ARSENE WENGER is going mad. At least, that was the conclusion he reached when asked how Premier League managers kept their sanity. “I don’t stay sane,” he said, with a smile.
There is plenty to trouble Arsenal’s enduringly quotable manager as he prepares to face Manchester United for the first time since the 8-2 defeat at the start of the season and it goes beyond the terrifying image he raised of Alex Ferguson, aged 100, still chewing gum and pointing at his watch in the Old Trafford dugout. “He will manage until he dies,” Wenger said. “And I think he will be 100.”
Wenger was not looking forward to his pre-match press conference. Never mind the inevitable and painful rewind of the humbling in August, there was also the matter of the back-to-back league defeats at Fulham and Swansea City, which have left his team four points off the Champions League pace.
“For me, not making the top four would be a disaster,” Wenger admitted. “Because I want to play with the best. We want to play in the Champions League and anything else would not be good enough.” The thought occurred that Wenger had said, last November, that he would consider his position at the end of the season if he felt he had failed to get the maximum out of the team.
Wenger sounded embattled and, at times, paranoid as he chronicled his gripes. He suggested he would miss 12 players for United’s visit, six of them members of what may be considered his best XI: Bacary Sagna, Thomas Vermaelen, Andre Santos, Mikel Arteta, Jack Wilshere and Gervinho. Vermaelen, though, could yet feature. “We are in a worse situation than anyone on the injury front,” Wenger said, although he insisted that he would not be active in the January market.
He repeated his criticisms of the referees from the Fulham and Swansea games and there was another mention for the Swedish academic whose report on last season concluded that Arsenal had been wronged by more bad decisions than any other team. “In the last six months of last season, what happened to us was unbelievable,” Wenger said. “I think if one team has been done badly recently, it’s Arsenal.
“If [Robert] Pires once dived against Portsmouth . . . okay, for six months, it was a story in the newspapers. [Nathan] Dyer dived on Sunday to win a penalty for Swansea and nobody said a word. If it doesn’t matter when Dyer dives, why does it matter when Pires dives?”
The pesky press are getting under his skin. “In the press,” he said, “you are educated to see everything in black. You reflect the fans’ fear but you create it as well.”
Wenger said he had no thoughts of revenge for the 8-2, even if his players consider there is a score to be settled, and he argued, again, that “big scores have no meaning” due to their intrinsic freakishness. Arsenal, he recalled, had played for their lives in 33 degrees away to Udinese, in the Champions League play-off, four days before facing United, and a patched-up squad had been “dead” at Old Trafford.
“When young managers ask for advice, it is always to survive big disappointments,” Wenger said. “Our job is up and down. The ups are easier but you have to go, as well, to some big hits and disappointments.”
Wenger has taken plenty of them this season and, from the back foot, he hopes that his players can punch past United. He sorely needs a tonic tomorrow.
For the first time, a domestic English game will be shown live on mainstream US television tomorrow. Up until now, the Premier League has been available only on subscription channels, but Fox, which owns the rights, has scheduled Arsenal v Manchester United on the main network as part of its “Epic Sunday” programming. It will serve as the warm-up for the NFL conference championship game between the San Francisco 49ers and the New York Giants.
