If you bought a wonderful, state-of-the-art car 22 years ago, it would have been a revelation. Then, 5 years later you’d notice that other people’s cars suddenly had different bits. More computerised, less mechanical, more sophisticated. After 10 years it would be decidedly ‘old hat’ but still lovely and doubtless wonderful. Give it another 5 years and everyone has sat-nav, computerised everything, USB ports, a sound system that just sucks the songs you want to hear out of your brain and all the space age technology you could ever want but never actually realised you did want.

As an Arsene Wenger analogy that’s quite fair. I consciously avoided the labrador puppy model, which after 22 years is blind, diabetic, incontinent and in pain and really needs to be put down FOR MERCY’S SAKE!!! I avoided that one because it may be more accurate, more representative, its a bit disrespectful. Hmmm…

Wenger arrived at Highbury and inherited a fairly decent football team. And then proceeded to single-handedly take all the fun out of footballers’ lives. He is exalted as a revolutionary, well so was Lenin.

The team would turn up for training, eventually, and enjoy a great big fry-up. Because it is definitely the best cure for the inevitable hangover, or to bring you down from a serious coke-buzz. Then, before the gym work started in earnest, there would be half an hour of bookie time, when the players could get all their bets down for the afternoon’s events, arrange a few judicious yet highly profitable handballs for Saturday, basically, taking care of business.

And Wenger stopped all that. Rather than coming up with some healthy-eating hangover cure he decided instead to ban the players from drinking. I mean, come on, is that right? Was that in anyone’s best interest? The gambling had to stop too. Recreational drugs were probably totally out of the question. Because he was Mr Straight. Or however that translates into French. Monsieur Straight.

So what did all that killjoying actually achieve? When you really look at it? Ok, it produced the most fit, strong and energised group of players that football had ever seen. They ate well, trained well, banned all the ‘good’ things, won everything, played the football of dreams and basically became the model of envy for every decent football team in Europe. Wenger changed the game, but totally. Nothing superficial or sticking plasterish about his methods. They were Gestalt. He addressed every facet of the players lives. Starting with their minds, then their waistlines then their feet. And consequently Arsenal won the league 3 times, twice in ‘double’ seasons and capped it all with the only ever unbeaten season.

Then it went downhill.

Because football is not ever a ‘revolution’ but an evolution. Wenger just represented a Jurassic explosion in the beautiful game with lots of changes all at once. But then his branch on the evolutionary tree stopped growing. He stuck with the 1997 plan and refused to budge. Even as others used his methods and then improved them. Like Maggie Thatcher, he was not for turning.

But I come to praise Wenger, not to bury him. Because he was a genius. Not a word I band about in any context. Then his inherent stubbornness? Frenchness? stopped him from embracing the changes necessary to keep his genius alive.

Au revoir Arsene

A xxxx