has become desperate. The Higuain deal looked nailed-on but last-minute dilly-dallying over a couple of quid allowed Naples and Rafa Benitez to steal him from under Wenger’s out-of-joint nose.
Still, what came next was most unexpected and what Gooners had hardly dared hope for – a pre-emptive strike for one of the world’s most coveted A-listers. Trouble was… the offer was less than half his value and many fans didn’t want him anyway.
The first move for Suarez smacked of the shy boy making a pass at a glamorous girl with a bit of a reputation. And it met a curt rebuff. But when Arsenal upped their bid to one pound above what they believed would trigger an escape clause, they invited ridicule – and received it in heaps.
Even though it was almost three times their record fee, it undid at a stroke the big-spending image that Gazidis had been trying to create.
Besides showing they’d not done their homework, the bid still came across as tight-fisted and calculating. Brendan Rodgers felt it showed “a lack of class” while John Henry inquired: “What are they smoking?”
Either way, it reflected badly on Arsenal and Wenger. Since then they have been snubbed by Luiz Gustavo, who preferred to join second-rate Bundesliga side Wolfsburg, and gazumped by PSG for Yohan Cabaye. Oh, and their timing incurred the wrath of Alan Pardew as well.
As Jamie Carragher has noted, why did Wenger wait three months to bid for Cabaye when he could have picked him up at the opening of the window? It suggests he’s already on Plan C.
He was at a similar stage two years ago when the 8-2 annihilation by Manchester United induced a panic last-minute spree that we can call a qualified failure. This time, what we have seen is hesitancy followed by stumbling followed by not a little panic.
So who are the players that Arsenal might have signed this summer that have gone elsewhere? Well, there are four at Manchester City for a start and half a team at Spurs. Seeing their neighbours spend like the Chelsea of old is exacerbating Arsenal’s festering wounds.
But mention names like Alvaro Negredo, Jesus Navas, Willian, Roberto Soldado and Erik Lamela and you feel they might have made a bit of a difference to the Arsenal line-up. And then there’s Dejan Lovren and Pablo Osvaldo at Southampton, and Wilfried Bony at Swansea.
It’s a sorry tale and you can’t blame Silent Stan – the money is there – all £154m (RM770m) of it. You get the feeling that Wenger somehow feels that if you have to buy a ready-made star it’s an admission of failure – like a master chef sending out for a pizza.
But the days of building your own team are long gone – Celtic did it, winning the European Cup with 11 players born within 30 miles of Glasgow, but that was in 1967.
Wenger was hailed as being ahead of his game when he arrived at Highbury but you sense he’s still stuck there – that was the mid-1990s.
It would be a sporting tragedy if his brilliant career were to end in tears but don’t rule it out – he’s looking more and more like a demented scarecrow on the touchline.
It would be a sporting tragedy if his brilliant career were to end in tears but don’t rule it out – he’s looking more and more like a demented scarecrow on the touchline.
He has reached the point where paying over the odds for a marquee name would be worth it. The money is not his – it’s Silent Stan’s – and could just save him.
The Emirates is becoming increasingly chilly and he may yet need saving from himself.
The Emirates is becoming increasingly chilly and he may yet need saving from himself.
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