IT IS not unusual to see Arsenal's players glaze on to autopilot and parrot the mantra about everything being "for the team". Thierry Henry, the former captain, was perhaps the most famous practitioner.

But one of Arsene Wenger's methods in drumming home the message can be revealed.

The manager gives his players a motivational handout, which he asks is taken away and digested in the build-up to matches. It is hardly thrilling bedtime reading for those long nights in hotels up and down England. Yet it stresses again and again the value of the collective - the word "team" appears 12 times on the sheet passed to the Guardian newspaper, from the meeting prior to the Premier League fixture at Bolton Wanderers on Saturday - and there is a certain relentless quality to the rhetoric, which is put together with input from the club's sports psychologists.

While the jargon on the sheet sometimes veers towards the slightly spiritual - "This attitude can be used by our team to focus on the gratitude . . . that the team brings to our own lives" - it is largely extrapolated from the simple maxims Wenger has preached for years.

In among the points, the players were reminded to play in precisely the same uninhibited way as they do at home and to keep going until the very last.

Even the most blinkered Bolton supporter had to admit Arsenal played some scintillating stuff in their 3-1 victory that took them to the top of the Premier League while Wenger enjoyed the benefit of yet another late goal, Denilson's clincher coming in the 87th minute. Had the sheet's inspirational words played their part?

One of the recurrent themes was the need to push oneself to the limit and never settle for second best. Wenger never has done. Le Professeur believes so much of football is in the mind. The young players he sends out tonight, in the League Cup tie at home to Sheffield United, will have their senses fine-tuned by the latest handout.