It is difficult to criticise Wimbledon. There they are, a tiny club battling the giants on limited resources and unlimited spirit. But Saturday's performance was so negative, so anti-football that one wonders sometimes why they bother. Better, surely, to descend in glory than to hang on in vacuity.
At least under Joe Kinnear Wimbledon tried to play football. But the arrival of the Norwegian manager Egil Olsen has heralded a new troglodyte era for the Crazy Gang. Olsen is a pleasant enough man, but his football isn't. By a conservative estimate, Wimbledon employed route one football 77 times during Saturday's 90 minutes.
Olsen's other tactic seemed to comprise solely of packing Wimbledon's penalty area with 10 men and saying to the opposition, "Okay, get through that". Such high human densities may be acceptable in railway carriages, but not on a football pitch.
Of course, Arsenal struggled to break through Wimbledon's cordon, a task not helped by their continued penchant for missing scoreable chances. But one look at the figures confirms Arsenal's prolonged encampment in Wimbledon's last third: 25 goal attempts to seven for Olsen's team. And seven was being kind.
This football Fagin from the fjords is a miser when it comes to entertainment. And the point he stole from Highbury will only encourage him further down this colourless route.
His dream is to produce a side which can not only defend in numbers for 90 minutes, but press the opposition for 90 minutes and attack in numbers for the whole game too.
Fortunately on Saturday, the law of nature rode to the rescue of the beautiful game, as the exertions required of Wimbledon's players in the first half left them too tired to follow orders in the second.
Arsenal took advantage of the extra space and should have won the game but for terrible misses by Kanu, who has finally agreed new terms within the club's wage structure, and Davor Suker, plus a smashing save by Neil Sullivan from Marc Overmars.
Wimbledon went ahead on six minutes when a series of Arsenal errors allowed Marcus Gayle to set up Carl Cort for a shot which hit the badly-positioned Alex Manninger on the leg and bounced over the line.
Arsenal, without David Seaman, Tony Adams, Martin Keown, Patrick Vieira and Dennis Bergkamp, got their act together only after the break, equalising on 62 minutes when Thierry Henry clinically dispatched Silvinho's cross.
The only other incident of note was a dust-up between Emmanuel Petit and John Hartson in which the trouble-prone Frenchman allegedly spat at the former Arsenal striker. The possibility of FA trial by video cannot be ruled out.
ARSENAL: Manninger, Dixon, Luzhny, Grimandi, Winterburn (Suker 73), Overmars, Ljungberg, Petit, Silvinho, Henry, Kanu. Subs Not Used: Keown, Hughes, Lukic, Vernazza. Booked: Petit. Goals: Henry 61.
WIMBLEDON: Sullivan, Cunningham, Andersen, Hreidarsson, Kimble, Earle, Roberts, Euell, Gayle (Hughes 27), Hartson, Cort (Andresen 67). Subs Not Used: Ardley, Heald, Badir. Booked: Hartson. Goals: Cort 7.
Referee: G Barber (Tring, Herts).
