Football
Mattias Karen, Arsenal correspondent 8y

Arsenal's Arsene Wenger quiet at half-time so he's not 'completely crazy'

Arsenal boss Arsene Wenger has revealed why he does not do a lot of talking in the dressing room at half-time during games, saying he is afraid he will "become completely crazy" if he loses his emotions.

Wenger rarely uses out the kind of "hairdryer" treatment that Alex Ferguson was known for at Manchester United, with players having described how he often stays completely quiet for large parts of the half-time breaks.

The Frenchman explained his reasons for that in a chat with former players Ian Wright, Sol Campbell and William Gallas in the lead-up to his 20th anniversary at the club.

"Basically I'm a very passionate guy. And if I lose my head, I become completely crazy," Wenger says in the roundtable chat, recorded for the club's official website.

"Most of the time you're in an emotional state when you come into the dressing room. You're upset, you're angry, you have to calm down. You can do a lot of damage, and you have to not talk too much.

"When you talk too much nobody knows really what you're saying. So you keep two, three things [until the end]. I never was a great believer that you talk for 15 minutes at half-time. And sometimes I believe the players have to calm down as well, and the players have to communicate with each other as well. Because that's the best. No matter what the manager says, the players know better what's going on the pitch."

Wright, who was part of Wenger's first Double-winning team in 1997-98, said he had never seen the Frenchman really "lose it" in the dressing room. Gallas says it happened once, against Liverpool in 2009.

"We were 1-0 down, and after his [half-time] speech we went back to the [pitch] and we won. And everybody at this time, all the players were shocked," Gallas said. "But it works."

Wenger has sometimes been criticised for giving his squad too much responsibility and freedom, but he feels that a manager's main job is to make sure his players are ready to deal with situations that arise on the pitch.

"Let's not be fooled, the game belongs to the players. It's as simple as that," Wenger said. "No manager in the world can absolutely tell a player exactly at a given second what will happen to him.

"The player has to make that decision on the football pitch. And you have to put them in a position where they can make clear decisions. That's why you have great players and less great players."

Wenger also offered some advice to his former players about management, saying they can only do it "with your own personality and by being who you really are."

But when reflecting on the changes he's seen over the last 20 years, he also said even more drastic changes could be coming in the next two decades -- to the point where team selections may be done by computers instead of managers.

"The manager today manages the team around the team. You have to keep it under control, it's not easy. The more people you have the more opinions you have," he said.

"I think the modern manager today gets so much information that for him it's about selecting the two or three important criteria that help him make the decision. Because you can be flooded with too much information as well. And at the end of the day you have to trust your eye.

"It could be in 20 years the guy who manages a football team is not a football specialist. Because the computer will tell him who to pick. The players who have the best blood tests, the best fitness tests. The computer chooses the best combination of the team. And it could be just a [normal] guy, yes, with certainly a big brain."

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