Over time, you come to realise that football, for all its charms and addictive qualities, is an inherently angry place. It’s unshakeable, there will always be eruptions of temper and no matter how much our grounds have been sanitised in recent years the sport is still essentially the same as when Arthur Hopcraft wrote in 1968 how football crowds are “never going to sound or look like the hat parade on the club lawns of Cheltenham racecourse”.
My mind goes back to Martin O’Neill’s early days at Leicester City, barely a few weeks into the job, and the unpleasantness of a 2-0 home defeat to Sheffield United when the crowd at Filbert Street made it clear that they did not want him at their club. O’Neill went on to become the most acclaimed manager in Leicester’s history – prior to this season anyway – but that night was toxic, culminating with an attempt to kick down the front doors of the stadium. “I was standing beside Martin in the technical area,” John Robertson, his assistant, recalls. “I remember Martin taking a deep breath and saying to me: ‘It’s wild, isn’t it?’”
It was wild, too, at Old Trafford in September 2005 when Sir Alex Ferguson, with enough trophies to fill a removal van, experienced a form of mutiny from Manchester United’s supporters that, looking back, can feel like a trick of the mind. Ferguson’s team had lost the league to Chelsea the previous year, the vein on the side of Roy Keane’s temple had started to throb out of control and many match-goers were losing trust in the manager in a way that had not happened since the days of “Ta-ra Fergie” and all that.
A jarring defeat to Blackburn Rovers had left his team 10 points off the top and, for some, it was too much to bear. “The hostility hit him like a mallet,” I wrote at the time. “There are V-signs, middle fingers raised and faces contorted with anger. There is nothing to prepare you for seeing and hearing Sir Alex Ferguson being jeered and abused by Manchester United’s supporters.”
It felt that way the first time I saw it happen to Arsène Wenger, too, and even now, having witnessed it on more occasions than I can probably remember, it can still be shocking to see, close up, when a crowd turns on a manager that way.
The press box at Arsenal is about 30 yards or so behind Wenger’s dugout, at the back of the lower tier, so there is a perfect view of what he frequently has to endure from supporters in that area of the ground and it is certainly an eye‑opener if, like me, you once suspected it would be unthinkable for a man of his achievement to be treated with this kind of malevolence.
It’s spiteful, vicious stuff and, though the temperature dropped against West Brom on Thursday, the vast expanses of empty seats and the photo-opportunity placard-waving were another reminder how Arsenal’s manager has been swept into dangerous currents. Every match his team do not win now feels like a crisis. Every game brings new danger. The hostility is never far away.
Sam Allardyce will know about those explosions of pent-up anger from his time at West Ham. Alan Pardew and Steve McClaren have experienced it at Newcastle United and, going a little further back, there is an infamous story at Burnley about Jimmy Mullen, with two promotions behind him, being relegated in his fourth year and some of the locals trying to set fire to his wife’s dress in a chip shop.
Yet I am struggling to think of another manager with Wenger’s managerial record, featuring two Doubles, with six FA Cups in all and three league titles, who has been subjected to the same froths of vitriol and – whatever you might think about his decline, the arguments against him staying on and the inescapable feeling that his modern work damages his reputation as one of the greats of his profession – it still feels extraordinarily shabby that people are hell-bent on chasing after him this way, pitchforks in hand.
This is why I fear for Wenger when he says so matter-of-factly that he will be staying on next season and it also partly explains why I find it perplexing that the people above him at Arsenal have not spent more time in the last year or so exploring whether Pep Guardiola might fancy London, rather than Manchester, as his next place of residence and, if not, whether he could be persuaded to change his mind.
The bottom line, unfortunately for Wenger, is that if Arsenal are 10 points adrift in a season when Manchester City, Chelsea and Manchester United have all, at one time or another, been inconceivably poor, it is difficult in the extreme to imagine that it will be any less traumatic when Guardiola, and possibly José Mourinho, are involved, not to mention Antonio Conte, Jürgen Klopp and the small matter of Mauricio Pochettino turning Spurs into the best team in London for the first time since 1995.
The Spurs factor is considerable and, though some of the abuse Wenger has encountered has been lamentable, that does not mean the people dishing it out are wrong to be filled with exasperation. His blind spots – in particular, the sudden apparent disregard for players with experience, competitive courage and, above all, physical and mental fortitude – have been a concern for far too long if we remember the times when Allardyce used to say his Bolton Wanderers players, hardly a bunch of snowdrops themselves, felt physically inferior lining up against them in the tunnel.
Gary Neville has certainly been vindicated regarding his prediction last August that Arsenal had zero chance of winning the league if Wenger insisted on packing midfield with smallish, creative players where he once fielded such figures as Patrick Vieira and Emmanuel Petit. “For 10 years it’s been a continual string of errors,” Neville said. “I cannot get my head around why he would not sign players of power to assist those talented players to enable them to win the league. It’s the one black mark I have against Arsène Wenger in the last 10 years, of why he hasn’t identified the issue with these types of players in central midfield, because they cannot win the league with these types of players. It cannot happen.”
Neville questioned whether Wenger was “naive or arrogant” and the problem when words like that are applied is that, in black and white, it takes the appearance of a personal attack. But he was right in any case. There is a measure of arrogance about Wenger’s belief that the combined football expertise of his critics barely reaches the molehills when it comes to his own mountains of knowledge. Wenger can be guilty of extreme forms of stubbornness. He will not change for anyone and that, more than anything, is why it is difficult to see anything but more of the same in the final year of his contract.
All of which brings us to a position where the footage is still online of Arsenal’s fans abusing him at Stoke‑on‑Trent railway station last season and we are left to wonder how many incidents of that nature have occurred without someone recording it for posterity.
O’Neill won promotion with Leicester and took them to three Wembley finals, winning two, as well as four successive top-10 finishes and so much personal vindication that he was known to ring some of the supporters who had bombarded him with aggressively worded letters early in his tenure. Ferguson won another five league titles after 2005, reached three Champions League finals, won two League Cups and now has a stand named after him and a statue outside.
With Wenger, there might not be a happy ending. “I respect always my contract,” he says, to the question of whether he might choose to go early. In which case, he might have to forgive us for wondering where it all ends and how unpleasant it might become if, 12 years since his last league title, it still doesn’t click. He, rather than his team, has become the story, and that is almost always a bad thing when the industry is so angry and so hard-faced.
PFA right about Agüero this time
That is certainly a remarkable sequence about Sergio Agüero having never being voted into the Professional Footballers’ Association’s team of the year and the Manchester City striker must wonder sometimes what more he has to do, given the frequency of his goals over the last five seasons.
This season, however, it is difficult to take too much umbrage if we go by the basis that most players will vote for two centre-forwards and those positions are taken by Harry Kane and Jamie Vardy because of the impact their goals have had for Tottenham Hotspur and Leicester City in the title race.
After Saturday Agüero has scored one more league goal than Vardy, 22, one behind Kane, but the Argentinian’s sympathisers point out that his goal-per-minute ratio is the best of the three players. Yet this also highlights that he has missed a chunk of the season through injury, whereas Kane and Vardy have been menacing defences from the start to the finish.
A closer look at Agüero’s scoring record also reveals a similar pattern to that of City as a whole – namely that he has been outstanding against the lesser teams but nothing like as impressive in the bigger matches. Agüero managed five in one game against Newcastle United but has scored only four times against top-eight sides: in the 4-1 home defeat to Liverpool, the 3-1 Etihad loss against Leicester and both goals in a 2-2 draw at West Ham.
Vardy has scored nine times against top‑eight opponents and Kane has managed eight, including home and away against Arsenal and Manchester City. Agüero might be unfortunate to miss the cut but the reality is it would have made much less sense to omit one of the two strikers whose impact has been greater on the title race.
Sturridge: the ego has blundered
Daniel Sturridge, showing the self‑awareness for which he has become renowned, is still arguing that he should be credited with Liverpool’s fourth goal against Everton because the ball brushed off his shirt after Philippe Coutinho had let fly from 20 yards.
Sturridge made the point to Coutinho immediately after the ball found the bottom corner and wheeled away for a one-man goal celebration, even though most other people saw it as a time to congratulate the Brazilian rather than himself.
“He would claim it is his but it touched me so it is my goal,” Sturridge later declared. “If it touches you, you claim it wherever it touches you – eyelash, wherever. So my goal. I know there are some guys out there hungry for goals but I’m not that hungry. There have been some dubious decisions but that is not dubious, it is clear for everyone to see.”
Not hungry? He sound positively ravenous. A streak of selfishness is not necessarily a bad thing for a striker but Sturridge is straying dangerously close to being referred to the Dubious Team-Mates’ Panel.