Arsenal: Les Miserables

A few weeks ago Gunnerblog posted a video of staggering brilliance on Youtube. In it the usual suspects of transfer deadline day belted out One Day More from Les Miserables, a musical I have inexplicably become obsessed with. Redknapp, Fellaini and, of course, Jim White were played to perfection, but it was Arsene Wenger as the cycnical, villainous Javert who stole the show. In the light of Arsenal's implosion against Bayern last night the image of Arsene as Javert seems all the more fitting, his side rapidly becoming the eponymous miserables of the musical as he skulks in the background, desperately clinging to his dignity and his misguided principles. Javert ends the film staring down at the Seine, lamenting his regrets as the murky water swirls below, inviting him to oblivion. Wenger now must be contemplating a similar doom, fallen from heady heights to desperate depths with all veneer of heroism destroyed, now cast as the villain in the story in which, not so long ago, he had dreamed the most wonderful of dreams.

To the neutral, Wenger is no villain. He is a the staunchest proponent of an admirable vision of football; a champion on the pitch with the most beautiful of styles, with no hint of the monetary steroids pumped into his closest rivals. Yet the pursuit of this ideal has become his downfall. As clubs gather inifitinely more resources into their armoury he has been left with a smaller and smaller palette with which to paint his masterpiece. His lieutenants have come and gone to greener pastures as he clings desperately to a belief that this generation will be the one to restore Arsenal to its former dominance. When Victor Hugo wrote of Javert he did not damn him but rather pointed out the error of his blinkered obsession with right and wrong:

Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the sense of duty, are things which may become hideous when wrongly directed; but which, even when hideous, remain grand: their majesty, the majesty peculiar to the human conscience, clings to them in the midst of horror; they are virtues which have one vice, – error. The honest, pitiless joy of a fanatic in the full flood of his atrocity preserves a certain lugubriously venerable radiance.

These words could just as easily have been muttered by Lee Dixon last night on Wenger's folly, as Adrian Chiles watched on gormlessly. Wenger is not malicious; there is heroism in his dogged belief. It is just that his strongest convictions are now, simply, wrong. Arsenal cannot win without greater spending, they cannot rise without experience, they cannot rely on Aaron Ramsey to do anything at all.

"We'll be ready for these schoolboys, they will wet themselves with blood" croons Javert on the eve of revolution. Maybe Arsene thought the same on Monday; that the next night would bring redemption and crushing victory. If he did he was alone. Bayern's relentless attack tore his Arsenal side to shreds. There were indeed schoolboys on show, but they wore red, battling in vain against a foe they simply could not contain. In Les Miserables the revolutionaries assemble a makeshift baracade of chairs, tables and wardrobes. Arsenal, for all of Steve Bould's apparent influence on their solidity, could not even summon this. Instead, in the face of Ribery, Muller and Kroos, they threw the most meaningless of defences. Laurent Kosicelny as a tottering coat stand with one leg longer than the other as he spiralled, wobbled and eventaully crumbled to dust. Mikel Arteta was no more than a tea tray laid invitingly on the ground for Bayern's forces to cast aside as they swept towards goal. And Per Metesacker. Oh Mertesacker. A battered old Grandfather Clock; once a grand centrepiece, now long devoid of any use. Chiming quietly in the wind, its hinges hanging off as the door blows invitingly open, its rusted mechanism ruthlessly exposed as the clock face forms a sad visage behind cracked, dusty glass. It was an embarrassment not of riches, but of poverty, and Bayern precitably scaled this most makeshift of barricades without batting an eyelid.

It seems inevitable that in the coming days Wenger will fall back to his customary refrain; that Arsenal have been financially outgunned and once the Emirates payments are done it will all be different. It is becoming harder and harder to believe him, even with all the good will his often majestic reign has earnt him. Bayern's wage bill is lower than Arsenal's. Their starting XI yesterday cost £98.7m to the Gunner's £92m. While it looked for all the World like Arsenal were a team of free transfers and schoolboys, they were instead 10 full internationals. The truth is that Wenger, once the master of the transfer market, has bought a succession of suspect reinforcements. Koscielny is excellent on his day, but at £11m is almost twice a Nemanja Vidic. Mikel Arteta is a fine midifield general, but will never be World Class, while Ramsey and Mertesacker look utterly redundant more often than not. Jack Wilshere is the one shining light of the team, but one great player does not a great side make. Arsene has had his hands tied by the board, of that there is no doubt, but when he has spent of late he has spent poorly. Maybe the apparent £100m+ war chest this summer will save him, but it seems liklier that it won't materialise, and that mid-grade players will instead, once again, bolster the Arsenal ranks.

Javert fell because he couldn't find a compromise between his ardent morality and what he had begun to see was truly right. Wenger is left in the same position. All his 16 years he has pursued one noble goal, only to see loss after crucial loss stack the evidence in favour of a changing football World in which passing circles and potential are not enough. He is a man I have the most enormous respect for; almost-single handedly dragging the English game, with its blood and thunder approach, into the more subtle ways of the 21st Century. Yet I fear that the latest revolution in the game is one too many for Wenger. It is not too late for him to change, but like Javert, he may be too ardently entrenched in his ways to contemplate it. Instead he could, tragically, be finally cast out. His trademark inexplicably puffy coat torn, shorn of his dignified locks and dwelling by the banks of the Thames, he will let out one last, desperate cry:

I had a dream my life would be
So different from this hell I'm living
So different now from what it seemed
Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.