Pre-season / time to deliver now

By Myles Palmer

This club is so small-time, it's hilarious.

There's still no Arsenal TV, so last night I watched free-to-air MUTV with some blonde nattering to big Gordon McQueen.

Pat Crerand, now 72, was commentating in the New England Revolution highlights.

Crerand was signed from Celtic by Matt Busby in 1963, the year I left school to go to Manchester University.

In 1970, ITV put Crerand on their entertaining World Cup panel with Malcolm Allison, Derek Dougan and dishy Bob McNab.

Arriving from Aberdeen in 1986, Alex Ferguson has been humble enough to always keep the DNA of Manchester United: ambition, passion, never-say-die spirit, good wingers, British physicality blended with Latin skills.

He played Gary Neville, Scholes and Giggs well past 30. Neville and Scholes stopped playing but they're still on the payroll.

Why? Same reason they keep Pat Crerand.

It's all about the family.

Sir Alex is a big man who shares, delegates, admits his mistakes, and becomes more jovial every year.

He admired Jock Stein and learned a lot from him. Jock said, "You need a few opinions about the place."

Pat Crerand played for Jock Stein and was never short of an opinion.

Arsene Wenger is a small man who doesn’t share, doesn’t delegate and never admits his mistakes.

In a commodified world, a world of fast-moving goods and services, a world of trends and fashions, a digital world of apps and short attention spans, what is a football club for?

The same as always.

A football club is an institution that reflects a community.

It's a family that has father and mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, children and grandparents.

Wenger is a dogmatic technocrat who won seven trophies, most of them with other people's players, an insightful choreographer who tweaked his teams in brilliant ways that I chronicled in The Professor, in ways that were sheer genius: selling Merson to win the title with Overmars, challenging Bergkamp to dig deep into himself, snapping up the sparky Swede, creating a phenomenal left wing raiding party with Henry, Cole, and Pires, converting the reliable Lauren to right back, building and rebuilding powerhouse midfields round Vieira, ｄ ｒｏｐping Brazil’s captain to play Flamini and crank up the tempo so high that Arsenal rocketed to the top of the table and stayed there for six months.

All of that was stylish, thrilling and bold.

All of that was along time ago.

Since then, nothing.

 As well as being a phenomenal salesman, an astonishing polymath and a world class spin-doctor, Wenger is also a paranoid dictator who won't have a dissenting voice anywhere within a 50 mile exclusion-zone of Colney.

A cautious man, he likes weak people around him.

He has systematically destroyed Arsenal's DNA and dismantled Arsenal's family.

He doesn't want Dixon or Keown or Bergkamp or Gilberto working at Arsenal.

By running the entire club, he makes sure that the biggest star is Arsene Wenger. He wants to keep his job because he’s on 6.6m euros basic.

 As I noted weeks ago, Arsenal should have gone to Asia when they had a team of giant winners, not waited till they had a team of midgets who have won zilch since Vieira left in 2005.

I love Jack Wilshere but he’s the same size as the Asians. If Arsenal had flown into Kuala Lumpur, and Patrick Vieira had got off the plane, standing a foot taller than the locals, the Malaysians would have elected him Prime Minister there and then.

If DB10 had got off the plane, they would have built a solid gold statue of Dennis Berkgkamp and placed it in a temple and gone in to kneel down in front of a football god every day.

(OK, I know Dennis didn’t fly.)

 This week we heard that club executive Richard Law had flown west to sign Joel Robinson, an 19-year old Costa Rican striker with Deportivo Saprissa.

Their president Juan Roja said a deal had been agreed in principle between the clubs. Surprise, surprise, Wenger, the recidivist, wanted another unproven kid.

Unfortunately, the kid’s father said he could get better terms for his son elsewhere. The father of an unknown teenager turned down Arsenal Football Club!

Law recently tried to sign midfielder Ricardo Alvarez from Velez Sarsfield in Argentina.

That's where we are and the board must be livid with Wenger.

Some of my closest friends reckon they’re totally pissed off with him.

But their strategy, I think, is to give him enough rope to hang himself. The directors won’t say anything now. But when the season starts to stutter, as it soon will, they'll leak.

For now, it's a one-man show, a mad ego-trip.

But it’s becoming clearer ever week that the dictator is living on borrowed time.

The next manager will rebuild the family that Wenger dismantled.

Read what you like into that Ivan Gazidis comment four days ago.

Ivan said, "We don't conduct our business in public and I am not going to throw my voice into the mix. Arsene has been very clear on these subjects and I will leave the voice of Arsenal to be his."

Jul 21, 2011