Source: Daily_Mail
MARTIN SAMUEL: Yes, I do see things and say I didn't... The world of Arsene
Even the most brilliant mathematic minds concede there is a stage in the explanation of life on earth where the sheerimprobability of it all forces cold rationality and theology into a skirmish.[LNB]And there comes a point in any discussion of football with Arsene Wenger when his polymathic concepts are exhausted and all that remains is faith. Blind faith. Chuckle-headed optimism, really.[LNB]Click here to read the full transcript of Martin Samuel's fascinating interview with Arsenal manager Arsene WengerTo rationalise his obsession, Wenger must believe. He must believe that the financial resources of a football club are not a predictor of its success; he must believe in youth over experience; he must believe in art over efficiency. For a man of reason, Wenger has to stay loyal to some highly paradoxical philosophies.[LNB]'No great thing has ever been accomplished without somebody's crazy belief': Wenger[LNB]But then Wenger is something of a paradox himself: a multi-faceted personality with the one-note singularity of an obsessive.[LNB]If he occasionally strays from the path of logic it is only because if he were to countenance the idea that his Arsenal team might no longer be able to compete in a league increasingly dominated by the wealth of billionaires, one would seriously fear for his mental health.[LNB]'No great thing has ever been accomplished without somebody's crazy belief,' Wenger said. 'The biggest advances have been made by people who, at the start, would have been judged mad. Yet if we had not had these ideas the world would have been less intelligent.'[LNB]Wenger was explaining why, sometimes, he is driven to statements that fly in the face of the evidence. Why, for instance, two years ago, he tipped Arsenal for the title in April, while lying six points adrift of Manchester United and facing a match at Old Trafford, where his team had recently lost 4-0 in the FA Cup.[LNB]'Yes, the objective judgment from outside was more realistic then,' he admitted. 'Many times I say things I find hard to endorse in my mind but this job can be like quicksand when you lose and being a football manager everyone wants to push you down. It is all guided by fear.[LNB]'What will happen if you do not win? Why do you not buy players? When you allow that to infiltrate your brain too deeply you become guided by it, too. Life drags you down and if you do not make the effort to rise above it you are being punched right and left, so much that you do not even notice any more. [LNB]'Once you are in that state, it becomes hard to say to your team, 'I believe you are good'.' [LNB]There is more to it than that, though. Wenger is consumed, and therefore defined, by football and success as a manager. He confesses to having little concept of downtime. He realises he might be just a bit mad. He has notseen a film in 10 years. He watches only sport and political discussion programmes on television because then there is no plot to follow, no commitment of time or intellect.[LNB]At 59, he still adopts the dietary regime of a player, because he genuinely fears indulgence might cause him to overlook a nuance in training the next morning. To achieve the goals he sets each new season is essential in validating his level of commitment, but while he has questioned whether football is worth a lifetime of dedication andsacrifice, he makes no apology for the affirmative in his conclusion. [LNB]'I decided the most important thing in life is to have a target and aim for it,' he said. 'Not to do it would be even more stressful, because in all of us is the desire to feel useful, to have qualities and to demonstrate them.[LNB]'For me, football dominates all the time. When you are 30 years in this job you have to be, somewhere, crazy, because you cannot say it has not had a psychological impact. You live it, you think it, there is no escape. There is madness in my obsession as there is in that of anyone who is at the highest level in sport.[LNB]'I worked with Dennis Bergkamp for 10 years and I have not seen a man more obsessed with every little technical thing. Thierry Henry the same. You could call Thierry at home, 10 o'clock every night, and he was there. At 23 years of age. And talk to Thierry about football: you cannot beat him.[LNB] Obsessed and the best: Bergkamp, signed by Wenger's predecessor Bruce Rioch, shared The Professor's love of the minutiae of the sport - as did the imperious Henry[LNB]'When you are manager of Arsenal, if you lose a game you drive away and you feel completely sick. Then you think, as well, of all the people whose weekend is dead because of it. So you feel that responsibility, too.[LNB]'If you think about that too much you can become crazy, but it makes you rigorous in your preparations. That is how I became the person I am today. I know I look like a robot: but everyone who has targets is like that.[LNB]'Did you see the last match Sir Bobby Robson watched? A charity game, but still he had that spark in his eye. He had two, three days to live, he could have sat at home, yet he chose to go to football. What else would he have done? Sit there and think about dying, maybe be terrified? The way to get out was to go to his passion.'[LNB]How fixated is Wenger? We talked briefly of life after football, which he fears. He revealed an interest in abstract art. When I asked if he had been to Tate Modern, he said yes, but before he was Arsenal manager. [LNB]It had to be explained that he must have visited Tate Britain because its sister gallery only opened in 2000, four years after Wenger arrived in London. When the conversation moved to cinema, Wenger admitted that he liked The Deer Hunter, a film that came out in 1978. [LNB]Wenger's father was a restaurateur in the Alsace region, yet his son has lived a life of self-denial. He has rejected the aspect of French culture that glories in food and good wine, fuelled sufficiently by football, an art form he feels ranks alongside any when done well.[LNB]'For every passion there is a big price to pay,' Wenger insisted. 'I tell the players that when you are hungry, it is only your stomach that is telling you it is hungry, it is just a part of your body. When you are hungry for success, it is the whole person, the whole life that wants success.[LNB]'It is something in the structure of your personality that says this is vital to me and it is worth organising my life around this desire. This is the core of my life. I do a lot of things I do not like to do. I would prefer to be able to go out, but I think that tomorrow I will be mentally dead, I will forget something or I will not be competitive.[LNB]'As a manager, you now have to live like a player. The time when you could have too much to drink, come in the next morning and not be focused, telling people to do this or that, is over. Finished. The players are more demanding.[LNB]'I believe the target of anything in life should be to do it so well that it becomes art. You read a book and the writer touches something in you that you would not have brought out of yourself. He makes you discover something interesting in your life. If you are living like an animal, what is the point? What makes the day interesting is that we try to transform it into something that is close to art. When I watch Barcelona, it is art.' [LNB]It is not just desires and distractions that Wenger seeks tocontrol. The emotions that could result in an ill-considered word to aplayer in frustration at the end of a match, or a confessional to afellow manager that reveals weakness, are also controlled.[LNB]Onewonders about the toll of keeping all this in and feels almostgladdened by memories of Wenger losing momentary control on thetouchline, as he did with Alan Pardew, the former West Ham United manager, who celebrated a goal too eagerly at Upton Park. Mention of it brings a smile of recognition.[LNB] An art form: Arsenal's brand of flowing possession football has won plaudits for its beauty[LNB]'When I was at Nancy as a young coach, the father of Michel Platini was a director of the club,' Wenger recalled. 'We had a really poor team and one day he said to me, 'Do you know what I really cannot stand any more? To see the other bench jumping up and down'.[LNB]'I thought about him on that day with Pardew. I discovered in Japan that at the end of a sumo wrestling match you can never tell who has won because they do not show their emotion to not embarrass the loser. It is only here in England that everybody pokes out their tongue when they win.[LNB]'Sometimes you feel under more stress or you will have less resistance to nervousness but the value of experience is that you can better dominate your nature, your emotions. [LNB]'On television, the politician who loses the debate is the one who gets nervous. As soon as you become aggressive you have lost. It is a basic rule. That is what everybody says about Kevin Keegan at Newcastle United, that he surrendered the league because he argued with Sir Alex Ferguson. [LNB]'It is not true, it was because Newcastle had no defence, but that night people thought he lost the plot.[LNB]'I am not extrovert. I do not like to show my emotions. In my job I learned very early that you can cause a lot of damage if you express your feelings with the team. After a game you can do fantastic damage by saying negative things.[LNB]'In Japan, a man loses his wife in the morning yet comes to work and does not speak about it. They do not wish to disturb others with their problems.[LNB]'I am not saying that is healthy. It is criminal for that person. Whenever there is trauma in the world, psychologists encourage people to talk about it because it is important it comes out of you. So I am sure I pay sometimes for holding it in. I don't know what it does to my health. I know it pays a price on my head; that is for sure.' [LNB] And on his dignity, considering the urbane Wenger is notorious for defending his team in adversity, or claiming hehas not seen a controversial incident, in which an Arsenal player is in the wrong. So will he admit that he is sometimes guilty of what Edmund Burke called 'economy with the truth'?[LNB]'Yes, because you are thinking, 'Why has he done that?' and you know you cannot explain it,' Wenger said. 'At times I saw it, and I said I didn't to protect the player, because I could not find any rational explanation to defend him.[LNB]'This is a job where you have to have an optimistic view of human nature or you become paranoid. You always have to think that a guy wants to do well.[LNB]'A coach is there to help. He must think that if he helps in the correct way the players will respond. You cannot be suspicious.' [LNB]Was that Jose Mourinho's problem, that he was suspicious? 'He was certainly suspicious of me.' [LNB]And Ferguson?[LNB]'We now have a respectful relationship, but that was not always the case. It has become a lot better since we stopped competing with Manchester United at the top level!' [LNB] Suspicious mind: Mourinho observes Wenger[LNB]Respect: Wenger and Sir Alex[LNB] Are you good friends with any manager?[LNB]'No,' Wenger confirmed. 'And it has nothing to do with the quality of the people. On the day, it is you or them, so there is always mistrust. You cannot be completely open.[LNB]'If you are the manager of Everton and I am playing against you on Saturday, I call you up the week before and we are talking. I cannot say, 'This player is driving me mad', because then you will know that I have a problem.[LNB]'There are managers I respect, but I cannot be completely friendly. That is why I do not go for a drink after matches. What can you say if you have won? And if you have lost all you want to do is get home and prepare for the next game.'[LNB] Reading this, one may feel that Wenger would be a lonely spirit. Even as a player with Strasbourg he was apart from his team-mates, travelling to Cambridge to take a three-week English course in the summer, or to Hungary to see how the Communist system worked.[LNB]He retains interest in politics (he stayed up to watch the American presidential debates), he theorises on the subject of global economics (a world government and a maximum wage) and enjoys travel beyond football's traditional axis.[LNB]A recent trip to China contained disappointment because there are 700 million farmers in China, apparently, 'and I did not get to meet one'. How does this man enjoyably swim in a shallow pool of twenty-something millionaires?The secret is to involve them in his grand plan and lend them a small piece of his soul.[LNB]'The common denominator of successful teams is that the players are intelligent,' Wenger said. [LNB]'That does not always mean educated. If you speak to a player after the game and ask him to rate his performance, if he analyses well, you know he is the sort who will go home thinking, 'I did this wrong, I did that wrong'. His assessment will be correct and he will rectify. That player has a chance. The one who has a crap game and says he was fantastic, you worry for him.[LNB]'At Arsenal, we are building a stadium. So I thought I would get young players in early so I would not be exposed in the transfer market without the money to compete.[LNB]'I would build a team, and we would compensate by creating a style of play, by creating a culture at the club that, because the boy comes in at 16 or 17, when he goes out he will have a supplement of soul, of love for Arsenal because his team has been educated together. This will give us strength that other clubs will not have.[LNB]'I am not a big fan of tennis, the big tournaments, but I like the Davis Cup because it is a team sport. I like golf, but only the Ryder Cup. It is the team ethic that interests me, always.' He pauses.[LNB]'It is strange, I know.'[LNB]Not really, if you think about it.[LNB] Arsene Wenger, together with Cesc Fabregas, Manuel Almunia, Theo Walcott and legendary actress Barbara Windsor (left), officially kicked off the club's charity of the season partnership with Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity last week.[LNB]The Gunners aim to raise £500,000 to help the institution one of the world's leading children's hospitals to build an all new and improved lung function unit for children who have difficulty breathing or sleeping.[LNB]The unit currently sees over 2,000 children a year and is an essential part of the care for those who have a range of conditions including asthma, wheezing, cystic fibrosis and cancer. [LNB]To find out more and donate go to: www.beagoonerbeagiver.org ARSENE WENGER INTERVIEW: The full transcript of Martin Samuel's fascinating meeting with the Arsenal managerWhy I said no to Madrid: It would have been a betrayal to leave Arsenal, says Arsene WengerVan der Vaart sparks Premier League scrap as FIFPro say he can leave Real for freeDigging in his Spurs: Comolli says he'll fight to stop Matuidi joining ArsenalARSENAL FC
