Arsènal
Page 5
This was Arsenal drawing a line under everything that had gone before. The boring, boring tag, the spendthrift policies and sterile football of the later Graham years, and most of all the bung scandal were all consigned to times past as the board finally gave their fans what they had been clamouring for so long: extravagant spending on world-class attackers.
Surely this is what Tottenham do? However, at the same time that Arsenal were signing Bergkamp, Spurs were busy turning themselves into the Arsenal of yesteryear, exemplified by chairman Alan Sugar’s comparative parsimony and manager Gerry Francis’s stunted imagination. “I can’t ever see us spending £7 million on a player, I really can’t,” said Sugar, suggesting that Arsenal would live to regret their profligacy. Bergkamp (along with Jürgen Klinsmann whose signed shirt the Tottenham chairman wouldn’t use to wash his car) exemplified in Sugar’s mind the notion of ‘Carlos Kickaball’, a foreign mercenary who failed to deliver and would head for the exit when the going got tough. The fact that Bergkamp had a predilection for Tottenham probably passed Sugar by.
When he was a youngster, as a special treat Mr and Mrs Berkamp would take Dennis to White Hart Lane where he only had eyes for his favourite player, Glenn Hoddle. So when he was searching for an escape route out of Milan his first thought was to ask his agent, Rob Jansen, to contact Tottenham to see if there was any interest. Of course back came the answer, none whatsoever, enabling David Dein to smartly step in. Even at the eleventh hour – allegedly in the taxi taking him to Highbury to sign, Bergkamp asked Jansen to check again with Tottenham and only when he was re assured that his only London home could be in N5 did he finally commit himself to Arsenal. However, there was still one further issue to be resolved.
After the deal was done, Dein was told by Jansen that “It’s nothing major but Dennis isn’t too keen on flying.”
“What do you mean?” said Dein. “We are aiming for Europe.”
“I’m sure you’ll get round it,” said Jansen, making light of the situation.
Dein immediately investigated the British Airways Fear of Flying course (a two-day tutorial which culminates with the passenger sitting alongside the pilot in the cockpit as the plane takes a spin over London). As Dein was telling his new employee that there were numerous options and the course would not interfere with training, he could see the colour draining from Bergkamp’s face.
“I don’t like to fly, Mr Dein,” said Bergkamp
“Don’t worry,” said Dein. ‘This course will help you.”
“No, Mr Dein. You don’t understand. I don’t fly.”
Arsenal’s new star had been traumatised by two flying incidents, the first in 1989 when 14 Dutch Surinamese players lost their lives in a plane crash and the second as recently as the year before, when the Dutch national team were caught up in a bomb scare during the World Cup in the USA, after which he vowed never to set foot in a plane again. Although at the time Dein must have been perturbed, he might have had more serious misgivings had he envisaged the perennial European campaigns under Wenger in the years to come and consequently the many key encounters Bergkamp would miss as a result of his phobia. Today, Dein is sanguine. “We still got the bargain of all time,” he says.
Whilst Rioch undoubtedly wanted Bergkamp – “He was the only foreign superstar the manager had heard of,” quipped Dein – Rioch’s insularity and indecisiveness might have scuppered other potential acquisitions. In a case of once bitten, twice bitten, Mel Goldberg was convinced that Bordeaux left back Bixente Lizarazu was just an unknown exotic foreign name to the Arsenal vice-chairman before he introduced him, implying that Dein in this instance was just as unworldly as his manager. Perhaps Arsenal’s interest cooled when Roberto Carlos came on the market. In the event they dithered and ended up with neither. Both went to bigger clubs: Lizarazu to Bayern Munich and Carlos to Real Madrid. It was probably inevitable anyway but Dein must have felt he and his manager were not on the same wavelength.
Now though there was no time to dwell on missed opportunities. Bruce Rioch changed the team’s tactics to get the ball on the floor more and build up from the back, utilising a 3–5–2 formation with Lee Dixon and Nigel Winterburn as wing backs. What was the point pumping the ball long to Ian Wright when the talents of Bergkamp and Platt had been assembled? It was a transitional season – a football cliché, but in this instance an accurate reflection of Rioch’s time – laying the groundwork for future progress. Arsenal qualified for the UEFA Cup, but the fifth place finish did not satisfy the board, who expected more given the outlay to bring the two big star names to the club. Moreover, the manager had alienated certain senior players and for some reason had not signed the contract that was on the table and would have committed him for the long term.
Paul Merson recalls that Rioch appeared to be a fish out of water, he simply didn’t fit in. “He couldn’t handle big time players. He couldn’t handle Wrighty. He used to come in and say ‘I can’t believe you all don’t come in the same car. At Bolton [Rioch’s previous managerial post] four or five of them used to come in the same car and talk about set pieces.’ London’s not like Bolton. He couldn’t grasp the concept that Ian Wright lived an hour and 20 minutes away from the training ground and someone else lived an hour away in the other direction.”
But, more critically, there were issues with his man-management style. George Graham might have seemed military to Merson, but he’d developed the players from unknowns into household names. Now they were stars, they didn’t take well to a new man using the same approach that they had had to endure when they were growing up. Merson recalls a particular training session as a watershed. “One day, he said to Wrighty ‘John McGinlay [his star striker at Bolton] would have scored that.’ I remember now seeing Wrighty walking to the showers saying the F word to him and that was it. Wrighty was bigger than the club itself then. It was either Rioch went or Wrighty went. And Rioch went.”
Dein had already targeted the man he really wanted, and after Arsène Wenger had been initially overlooked following Graham’s dismissal, at Dein’s behest the board believed the time was now opportune for a foreign adventure.
They were lucky to get a second chance. Peter Hill-Wood admitted, “We hadn’t the nerve to do it [before hiring Rioch in preference to Wenger] and I might not have been wrong. I don’t think it hurt him going to Japan.” (After Arsenal’s disinterest, Wenger went to manage Grampus Eight for whom he won the Japanese cup.) Indeed, there was some support for Hill-Wood’s position. Wenger’s former star player at Monaco, Jürgen Klinsmann, felt that “There was a different Arsène Wenger after Japan. He came back and for the first time truly believed ‘I’m ready for a big club now.’”
“It was a big decision,” recalls chairman Peter Hill-Wood, to reverse the one taken two years previously. However, it was quick and painless once the Arsenal trio of Dein, Hill-Wood and largest shareholder, Danny Fiszman, made the trip to Japan in the summer of 1996. An hour’s discussion in Wenger’s hotel room and it was handshakes all round.
Yet, as with Dennis Bergkamp, Arsène Wenger could so easily have ended up on the other side of North London. During French mid-season breaks in the late 1980s, Wenger, then the Monaco coach, would head across the Channel to absorb his annual fix of English football. “There was a different quality of passion and the way supporters lived the match was distinct from anywhere else [I had experienced] in Europe. I thought,” he said, “that if one day I was given the chance to work in England, I would do it.” That chance could and should have come at Tottenham.
Wenger had established a relationship with FIFA-accredited agent Dennis Roach, who had enabled him to acquire his clients Mark Hateley and Glenn Hoddle. The Monaco coach was indebted to Roach who, unbeknown to Hoddle, had changed his French destination at the last minute from Paris St Germain, enabling Wenger to snatch the man he later described as “indispensable” from under the nose of his friend and then PSG coach Gerard Houllier. Further, Roach was a good friend of Irving Scholar and was
thus in a perfect position to act as a go-between. As a start, he instituted friendly matches between Monaco and Tottenham which became a regular feature of the January calendar and he organised Wenger’s winter travel itinerary, with the first stop invariably White Hart Lane.
At the time, George Graham was getting his feet under the table at Arsenal, while at Tottenham David Pleat’s team of talents were self-combusting – Clive Allen and Chris Waddle following Hoddle to France – as the manager committed occupational suicide by giving the tabloids the opportunity to make headlines out of his private life.
Having lived in Monaco for many years, it is the cruellest of ironies for a Tottenham fan that the biggest one of all, Irving Scholar, the most cosmopolitan and outward-looking English chairman of his time, should have passed up the golden opportunity on his doorstep. Scholar and Wenger were enthusiasts on the same wavelength regarding how their obsession should be played. Unfortunately for Wenger Scholar preferred Terry Venables as Pleat’s replacement, a decision that came back to haunt him when the club went into debt and Scholar was forced to sell his shares to the Alan Sugar/Terry Venables partnership.
Although he wasn’t on Tottenham’s wishlist, it didn’t stop Wenger’s winter escapades which of course went far beyond White Hart Lane. As luck would have it, on one of his trips, lost in the bowels of Highbury, Wenger stumbled into the Ladies’ Lounge (even as recently as 20 years ago, no directors’ WAGs were allowed in the Arsenal boardroom). Rescued by Mrs Dein, who took him to meet her husband, the two men struck up an immediate rapport. On his own in London that night, the Deins took Wenger along to a friend’s dinner party where the unexpected guest endeared himself to everyone by the panache he brought to an after-dinner game of charades. At the time, his English was only passable, but he immediately impressed David Dein with his intelligence and the Arsenal vice-chairman made a mental note of the fact that here was a different species of football man. “One for the future,” Dein recalls thinking.
Having a yacht moored at Antibes on the Côte d’Azur, just along the road from Monaco, Dein became an increasingly frequent spectator at the Stade Louis II, where the post-match tradition of dinner with the Monaco coach was inaugurated and his admiration subsequently increased by leaps and bounds. Dein was convinced that if ever the Arsenal leopard was going to change its spots, he had the answer in waiting.
Although the club did not announce that Arsène Wenger would be coming until some weeks into the 1996/97 season, it became the worst kept secret in football. Rioch was dismissed days before the first league match of the new season and Stewart Houston was once again asked to take charge until Wenger’s arrival. Houston then received an offer from Queens Park Rangers and jumped ship before the new number one arrived, ironically recruiting Bruce Rioch to assist him at Loftus Road in a reversal of their roles at Highbury (though apparently Houston couldn’t rid himself of the habit of, from time to time, referring to Rioch as “Boss”).
Pat Rice took charge for the remaining matches until Wenger had completed his obligations to Grampus 8 in Japan. His first sight of his team in the flesh was their late September elimination from the UEFA Cup by Borussia Mönchengladbach in Germany. His first match in charge was a 2–0 victory away to Blackburn two and a half weeks on. By that time, Arsenal fans had already seen the debut of a young midfielder signed on Wenger’s recommendation before his arrival had been officially confirmed. (“I had to be quick because he was on the verge of signing for Ajax,” he recalls. “I intercepted him when he was in Holland.”) Probably only footballing francophiles were aware of the 20-year-old before he joined, but Patrick Vieira’s evident talents indicated that the new boss certainly had an eye for a player.
CHAPTER THREE
A BREAK FROM THE PAST
On 12th October 1996 Arsenal took the field at Ewood Park to face Blackburn Rovers in an auspicious Premier League encounter. Auspicious because it marked Arsène Wenger’s first match as the manager of Arsenal Football Club. His starting line-up that Saturday afternoon consisted of nine Englishmen, a Welshman and a Frenchman. His five substitutes were all English.
Fast forward to Sunday lunchtime on 12th August 2007. Wenger is still in his post (the second longest serving Premier League manager after Alex Ferguson) and Arsenal are about to play their opening fixture of that season’s Premier League campaign, albeit in their very own 60,000-seater stadium a world away from Highbury in every sense apart from distance. The 11 starters are totally devoid of any British presence, although there is room for just one Englishman, Theo Walcott, to be squeezed onto the bench. (In fact, Arsenal’s use of foreigners is the highest by far of any club from the major European leagues.)
How did it come to this? One of the great clubs of English football unable to find a place in the team for anyone from the country in which they play? The search for an answer reveals how Arsène Wenger went about creating the modern Arsenal, one so far removed from the regime during the fading years of the George Graham era that only the red shirt with white sleeves would be recognisable to those who watched the team in the early 1990s. It is the story of how Arsène Wenger built three distinct Arsenal sides, assimilating past, present and future, to procure trophies and thereby lay the foundations for future prosperity at a time of financial uncertainty. It is a unique blueprint for the making of a modern superclub, to a point where, by the time his current contract expires in 2011, Arsenal could be the world’s richest club. By the conclusion of the 2006/07 season, they had risen to the heady position of third in the world money league with an annual turnover of more than £200 million (with the inclusion of its property revenues) on a net transfer spend of less than £4 million a season over the 11 campaigns that their manager had overseen. To achieve this whilst delivering seven major trophies and producing the most entertaining fare in the country can be summarised as ‘the Wengerian miracle’.
The personnel Wenger inherited in 1996 were comfortable with the 3–5–2 formation that Bruce Rioch had introduced and they expressed their wish for the new boss to persevere with it. After all, they were lying second in the table on goal difference, in spite of a series of off-the-field upheavals. Over the course of less than three months, three different men had selected the first team. To add to the climate of uncertainty, club captain Tony Adams faced up to his demons and admitted he was an alcoholic to his colleagues, who probably weren’t as surprised at the revelation so much as the transformation of the man who was making it. As his teammate Ian Wright commented with no ironic intent, “For Tony to admit he is an alcoholic took an awful lot of bottle.”
With change and an accompanying foreboding in the air, the paramount need was for a sense of togetherness, which the new arrival effected by maintaining the existing formation as the players had requested. Had he insisted on his preferred 4–4–2 line-up, perhaps the outcome would have been even better than the third spot they attained, missing out on Champions League qualification on goal difference to Newcastle, seven points behind champions Manchester United. It would be the last time that Arsenal finished outside the top two until 2006, and the last time that Arsène Wenger would compromise on his modus operandi.
Still, a lot of the groundwork accomplished in Wenger’s first months would bear fruit the following year, despite the players’ initial hostility. This was epitomised by Tony Adams: “At first I thought, ‘What does this Frenchman know about football? He wears glasses and looks more like a schoolteacher. He’s not going to be as good as George [Graham]. Does he even speak English properly?’” But having got their way over their preferred system, they conceded to Wenger’s newfangled preparatory methods. With a nucleus of largely English players, he concentrated on improving their physical well-being, introducing dietary changes and training that was geared towards tuning rather than testing bodies.
Sessions were much shorter than hitherto and involved much more preparatory work – stretching and jogging – to lessen the chances of injury. Regular psychological and physical examination
s and continuous monitoring confirmed how effective the new methods were. During the week, the manager had to rely on his players choosing to consume copious amounts of water instead of (dehydrating) alcohol when left to their own devices. Ian Wright probably headed for the nearest takeaway as an antidote to the nourishing fare he was provided with at the training ground: “He has put me on grilled fish, grilled broccoli, grilled everything. Yuk!” Shortly after his arrival, Wenger justified his reforms: “It’s silly to work hard the whole week and then spoil it by not preparing properly before the game. As a coach you can influence the diet of your players. You can point out what is wrong. Some are wrong because they are not strong enough to fight temptation and some are wrong because they do not know. As a coach I can teach the players what they do wrong without knowing it is wrong.”
Perhaps it was no coincidence that the players shipped out within a year of Wenger’s arrival were those who found it most difficult to adapt. John Hartson’s temperament was the polar opposite of the Zen-like manager’s (whilst his bulky physique suggested a liking for consuming something the manager would have disapproved of). The final straw for Wenger was probably Hartson’s New Year’s Day appearance as a substitute against Middlesbrough, in which he received two yellow cards for dissent and then foul and abusive language to leave his teammates a man short. On Valentine’s Day the striker was sold to West Ham, with no love lost.