The Arsenal manager has revived the tradition of introducing a random element but it may be a winner by the laws of the jungle.
Pundits are fond of telling us that football "is cyclical". Like the frequently expressed view that a team who haven't picked up three points on their travels for six months "are due an away win by the law of averages", this appears to be another case of superstition posing as science. If football really is cyclical, then it is plain that some teams are on much shorter cycles than others, with clubs from the Lancashire cotton towns forced to circle the solar system on a moped, while Manchester United are tasked with whipping round Salford in an F-111.
The north-east's clubs, meanwhile, have plainly missed their turn-off and are heading directly away from the title, unable to focus on finding a route back due to somebody in the passenger seat muttering: "I told you to stop and ask someone for directions, but would you listen? Would you hell as like."
One thing that plainly is cyclical in what Pelé once memorably dubbed "a necessary rung on the ladder to advertising impotence cures" is the jokes. This week, for example, somebody told me that after his series of gaffes against West Brom, the Arsenal goalkeeper Manuel Almunia had "thrown himself in front of a bus, but the bus went under him".
The first time I heard this quip was 40 years ago. The butt of it then was Gary Sprake. Sprake was the goalkeeper in Don Revie's mighty Leeds team of the late 60s and early 70s. The Leeds manager was a bloke who left little to chance, so it has always seemed odd that he put so much faith in the talented yet erratic Welshman. On his off days Sprake wasn't so much prone to errors as totally supine before them, infamously diving over an innocuous Peter Houseman shot in the 1970 FA Cup final and getting in such a flap during a game against Liverpool in 1967 he threw the ball into his own net. As a consequence the Kop serenaded the man from Swansea with a chorus of the Des O'Connor hit Careless Hands" (Sprake later used it as the title of his autobiography).
At least he fared better at Anfield than another keeper, Everton's Gordon West, who was presented with a handbag by a spectator, an apparent reference to a US TV show Honey West and the fact he was reckoned "a bit of a Mary".
Had Gordon Banks, Joe Corrigan or Pat Jennings been between the Leeds posts they'd have been more or less invincible. Sprake added an exciting randomness. Back around that time there was a popular myth that, under orders from the Vatican, priests regularly turned up at condom factories and stuck pins in the product. The Welshman seemed like the football equivalent, an arbitrary hole in the prophylactic barrier of Revie's defence. Sprake added risk. He was the chance element on which all sport thrives, without which it would merely be a sweaty version of chess. Perhaps that was why Revie persisted with him. I'd like to think so, anyway. Certainly Leeds weren't as much fun once the more reliable David Harvey arrived.
Since then other top managers have seemed churlishly reluctant to embrace the Sprakes of this world. Brian Clough boringly insisted on buying Peter Shilton, for instance, and Howard Kendall stuck with the thumpingly predictable Neville Southall. Bruce Grobbelaar had his moments, admittedly, and Sir Alex Ferguson briefly flirted with the idea of making things a little more interesting when he opted to replace the tediously excellent Peter Schmeichel with Massimo Taibi, "The Blind Venetian". Sadly, after the Italian had proved his worth by winning a man of the match award and shipping 11 goals in four matches, he was given the heave-ho.
Now, at last, we have Arsène Wenger, a man seemingly determined to add some hazard. The Frenchman has already demonstrated a remarkable reluctance to buy any of the sort of rambunctious strikers with thighs like a pair of hogs who insist on hoofing the ball into the net whenever they get the chance. People have often wondered why this is, seeing in it some aesthetic judgment, a repudiation of such direct vulgarity. The truth, I believe, is quite different. Wenger knows that if he'd bothered to buy somebody like Alan Shearer, Ruud van Nistelrooy or even Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink it would all have been too easy; likewise the Alsatian's mysterious decision not to bother looking for a goalkeeper once David Seaman had hung up his ponytail.
A friend who watches a lot of wildlife programmes tells me that you can always distinguish the alpha male among a troop of gorillas: he is the one who moves most slowly, who constantly and lazily exposes his vulnerable throat and abdomen to his rivals. By so doing the alpha male signals that he is unafraid, that he is confident of his ability to defeat anybody in a fight. Zoologists call this "the handicap principle of selection".
Wenger does not move slowly, and as far as I'm aware he is yet to bare his stomach to Sir Alex or Carlo Ancelotti, but by failing to buy a replacement for Almunia and Lukasz Fabianski (a hero on Tuesday but surely no more than a sliver of cheese away from further nightmares) he could be signalling that he is the male who ought to have first crack at the Premier League bananas.
Source: Harry Pearson, The Guardian on 1 Oct 10
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