How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday inside me, a wise man once wrote: not talking about Arsenal in the post-Wenger days but still kind of talking about Arsenal in the post-Wenger days.
Most likely it won’t hit home until the first Premier League match at the Emirates next week, one of those August days when the grass is a wild lime green, when results and goals pass in a sun-drunk daze and football feels like a dance or a lark or a bit of fun. At which point there might be the first pang.
Yes! He really is gone, the thin white duke with his furrowed frown, the touching way his trousers flap just short of his shoes as he strides toward the touchline, utterly baffled by the sight of the same thing that always happens to his team happening to his team once again. For a moment your heart will start to swell at the Wenger-shaped absence. And then, just as abruptly, it will stop swelling. And you’ll be totally fine. Because let’s face it, it’s actually a huge relief it’s all over.
And things have already changed. For the first time in a while, to think about Arsenal in August is to feel notes of intrigue, hope and enjoyable uncertainty. The fate of those who have followed an era-spanning manager suggests history is against Unai Emery. But Emery has one major advantage over Arsène Wenger. Mainly he isn’t Arsène Wenger but is instead a manager whose methods and structures are entirely opposed to those of his predecessor.
The chief distinction is that he actually has methods and structures. The word from the training ground is Arsenal’s players have been working furiously at playing without the ball. Rugged, useful additions have arrived. There is talk of Emery’s fetish for video analysis, his agreeably dull and technical press conferences. And so the necessary process of moving on has begun. The cultural revolution will in time kick over the Wenger traces, strip the quilted gowns from the club shop mannequins, dynamite the giant stone Wenger heads from the hillsides.
As far as this summer goes the remaining note of intrigue is perhaps the most significant. Yes, it’s time to talk about Aaron. “I want him to be with us, but ...” Emery said this week, asked about Aaron Ramsey’s still unsigned contract. Arsenal fans want Ramsey to stay, although a few have whispered about cashing in, floating the brutal punkishness of taking down the definitive monument to the years of post-Highbury Wenger-ism.
There are other candidates for the role of defining late Wenger-era player. Theo Walcott is a popular choice. Even now Walcott remains a baffling mix of extreme attributes and extended periods of basically doing nothing, a player who towards the end of his time at Arsenal sported the hair and beard of someone who doesn’t play any sport at all, resembling instead a charismatic regional paper clip sales manager who, yes, wants to talk to you about paper clips but also about human potential and the power of the mind.
But for me it’s Ramsey, a footballer of far greater depth and interest and Arsenal’s best midfielder of the past five years. Is there a more frustratingly semi-explored high-end midfield talent in Britain? He remains a puzzle aged 27, a player who runs more than anyone else but at times can still seem oddly static, a midfielder who basically has everything, on the days when he has everything. Ramsey is all about the brilliantly smooth-surging sixth-minute late-running ink-finish opener in a three-goal first half against mid-ranking opposition on a Premier League October afternoon. But he also stinks of the 3-0 early April defeat at home to Chelsea as some weirdly staffed late-Wenger Arsenal simply fall apart under pressure like a cracked teapot. He’s one of the best late Wenger-era players. But at times he can also resemble a parody of a late-Wenger player, something distilled in a lab from hair of Hleb, essence of Bischoff and a tangle of old Silvinho toenails.
Ramsey’s issue has probably been a lack of definition. José Mourinho has been criticized for setting a damagingly rigid set of demands on his creative players. Ramsey, who has known only Wenger since the age of 17, has seemed at times to have too much freedom, too few rules. On the worst days he has appeared to be wandering through an oddly frictionless midfield, a place of too little tension. In his best times as a No 8 or a No 10 there has been cover and balance. In that golden autumn of 2013 Ramsey had Mathieu Flamini glowering next to him.
As ever the real point of interest here is about change and new things. Emery loves cover and balance and pressure in midfield. It remains to be seen if and how he can play Ramsey, Mesut Özil and Henrikh Mkhitaryan at the same time. You suspect Ramsey’s willingness not to move elsewhere but to stay, graft and take on a little of the Emery way will be key to his own success, and to the sense of taking on rather than simply rejecting the best of the Wenger years. It was Leonard Cohen who wrote about getting rid of tomorrow in his book Beautiful Losers. With a little luck Ramsey, and a little of the beauty, can still remain.
(The Guardian)
