Two famous former players recently told me within days of one another: “It’s about players, it’s all about the players.” More profound than it sounds, it’s a lens on Arsenal’s trip to Manchester City today and their struggle to end a 22-year wait for the league title.
Arsenal are through to a Champions League semi-finals for the second consecutive year and lead the Premier League by six points. If that’s a crisis, we’d all settle for one like that in our lives. So, is it the expensively built horse of this Arsenal team, or the jockey, Mikel Arteta, who is causing the run-in to be so stressful?
One of the former players was Tony Adams, who bridged the George Graham and Arsène Wenger eras. “It’s about players. Don’t let anyone ever tell you any different,” said Adams, who recalled asking Wenger in his Arsenal twilight years why the team had regressed so far. “I used to have World Cup winners,” Wenger told him. “Now I have none.”
Wenger was referring to his fellow Frenchmen Patrick Vieira, Emmanuel Petit, Thierry Henry and Robert Pirès, all 1998 World Cup winners. The club’s greatest manager inherited George Graham’s redoubtable back four and added orchestral fluidity and imagination higher up the pitch. Highbury, before it closed, was a stage for a kind of beauty those of us who witnessed it still get misty about.
But it wasn’t only pretty and cerebral. The fusion of pace, creativity and aggression found its crowning glory in the unbeaten league campaign of 2003-04 – the Invincibles. But the really good times stopped two decades ago and now it’s make or break for the Arteta reconstruction.
Arsenal can dance into summertime by winning the Champions League or the English title. Winning one would make Arteta’s job secure. Winning both would earn him a statue.
‘Who is going to challenge the manager? I’d say things to George Graham, and I was terrified of him’
‘Who is going to challenge the manager? I’d say things to George Graham, and I was terrified of him’
Tony Adams
Panning out to George Graham and Wenger clarifies the big question: what, if anything is missing now? Is there a virus of tactics, team character or managerial acumen that will hand the title to City?
It’s a short step from man “on fire”, as Arteta said he was in midweek, to “man fired”. Arsenal, league runners-up three seasons in a row, can’t be said to have many leaders of the Vieira, Petit or Adams calibre, though Declan Rice, David Raya and Gabriel Magalhães belong in the same paragraph. Nor does Arteta’s relationship with his players match either the Graham dictatorship or Wenger’s clever knack of making his senior players think they were in charge when he was the one running the show.
Arsenal hold the record for the biggest Premier League lead ever chased down – the 13-point advantage Manchester United held over them at the end of December 1997. But this time it’s Arsenal hanging on against a pursuer schooled in causing teams ahead of them to crack.
Great managers don’t put pressure on. They take it off. Aside from Arteta’s excessive tactical caution, his mistrust of adventure, the main doubt about him is whether he has tied this Arsenal team in anxiety knots.
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“Fire. I’m on fire. That’s it. Nothing else,” he said before the Champions League quarter-final second leg against Sporting. “I’m driven so much. I have done so much to be in this position. I know how this club was. This is beauty.”
Before the Bournemouth home game last weekend, which Arsenal lost, Arteta told the fans: “It’s an early kick-off, so get up early, have an early breakfast, bring your lunch, bring your dinner, and let’s all go for it together because it has to be a big day.”
It was enough to make older observers nostalgic for the days of paintballing or a day at the races. Those de-stressing tricks are discredited now but there are times when Arteta’s intensity can seem less than conducive to serenity. Guardiola has 39 trophies to justify his fanaticism.
Two weekends ago Adams studied the Arsenal and City league games. “You’re looking at [Bernardo] Silva with his relationship with Pep. You could see an instant chemistry there,” he says. “And there was a leader there and he’s like, if there’s a problem … I didn’t see the same with Arsenal. Declan is a leader. I think he’s a super leader and super player, and I feel he should be Arsenal captain anyway [he has been, for the last two games]. Gabriel, these kind of players... Who is going to challenge [the manager] now as captain? I’d say [things] to George [Graham] – and I was fucking terrified of George.”
Issues of “character” bubble up again and again because Arsenal fans see their team seized by the implosion narrative. They suspect their manager of muzzling his attackers (Saka, Eze, Madueke, Martinelli, Havertz, Dowman, Gyökeres). Even as they advanced to the last four of the Champions League a distress flare seemed to glow above the Emirates. It may be neurosis. Or it could just be that this Arsenal side are good but not great.
There’s no curse in sport like the one that hangs over a team who should have won the big prize but didn’t – the side that defeated themselves. Arteta would be paraded as the culprit. But if football really is “all about players”, it stands to reason that the 11 who take to the field and the five who come on in the six league games left can’t hide behind their boss.
Photograph by Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images