Morning:
6°c
One of the immutable laws of football states that any team will assume the character of a long-established manager. The same goes for any business, but the typically ovine nature of the professional footballer makes it especially observable in the sport.
If you doubt the point, consider Roy Keane's disciplinary career under the two coaches who shaped him. At Nottingham Forest, where for all his boozeinflamed lunacies Brian Clough demanded the highest standards of behaviour, Keane was an angel.
Under the psychotic aegis of Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United, he morphed into the odious, braggardly devil who boasted of savaging Alf Inge Haaland's knee in vengeance for a perceived slight from several years earlier.
The Leeds United of the late 60s and early 70s perfectly reflected the niggling neuroses and nastiness of Don Revie, just as the Chelsea team of recent years precisely replicated the self-serving paranoid hysteria of Jose Mourinho.
All in all, then, it seems safe to engage in a little pop-psychological analysis of Arsene Wenger's peculiar nature based on Arsenal's wretched performance at Old Trafford on Saturday evening.
That Arsenal lost this FA Cup tie was no surprise given that Herr-Monsieur Wenger, that paradoxical medley of soulful Left Bank philosopher-poet and snarling, foaming-mouthed German Shepherd, was so ostentatiously content for them to lose. Had it been a horse race, Arsenal would be charged with being a non-trier, because they unfurled the white flag once United went two goals ahead within the game's first quarter.
Once, when the FA Cup was more than a consolation prize for whichever of the Big Four most needs to assuage its fans at the end of a duff season, the surrender would have excited some outrage. But these days the competition is so denuded of status and glamour that it would be faux naif to rail against Wenger's admission that his heart belongs to the Premier and Champions Leagues (and also, despite the disbanding of the G-14 group of Europe's most powerful clubs, to the European super league he still regards as inevitable).
Where the world-weary resignation mutates into rank distaste is over Arsenal's unfettered malevolence as this 4-0 defeat dragged on. While the sort of malign challenges for which Emmanuel Eboue was dismissed, and William Gallas should have been, could never be condoned, in a match Arsenal were trying to save or win they would at least be comprehensible.
In a game Arsenal were happy to lose, and had long since effectively lost, this viciousness was stripped of even the paltry fig leaf of expediency. This was nothing but purest spite, and the source of it stood on the touchline watching it, albeit doubtless seeing none of it (least of all that peerlessly embarrassing dive by Emmanuel Adebayor; a dive you felt you'd seen in some disastrous Am-Dram rendition of an Italian farce) without a hint of disapproval.
When tomorrow's football historians pass judgment on Wenger's resplendent career, they will dwell on his genius for unearthing staggering young talent, buying it for thruppence ha'penny, and moulding it into teams of bewildering brilliance. And rightly so.
But they should also remember the petulance and malice exhibited by a side shaped in his own image on Saturday, and let that memory temper the deification of the soulful footballing purist.
Wenger deserves most of the superlatives that as banal a career as football management can confer.
However, let it never be forgotten that, facile it may be to take the boy out of Alsace, it appears impossible to remove the distempered Alsatian from the overgrown boy..
