The Arsenal story has become football’s Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett’s masterful play about the futility of life. I can picture Stan Kroenke and Arsène Wenger playing the vagabonds Estragon and Vladimir, sitting by the roadside while Vladimir reassures his companion, “I think we are better placed to challenge next season.”
Next season is Godot. They wait as long as they wish but Godot never arrives, at least not as they envisage it. Wenger could also be cast as Pozzo, the slightly aristocratic character who falls in with the derelicts and philosophises about the world. At one point Pozzo gets up to go.
“Adieu,” he says.
“Adieu,” they reply.
“Adieu,” he says again.
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“Adieu,” they reply.
Pozzo, though, can’t take himself away.
“I don’t seem to be able . . . [long hesitation] . . . to depart,” he says.
“Such is life,” says Estragon (Kroenke).
I can’t remember where I was the last time Arsenal won the title, except that my hair was a different colour. Far easier to recall the moment when you knew it was over for Wenger at the club. That came the morning after the 8-2 capitulation at Old Trafford in August 2011.
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This was the season when Wenger made Robin van Persie captain for no reason other than to stop him from decamping to some rival. It kept Van Persie for a season but a fat lot of good that did. The following season he was helping Manchester United win the title. Van Persie would later say that as soon as he arrived at United’s training centre, he felt he was at a club that had to win, having left one that wanted to win.
All I remember of Van Persie from the 8-2 shambles was a mis-hit penalty that was easily saved and a late goal that was no consolation. By then many Arsenal fans knew this was not going to get better. On the morning after that defeat in Manchester a leader writer at The Times wrote an extraordinary defence of Wenger’s record at the club.
“His brand of living-within-your-means bookkeeping is an example to all governments striving to cut spending without undermining the competitiveness of their economies,” The Times opined, before dismissing the concerns of those Arsenal fans who believed the club was stagnating. But was it Wenger the bookkeeper or Wenger the indecisive?
“Somewhere along the way, Wenger lost his vision for what the team should be
Around this time you could have had an interesting philosophical debate with him about the soaring transfer fees, wages and financial fair play. Everything he said would have made sense but the world in which he competed made no sense. His belief was that Chelsea and Manchester City were financial dopers while Arsenal played clean.
For a while Wenger’s hopes seemed to rest on Uefa but the regulatory authority needed its television revenue and the TV companies wanted the top teams. Unlike Pozzo, financial fair play just went away. Arsenal offered one pound over £40m for Luis Suarez in July 2013, a silly bid from the club that tried to get the Uruguayan on the cheap.
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“What are they smoking at the Emirates?” asked Liverpool owner John W Henry. Whatever it was, it was not performance-enhancing.
At an AGM, Wenger outlined the club’s strategy. It would be based on three fundamentals. The club would remain committed to its style of play and developing players from within. It would continue to trust “the intelligence of our eye” to find relatively inexpensive players with the potential to grow at Arsenal and, finally, the club would buy recognised world-class players.
That sounded plausible until Wenger listed the players the club had developed: Wojciech Szczesny, Carl Jenkinson, Kieran Gibbs, Jack Wilshere, Aaron Ramsey, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Serge Gnabry. Of that group, it is difficult to name one that has fully realised his potential. It has always seemed a little comfortable for talented young players in the first-team squad. This season didn’t matter so much, next season would be better.
The Godot Complex.
Mikel Arteta’s time at the club was diminished by injury and nobody would deny that Arteta was a serious professional who made the most of what he had. But something the Spaniard said during his time at the Emirates resonated: “We really enjoy playing with this club, so imagine if we are able to win trophies.”
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Playing at Arsenal should not be much fun if the team are not winning trophies.
“What is sure is that every defeat is a scar in your heart that you never forget,” Wenger once said. No heart can have accumulated so much scar tissue but still heals.
He deals with it. “We have gone through fantastic periods and also periods where we have to stick together,” is what might be called the archetypal Wenger summary. And there is always the FA Cup.
The reason so many Arsenal fans would have been pleased had Wenger walked away in minor triumph after last weekend’s victory over Chelsea is that it would have allowed a once-great manager an honourable exit. That is less likely now.
The man who once managed Tony Adams, Dennis Bergkamp, Patrick Vieira, Emmanuel Petit, Sol Campbell, Ashley Cole, Thierry Henry, Robert Pires and Cesc Fabregas is no more.
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Somewhere along the way, Wenger lost his vision for what the team should be. They bought Mesut Ozil because the club needed to show it could attract a world-class player. The same with Alexis Sanchez. But there was no strategy to build a team that would allow Ozil and Sanchez to truly flourish. Too many technically talented but slightly-built midfielders, players who have everything but stature. All those former guys, the Bergkamps, the Vieiras, the Campbells; that is what they had. Stature.
Who knows why Wenger chose to stay?
Was it an obstinate sense of entitlement that comes from the loyalty he showed to the club in the past, or the £16m salary, spread over two years?
Perhaps the more likely explanation is that he is Vladimir and Estragon rolled into one and still believes Godot is going to show up.
Lions know there’s no easy meat in New Zealand
Well, nobody said it was going to be easy.
Watching the British & Irish Lions get their tour under way by struggling past the New Zealand Provincial Barbarians in Whangarei, you quickly reached the conclusion that this will be a murderous tour.
The first opponents were a team of part-timers, mostly young men who would never be deemed good enough to play for New Zealand’s Super Rugby provinces. The reality is that they were meant to be easy meat for the Lions.
From the nightmare of the Lions’ 2005 tour to New Zealand there is only one memory worth preserving, and that was Dan Carter’s performance in the Wellington Test. He scored 33 points and delivered a fly-half masterclass. All it lacked to be one of the greatest performances ever seen on a rugby pitch was a worthy opponent.
Watching that game was a 13-year-old kid from Taranaki in his first year of secondary school. He was mesmerised. Being a fly-half, the teenager tried the stuff that Carter sublimely executed that night. Eventually Beauden Barrett grew up to become the All Blacks’ fly-half. He has grown to know Carter pretty well. And Carter has even persuaded him to do Pilates and yoga. Right now, the 26-year-old is world player of the year.
Barrett is an exquisite footballer who plays the game with an almost nonchalant attitude. He sees space, not gaps, because gaps often close by the time your reach them. In these times of unrelenting physicality his effectiveness is a breath of fresh air. I bring up Barrett not simply because he is the All Blacks fly-half but rather because of his family. The Barretts, you could argue, are the foremost sporting family in the world.
This was not entirely accidental. Dad Kevin is a farmer who once played a lot of rugby for his local province. An uncompromising loose forward, at the end of his career he announced that he was off to breed All Blacks. Beauden is the eldest of three star rugby players. Scott comes next, a strapping lock who made his debut for the All Blacks against Ireland in Chicago last year, coming on in the second half and scoring a try.
Scott has now played four times for the All Blacks and as the team’s coach, Steve Hansen, is a confirmed fan, he is likely to figure at some point in the forthcoming Test series against the Lions. The youngest of the Barrett stars is Jordie, a 20-year-old utility back whose best position is full-back. He was taken on the European tour as an apprentice last autumn but wasn’t used in any game.
Such has been his form since breaking into the Hurricanes side that most pundits accept it is purely a matter of time before he gets his chance with the All Blacks.
The thing about the Barretts is that their games, even that of second-rower Scott, are based on skill and speed and searching for space rather than always seeking contact. Keep them in mind because over the next six weeks, you may well find yourselves searching for reasons to get out of bed early on Saturday mornings.