Arsenal and the Wenger Wonderland

The interesting thing is, for most of his 22 years at Arsenal, Wenger has arguably played the most attractive football in England and as the title seemed under threat with the entry of Pep Guardiola, Arsenal has stepped it up a notch.

Both play attractive, possession-based football. The two systems are very space-oriented, but with very different objectives with and without the ball. Guardiola seems fascinating to me, as he bends conventional football wisdom to his will and makes it work 99 per cent of the time. Wenger is more staunch toward one idea of play, spending transfer window after transfer window to fill the pieces in his puzzle. Mesut Ozil becomes Dennis Bergkamp, Alexis Sanchez becomes Thierry Henry, Hector Bellerin becomes Ashley Cole, Xhaka becomes, well, Xhaka and so on.

Which probably explains why I gravitated toward Wenger in my impressionable years. Wengerball was a manifestation of what I perceived were the key ingredients of greatness – intimacy, delectable yet infallible with a dash of cleverness and honesty, topped with the courage to zig when everyone else zags.

For a lost kid finishing first year of college in New Delhi, surrounded by ruthless pragmatists, Wenger seemed ethereal, childlike even in his naïveté to choose process over results. As I smoked one cigarette after another to get a kick, Wenger seemed to be the kind of bloke who would blow rings and admire its forms and patterns. In a world of financial doping, hot-take media, and Jose Mourinho, this Arsene Wenger person, who was the same age as my grandmother, was trying to produce football not to simply score and win, but to entertain and enthrall and induce gasps and then win, in that specific order.

Every Arsenal game, for me, then became a test of its players’ imagination and ability to mesmerise, where Wenger was the tutor and Wenger the examiner.

Einstein famously defined insanity as, “doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results” and Wenger defies it by refusing to adapt to the changing landscape fast and sticking with doing same things over and over again.

This then, is Wenger’s most frustratingly beautiful quality. If he wasn’t this stubborn and inflexible in his thought process, then he wouldn’t be what he is today. The world expects a 68-year-old man, who’s had incredible professional success, to change his ways because the millennial generation of footballers isn’t patient enough? Try getting your son or daughter or brother or sister to choose vanilla ice cream, if they wanted chocolate. We are a stubborn people and choice is a living tangible entity every human deserves.

It’s been more than twenty years since the good-looking, lanky Frenchman graced England. Now that we know this is to be his last year, we should appreciate that every weekend, and some weekdays, for over two decades, we got to see an artful master at work. In a world devoid of Tesla, Van Gogh, and Kafka, Wenger is all we have left.

This is an updated version of a previously published story.