Arsène Wenger has not been forthcoming in his media conferences for some time and the regulars who travel to see him at Arsenal’s training ground in St Albans would say he is particularly guarded before a big game. This week was no exception. But before the FA Cup final against Chelsea on Saturday, the manager brought some extra ingredients – exasperation, defiance and a series of digs; some veiled, others the equivalent of going in two-footed.
Take the one that related to Tony Adams. The club’s former captain has a new book out, which led to one headline about how Wenger “couldn’t coach his way out of a paper bag”. Understandably, it went down badly with him.
Adams also writes about the FA Cup final in 2001, when Arsenal lost to Liverpool and, according to him, Wenger threw his runners-up medal into a bin in the dressing room. “I don’t remember [that],” Wenger said. “Don’t trust too much to what Tony Adams says.”
Wenger reheated another recent bug-bear when he segued into an apocalyptic vision for football in the coming decades. “Maybe we’ll have a robot on the bench who will make the decisions and the computer will analyse exactly what decisions he makes during the game,” he said. “You might not even have human beings on the bench anymore.”
On 9 May, Wenger had talked for the first time about how computers could come to replace managers. “Maybe we will have enough computers around the manager to analyse the game and, straightaway, he pushes on the button and, after the game, comes out the team for the next game,” he said.
Arsenal have come to rely, increasingly, on analytics – an approach driven by the chief executive, Ivan Gazidis – and it is not something that sits easily with Wenger, who has come to look more and more old school.
At the heart of everything for Wenger is the notion of control, and at the end of surely the most divisive season of his career it is not difficult to paint him as being embattled to the point of paranoia.
The issue of whether he stays or goes next month, after the expiry of his contract, has been allowed to cast long shadows over the campaign and drive the supporters to distraction. But Wenger was not about to put anyone out of their misery before the Cup final.
There was one last dodge of the question and yet more reiterations of how he had always fought until the final day of his contracts. “This is not about me,” he said, sighing and, yet again, he made plain his incredulity that the subject should even be up for discussion which, in itself, was incredible.
“I focus on football,” he said. “One of the big problems in the modern society is that the big companies sit there not any more to make the decisions that are good for the company but is it popular or not? I don’t care about that. I just want to always make a decision – is it right or is it wrong, is it good or not? All the rest for me is artificial debate.”
Wenger believes that he has done enough to merit the new two-year deal that has been on the table since the early months of the season. He talked about how the Cup final would have zero bearing on the decision and of his intention to carry on as a manager next season, either at Arsenal or elsewhere. Wenger is addicted to the job.
To his mind, 75 points is a respectable tally with which to finish the Premier League season and it has just been Arsenal’s misfortune that, for the first time, there have been four clubs who have collected more. And they could yet finish with a trophy. “Believe me, the 18 other managers in the league would like to be in our position on Saturday,” Wenger said.
The omerta on Wenger’s position has, unsurprisingly, extended to the dressing room. Danny Welbeck, Per Mertesacker and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain were asked about it during the week and they said, variously, that they had no idea or they did not want to comment.
Mertesacker had a typically strident view. “You cannot let yourself down or use excuses about the environment or the manager’s future,” he said. “This is not my approach and it is not the team’s approach. This is not our excuse. We have to look at ourselves in the mirror and see what’s next for us.”
Welbeck and Oxlade-Chamberlain made it clear that although they were determined to win the Cup, it would go only a short way to making up for the failure to secure a top-four finish and Champions League football for next season.
But they will carry hope to Wembley, largely because of the stability they have shown since Wenger’s switch to a 3-4-2-1 formation at Middlesbrough on 17 April. They have won eight of their nine matches with the system – the lone reverse being in the derby at Tottenham Hotspur.
The Cup final is likely to be decided by how Wenger’s patched-up rearguard contend with Diego Costa, Eden Hazard & Co. “Over the years, we have always played in a certain formation and I think teams get better at learning how to deal with us,” Oxlade-Chamberlain said. “When we changed the formation, that gave them something new to think about and the results have started coming.”
Mertesacker said: “We feel more compact and accepting [of the need] sometimes to just defend. With a back four, we felt that we have to get the ball, we have to play, we have to press. But especially against Man City [in the Cup semi-final], we allowed ourselves just to defend from the box and not even open up too much. You have to adjust. Whatever is necessary for Arsenal, we do it.”
The summer is certain to bring further challenges and the impression is of a club being buffeted by uncertainty. Alexis Sánchez, Mesut Özil and Oxlade-Chamberlain are among the players who are poised to enter the final year on their contracts and others, such as Héctor Bellerín, would be receptive to moves away. Sánchez is a prime target for Chelsea.
Against it all, Wenger endures. He denies chucking medals in the bin but he has no time for trinkets and sentimentality. “You come to my house and you will be surprised,” he said. “I have no medals, no trophies, nothing. You would not even guess I am a football manager, apart from the fact that a game is on.
“I always give my medals out. There is always a guy at the club who did not get one and I give mine to him.”
Wenger describes himself as a person who is “not a back-looker, only forward”. At long last, the future is set to become clearer.