Morning:
8°c
Forgive the foray into sub-Peter Alliss snug bar philosophising, but the human journey is studded with turning points. Every now and then we reach a crossroads, and must decide which path to take.
Sometimes it works out well, sometimes badly, and sometimes the story is mixed, as with Oedipus who had to balance winning the kingship of Thebes against that minor unpleasantness with his old mummy and the subsequent, self-inflicted loss of his eyeballs. Swings and roundabouts, as I say.
Arsene Wenger, you feel, has reached a crossroads this week. The near-unanimous reaction to Arsenal's Champions League loss at Anfield, narrow though it was, is that three consecutive trophy-free seasons is enough, and he must now come to some accommodation with the fans's appetite for silverware.
However aesthetically delectable Arsenal's passing game might be, however thrilling those lightning breaks that turn massed defence into rampaging attack in 0.37 seconds are to watch, even the romantic cannot fail to notice that it is plodding, soporific Chelsea who are in yet another Champions League semi-final with Liverpool (Smythson's might as well put the two fixtures in their 2009 diaries right now). And it is dull, mechanical Chelsea who are Manchester United's sole surviving title challengers.
In his own defence, Wenger would argue, as he invariably does, that this failure was purely down to bad luck. He has half a point. To lose at Liverpool to a late, debatable penalty, after being denied such a blatant one in the first leg, was unlucky. As for the injury to Eduardo that had such a murderous impact on the team's self-belief, no one could deny that was monstrous ill fortune.
But luck, as every clichemonger knows, evens out over time, and Arsenal have endured enough agonising near misses in recent years to establish a pattern of vulnerability to extreme tension.
The choice for the Alsatian looks plain. He can trust his luck to improve, and keep faith that his youngsters will soon mature into a side as hard to beat as it is easy to watch. Orhe can compromise a little, and add a few older pros, notably in central defence, to a squad in obvious need of strengthening, deepening and, at times, nursemaiding.
There is no law of mutual exclusivity that prevents a team being both miserly in defence and explosive in attack.
Somewhere between the barely watchable relentlessness of Chelsea and the fragile scintillation of Wenger's Arsenal lies a blissful medium, and its code-name is Manchester United.
The concern is that Wenger is too stubborn even to consider modifying his youth-fixated strategy. If so, with that Uzbek sea monster and David Dein doubtless still plotting their hostile takeover, and with the board increasingly pressured to go that extra mile for vulgarity by actually winning a trophy, his position could rapidly weaken.
Right now, of course, it is anything but over for Wenger at Arsenal. Many of us wrote Alex Ferguson off five or six years ago, and he's been making fools of us ever since. We may yet see Arsenal's dazzling potential solidify into sustained success thanks to no more than the passage of time. And yet, one has detected a surge in frustration this week . . . a restiveness, among fans and media alike, about the manager's intransigence in the face of ever more potent evidence that all that youthful promise needs seasoning with a pinch or two of grizzled experience. It is a shift in mood, you sense, which Arsene Wenger would be reckless to ignore.
