IT WAS Harold Wilson’s ambition to establish Labour as “the natural party of government”. Sir Alex Ferguson managed to make Manchester United the natural league champions of England, so much so that when any other team went on top of the table, it looked like an unnatural act. And certainly a temporary one.
Now Arsenal are on top. And you know what? It feels natural. It seems right and it seems inevitable. Tottenham Hotspur set the early pace, but that always felt a bit silly. Now, it seems, normal service has been resumed.
This is not because Arsenal won the Double last year, or not just. It is because Arsenal have achieved a level of serene self-confidence. They believe in themselves and, crucially, everybody else believes in them as well. They look like natural champions. All they have to do now is make that feeling last for the rest of the season.
Today, they travel a few miles to take on Charlton Athletic at The Valley. They look smooth, content, untroubled. They look cool — a word increasingly associated with Arsène Wenger, their manager.
Arsenal’s great rivals of the modern era, Manchester United, do not look cool. Ferguson, their manager, doesn’t do cool. He does hot. And his side are also looking increasingly bothered. That Arsenal cool is getting to them.
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There was a moment, late last season, when Ferguson got desperate with his famous mind games. He tried a ploy that blew up in his face, saying that Arsenal may be higher up the table but Manchester United had played much better football.
Wenger did the urbane shrug; urbanity is rather his thing. And he said the words that were to make Ferguson incandescent with rage: “Everyone thinks he has the prettiest wife at home.”
Wenger was obviously speaking in generalisations. Ferguson, not urbane, took it as a vindictive attack on the charms of Lady Ferguson. It was like being in the wrong pub, when you make a polite joke and find a Scotsman about to knife you.
Wenger has established Arsenal as cool, not to say chic. He has won all the recent exchanges with Ferguson. Ferguson has lost Keane and Scholes to injury — but then Wenger is missing Robert Pires and Freddie Ljungberg, who were, in a highly competitive field, Arsenal’s best players last season.
In short, Wenger and Arsenal are going through a period when it all looks easy. Everybody in sport knows how vulnerable you are under such circumstances.
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And Arsenal move into the Champions League on Tuesday, when they have a visit from Borussia Dortmund. This raises the stakes somewhat dramatically, because in sport’s show-us-yer-medals culture, this is one area where Fergie and his boys are still one-up. They can always point at the European Cup and say: We won that. Did you? And that means everything, more even than their seven Premiership titles in nine years.
Manchester United used to cruise through Premiership games and get serious for Europe. The message: this is where we belong. This is where the serious teams are to be found. And Arsenal haven’t matched them here. They have played with competence in Europe, but they haven’t played with authority. They haven’t looked at home. They failed to reach the knockout stages last season.
Another Premiership title would show that Arsenal have outcooled Manchester United in the staring match that has enlivened domestic football so pleasingly in the past few years, but a serious run in the Champions League would show something more. And victory — but best not talk about that.
The fact is that Arsenal are at present on top. Manchester United are struggling, as they have been ever since Ferguson announced his retirement. He changed his mind about that, but Manchester United have not changed their mind about their uncertainty.
The pretenders — Leeds United and Liverpool, Newcastle United and Chelsea at a pinch — have yet to show real substance when it comes to winning the big stuff. Arsenal, once pretenders themselves, are sitting in what looks like their rightful place. Wenger has taken his club that far.
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It is a remarkable achievement for a man who was nicknamed Clouseau when he first went to the club. But his arrival changed the way that football is played in England, and the way it is played by Englishmen. Sven-Göran Eriksson was recruited as a slightly smudgy carbon copy of Wenger, similar glasses, similar cool, less tactical flexibility and much more vanity.
Foreign coaches had come before and tried to turn their clubs into foreign clubs. Wenger has always been red hot on the cross-fertilisation of footballing cultures. When he first arrived at Arsenal in 1996, instead of chucking out the old guard, he admired “the quality of their English spirit”.
I knew there was something special about Wenger when, in the match in which Arsenal celebrated the championship in 1998, Tony Adams scored a goal with a left-foot volley. He made players more truly themselves. His managerial techniques make Ferguson look like a Fifties throwback.
Wenger doesn’t shout and hurl teacups. He treats players as grown-ups. He speaks five languages, a good four (or five) more than Ferguson. He closed the players’ bar and ended Arsenal’s reputation as a haven for boozers, gamblers and brawlers. He made them eat proper food and do their stretches and warm-ups properly — these things seem run-of-the-mill now, but it was Wenger that made them so.
He has changed the look and the feel of the English game. And he has brought a dignity and calm to the profession of football manager. Clive James once said: “There are people who say that Tommy Docherty is not fit to be a football manager. That’s exactly what he’s fit for.”
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But Wenger has changed the way we see managers: cool, poised and, of course, urbane. And so far this season he has made Manchester United look like country bumpkins and Ferguson look like a provincial hick. The season rolls on: so far, so cool.
Steve McClaren, page 28
Nolan’s chance, page 29