{"id":499,"date":"2016-06-17T01:05:06","date_gmt":"2016-06-17T01:05:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/?p=499"},"modified":"2016-06-17T01:05:06","modified_gmt":"2016-06-17T01:05:06","slug":"arsene-wenger-arsenal-jose-mourinho-wengerball-thierry-henry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/13.207.105.184\/?p=499","title":{"rendered":"Arsenal and the Wenger Wonderland"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

T<\/span>hirty minutes into Yorgos Lanthimos\u2019s dystopian, surrealist film, <\/p>The Lobster<\/span><\/i>, I sat back, awestruck at the all-iness of the central premise. Colin Farrell and Colin Farrell\u2019s moustache want companionship, so they enter a hotel where he has 45 days to fall in love. If he fails do to do, he will be turned into an animal. Farrell is ALL IN, and so is Arsene Wenger.<\/span>\n\nYou either die a hopeless romantic and be turned into a lobster or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain. The maddening thing about Wenger is that he has now become part incurable romantic, part corporate villain.<\/span>\n\nBrian Phillips once called Wenger, \u201c<\/span>soccer\u2019s quantum uncertainty<\/span><\/a>\u201d.<\/span>\n\n\u201cHe\u2019s a terrible coach whose decisions have ruined Arsenal, and he\u2019s a brilliant coach whose balancing act has saved Arsenal\u2019s future. We have no way of measuring which of those things he really is, so to us, he\u2019s both at the same time.<\/span>\u201d<\/span>\n\nHowever, despite Wenger\u2019s strange yet utterly captivating two decade reign at Arsenal, what is undeniable is that he transformed English football forever, mainly by shepherding a kind of hypnotic, almost addictive delicacy of play.<\/span>\n\nWengerball, they call it.<\/span>\n\nIt is more ideal, less strategy, and like Kanye West\u2019s absurdly ambitious record, <\/span>Life of Pablo<\/span><\/i>, is constantly reorienting itself to the whims of its master, trying to reach the space which accurately projects Wenger\u2019s single-minded interpretation of how football should be played.<\/span>\n

Every Arsenal game, for me, then became a test of its players\u2019 imagination and ability to mesmerise, where Wenger was the tutor and Wenger the examiner.<\/blockquote>\n\u201cI\u2019m a facilitator of what is beautiful in man,\u201d Wenger had once said. \u201cThere is a kind of magic when men united their energies to express a common idea. That is when sports becomes beautiful.\u201d<\/span>\n\nHis team is one malleable unit of ball control and spacial awareness, making love to the football, caressing it with short, primarily horizontal passes, facilitated by the positionlessness of the front four and the extreme technical proficiency of everyone else. The aim is to assemble\u00a0kinetic energy, \u201cenergy which a body possesses by virtue of being in motion,\u201d until an opening is presented in the defence.<\/span>\n
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