Arsene Wenger faces greatest EVER crisis

MAYAN culture has it that the world will end next Friday.

Yet Arsene Wenger’s own world may have come to a conclusion at Bradford on Tuesday night.
Even Wenger loyalists have arrived at the situation where they believe his time is up.
Yes, he has been a brilliant, mould-breaking manager with, at one time, a conveyor-belt of outstanding talent producing the nearest thing to fantasy football.
But seven years of famine at a club like Arsenal is too long, especially when there are few signs that seven years of plenty will follow.
As Alan Shearer argued in these pages recently: Would a club like Chelsea, Manchester United or AC Milan put up with this sort of failure?
Before the rot was temporarily halted by the Gunners’ 2-0 win over West Brom on Saturday, Wenger had used in his defence the fact that the club were still in four competitions. That, though, was being a little economic with the truth.
Arsenal are not in contention for the Premier League and have even less chance of winning the Champions League.
Now, humiliatingly, they are out of the League Cup, humbled by a club from the fourth tier.
The third round of the FA Cup sees them at Swansea, who won 2-0 at the Emirates two weeks ago. No, it doesn’t look good.
Wenger appears like a man in denial. He has loaded the club with some of the poorest players ever to wear the famous red shirt and on Tuesday night, oversaw the worst defeat in his 16 years at Arsenal.
But the most troublesome thing of all is the damage he might be doing himself.
Yes, we have always known how stubborn he is. Yes, we have always joked about his Basil Fawlty impersonations on the touchline.
Except that now he really does appear to have lost the plot. He also looks worryingly gaunt and grey in the face.
On the one hand, he is arguing the whole time with officials and kicking over water bottles. On the other, he’s not talking to the men alongside him.
There certainly doesn’t appear to be much dialogue with Steve Bould. Yes, he promoted Bould to assistant but this increasingly seems to have been merely a sop to his critics.

Wenger speaks following Arsenal's cup humiliation

Football

GUTTED Arsene Wenger faces up to the Press after his side were humbled by League Two Bradford

As Bould has discovered to his immense frustration.
The former defender is not keen on Arsenal’s zonal marking system and yet manager Wenger — still very much the man who runs training — persists with it.
Despite all this, I cannot see Le Boss resigning.
And a club for whom he makes millions every year in the transfer market, a club for whom he masterminded the hugely successful move to the Emirates, are hardly going to dispense with his services before the end of his contract in 2014.
But in the interests of their supporters they SHOULD think seriously about a parting of ways at the end of the season.
People will say: “But who can replace him?”
Dortmund’s Jurgen Klopp, perhaps. Or Swansea’s Michael Laudrup.
Or Pep Guardiola, slowly but surely being put off by Chelsea’s manic pursual, a man raised at Barcelona, a club with a solid tradition of doing things the right way, a club with many similar attributes to Arsenal.
It would be a job he would relish, overseeing everything at London Colney, including an academy that has gone off the boil. Jack Wilshere, Kieran Gibbs and, er, very little else.
As former Gunner Stewart Robson, one of the most astute commentators on the club, said yesterday, Wenger has lost the knack of not just spotting young talent but improving it. Look at Thomas Vermaelen. Consumed by the responsibilities of captaincy, his game has actually gone into reverse.
Yes, Wilshere is still very young but I can see only positives by him replacing Vermaelen as skipper.
But back to Tuesday night. There comes a moment in any manager’s life when it is apparent he has gone as far as he can.
A week or so ago Wenger was complaining his players were tired. Yet, going totally against time-honoured precedent in the League Cup of fielding hungry youngsters, he sends out practically a first team at Bradford when he could have been resting them.
Still, only a few will have played more than 20 games — whereas it was Bradford’s 31st match of the season.
And still Arsenal didn’t have a shot on target until the 70th minute.
When they finally appeared to have got out of jail with Vermaelen’s 88th-minute equaliser, it seemed they would go on to take their place in the semi-final. But they couldn’t even do that.
How many times have we heard Wenger talk of his trust in his players’ attitude, character and spirit?
On Tuesday night, this was once again exposed as the sham it is, the attempted use of emotive words to cloud what most Arsenal fans know to be the truth. That character is the one quality they lack.
There are all sorts of things that no longer make sense, that suggest Wenger, sadly, no longer has the answers. Yes, players have to shoulder responsibility.
But as I touched on the other day, how on earth did he sign — or have recommended to him by Gilles Grimandi or Steve Rowley — players like Santos, Chamakh, Park, Squillaci, Gervinho and the rest?
Gervinho, judging by his comical miss at Bradford, is getting worse.
As one cynical Gooner blogged: “Gervinho ends up as such a menace to anything we are trying to achieve I’m starting to think he might actually support Spurs... ”
Then there’s all the other transfer-market deadwood like Arshavin, Denilson, Djourou and Bendtner, all on £50,000-plus salaries but who no one seems to want other than on loan. And now poor Aaron Ramsey, never the same since his broken leg, is becoming the fans’ scapegoat like Emmanuel Eboue before him.
And is Lukas Podolski really going to work out? He didn’t at Bayern Munich. And will Abou Diaby, on his day a true performer, ever be fit?
Then we come to Theo Walcott, the only player with any real pace.
Despite Arsenal signing a new £150million deal with Emirates, they can’t appear to find an extra £20,000 a week for Walcott.
And yet Wenger continues to be paid £7.5m a year. While Ivan Gazidis, chief executive of Arsenal Financial Corporation, pocketed £2.1m last year including a £675,000 bonus on top of one the year before of £669,000. For doing what? Selling Arsenal’s best players?
From the very top — from the absent American owner ‘Silent’ Stan Kroenke — we hear precious little.
It seems increasingly that the only way there will be any change will be if Arsenal fail to qualify for the Champions League.
There will then be a massive groundswell of opinion that billionaire Alisher Usmanov be finally admitted to the board along with a transfer fund of £100m and the return of David Dein to administer it.
And the ending of the days when the club shops at Asda rather than Harrods.
This scenario might just save Wenger. Yet an increasing number of Arsenal fans are coming to the conclusion that the manager has no white rabbits left to pluck from his hat. Certainly no Vieiras or Henrys.
On Monday, Arsenal are at Reading. Then on Saturday, December 22 they travel to Wigan.
Poor results in these two games and the end really will be nigh.
Provided, of course, the world hasn’t ended on the Friday.
TheSun