WENGER ARRIVED... MY INSPIRATION

And it is clear Wenger continues to have a huge influence on him.

Bergkamp said: “I saw more and more why he trained us in a certain way. What I regretted terribly – and especially when I became a coach myself – was that I never wrote down all his drills.

“All the training sessions I did in those years were so valuable. When I first became a coach, I sat in a little room for two or three weeks and mulled it over. How did that Arsene drill go and how did that training go?

“They were great training sessions, where only later I realised, ‘Oh, so that’s how he was achieving this and that with us’.

“In Arsene’s first weeks, we did shadow play. That was 11 against zero, just as a team without an opponent!

“You should have seen the ‘There was an idea behind everything with Arsene’

Englishmen, ‘What are we going to do now? That guy is crazy!’.

“But with everything he did, the team got better and better. It was a strange sensation. There was an idea behind everything with Arsene.

“He is a huge fan of football and doesn’t want to miss anything.

“But I never saw the translation of how much time he put in outside the club. Not even in tactical talks or video analysis. That was all very brief.

“He once told me a pre-match talk should last between seven and 11 minutes at most because then you still have players’ attention.

“As an assistant coach, I started paying attention to that. I would sit at the back of the room and, damn, the first five or six minutes they listen.

“Then one will turn, the next one will sit or watch differently.

“It was forever clear to me, you’re never going to keep these guys in for more than six minutes. After that, nothing goes in.”