The Strange Case of Arsenal Football Club

-------My own analysis of our current long-running debacle written just for the sake of it-----------


If you support a team than it seems counter intuitive to actually want that team to lose but defeat tells you a lot more about a team than victory. In sport victory has a tendency to be copasetic and unequivical and allows flaws to go unadressed where as defeat lays them bare like exposed wiring in electrical goods.

If you wanted a prime example of this you'd need to look no further than the current Ashes series where a 3-0 advantage to the hosts is masking ominiously poor performances from the top order batsmen and the amateurish field setting by captain Alaistair Cook which is causing us to heamorage runs in a way that would be resoundingly punished by sides like South Africa and India.

Towards the back end of the season this was true of Arsenal as well, our Lazarus like revival after the defeat at White Hart Lane was tempered by the fact that many of the performances despite yielding vital points were truly apalling at times and were largely unworthy of the competition we sought qualification for. Even against a Manchester United side who already crowned as champions had nothing to play for and who gave a largely sedate performance we were found desperately wanting and were fortunate in the extreme not to have gone down to resounding defeat.

Nonetheless the blessed elysium of fourth was ours once more and it seemed only fair to believe that this somewhat fortuitious ending to the season would be a springboard for the club to push on after eight years without a trophy.

Although as a fan I viewed with a degree of skepticism both Ivan Gazidis' posturing about our financial firepower and the calibre of players the media were linking us with back in June I found myself happy at least to entertain the possibility that something might change. It was conceivable that Arsene Wenger looking down the barrel of the last year of his contract might either look to end his time with us in a blaze of glory or at the very least create a side that would allow him to justify signing a contract extension.

As June passed into July restrained optimism became frustrated deja vu well actually not even that because deja vu is only actually a feeling of having experienced something similar beforehand where as this particular experience of history repeating itself was very much grounded in reality (for Higuain and Suarez read Julio Baptista in 2005 and Xabi Alonso in 2008). The only argument remaining was whether the promises to strengthen had been cynically made during a time when the fan's season tickets were up for renewal or whether this was purely just total and utter ineptitude on the part of the transfer negotiating team (again team is a word that probably shouldn't apply to a single American lawyer).

Either way we learnt that a Brazillian midfielder pushing for contention in his national side for next year's world cup would rather take his chances with a team that had recently flirted with relegation from the Bundesliga than with us, hardly surprising considering the Emirates is becoming known as a venue in which the careers of promising players goes down the toilet.Thomas Vermaelen, Andrei Arshavin, Lukasz Podolski and others have all been struck down in their prime with a virulent illness i like to call Wengeritis; a horrible malignant disease which causes otherwise good players to become awful through poor coaching methods and being played out of position, even our best player Santi Cazorla is begining to manifest symptoms through being played out on the wing.

Fast forward to pre-season and meaningless cash incentivised friendlies in the far east and a precursor to the season ahead with a draw and a defeat in the Emirates Cup (another pointless money grabbing exercise) to mediocre European teams were followed by a deceptively convincing win over Manchester City in Helsinki and the prospect of a perilous pitfall (apologies for the aliteration)for Champions League group stage qualification in the form of Fenerbahce (which apparently is turkish for Lighthouse Garden which is a wonderfully florid name for a football club)

The fixture list was unusually kind to us with matches against mid table oposistion and relegation fodder to ease our passage into the new season and emphasised by an opening fixture at home to Aston Villa; a side whose own fortunes had taken a sharp turn for the worse in recent years. The caveat was that Aston Villa hadn't exactly found coming to the Emirates a daunting prospect and had come away from the ground with maximum points on two previous ocassions and yesterday they were victorious once more.

I personally find it hard to muster much emotional response when Arsenal lose because it's largely forseeable and therefore easier to supress the sense of disappointment much in the same way youd supress the pain of a burn by wrapping a damp towel around the affected area. And thus my only consternation about the whole debacle is how an otherwise intelligent man like Arsene Wenger looked totally shellshocked in the post match interview.

This despite empiical evidence seeming to indicate that a defeat of this nature was not only possible but becoming increasing likely given our inability last season to deal with teams with any pace in their side, a midfield that is both uncapable of and unwilling to protect our back four and a mounting injury list which further made our failure to make a significant summer signing that much more incredulous.

And so contrary to my opening statement it is becoming clear that from these kind of defeats one cannot even derrive the satisfaction of the truth being laid bare to to Wenger. The author of the amusing and lucidly written Arseblog made the following observation " to paraphrase Ivan Gazidis talking about the manager, ‘What makes sense to you and I isn’t necessarily what makes sense to Arsene Wenger".

It's hard to evaluate such a statement with any sense of certainty...it's either that Wenger is a man of unmittigated arrogance or that his perceived entrenchment and myopia has brought about a mentality which is totally removed from reality. Either way a comment that was probably intended to suggest that the frenchman is a complicated engimatic individual who thinks outside the box seems to be unintentionally painting a potrait of a man suffering from a severe depreication of his cognitive faculties.

But given that Arsenal football club are more furtive about how they conduct business than the DPRK much of the rationale attributed towards the often baffling behaviour of both manager and the club in general is largely specculative and the inferences drawn are largely variant depending on whose opinion you ask.
On one end of the spectrum it is claimed that Wenger is an meglomanical micro manager who looks upon spending as the cowardly option and the board are too frightened to reign back his autocracy in fear that he might resign.
The oposing argument is that he is a pawn beholden to the board and the majority shareholder Stan Kroenke who are the worst kind of venture capatalists looking to asset strip the club by selling off the fine china (Van Persie, Fabregas, Nasri et al) and now that this well has dried up are targeting the wage bill by releasing dozens of players.

Neither of these is a particurlarly compelling argument and it seems much more likely that this is a club without any centralised leadership which has resulted in the current inertia. For instance there doesn't seem to be any one other than Dick Law taking direct responsibility and easing the burden of transfer negotiations from the manager's shoulders.
Arsene Wenger in his post match interview yesterday spoke about the transfer funds "as being the club's money not his own" which made him sound like someone in a hotel on a business trip paid for by the company agonising over whether to indulge in either the mini bar facilities or the pay per view pornography channel and then ultimately deciding it would be the safer option not to.
It appears to me that Wenger views transfer fees as a business expense and is therefore desperate not to be seen to be taking liberties and seems to only make purchases if he believes he is getting a bargain for the club such as last summer when he swooped down upon Malaga (a club in extreme financial difficulty) like a vulture in order to take Cazorla off them for a modest amount

Then again all of this is supposition on my part and the only chance of knowing the truth behind it all is if an embittered ex-board member publishes a self-serving yet comphrenhensive expose of the inner workings of the club. The smart money would have been on Lady Nina Bracewell Smith but she has confined herself to some petty sniping at some of her ex colleagues accusing them of adopting a chauvinistic attitude towards her so even if she was to elaborate further it could be easily dismissed as the hysterical rantings of someone who was never particurlarly taken seriously even when they were on the board.

The only certainty i have in relation to Arsenal football club is that unless there is a drastic change of direction that the most sensible approach for me personally would be to ape the club's approach to spending by keeping my money in my pocket when it comes to purchasing match tickets.