Blood lust grips fans against Arsenal’s immortal
Wenger’s long reign has created a pent-up desire to destroy his psychological authority, writes
They have not known the joy of manager destruction, the sweet release of the sacking
Ibelieve I have identified the key problem with the regrettable Arsene Wenger situation: Arsenal fans wish to kill him, but they cannot.
I do not mean that supporters of the unfortunate Emirates outfit literally wish to end the life of the artist formerly known as The Professor. I am speaking figuratively, in the same way that an Arsenal midfielder might figuratively, rather than literally, attempt to get the ball away from an opposing player. The tragedy for Arsenal fans is that, where supporters of every other club have been able to feast on the flesh of a slain manager and thus enjoy the fleeting promise of rebirth through sacrifice, their own gaffer remains stubbornly, singularly, supernaturally immortal.
For younger Arsenal devotees, this undead, gloomy figure, slumped in dugout despair, powerless in the face of the latest defensive outrage, is the only manager they have ever known. They know not the savage primal joy of manager destruction, the sweet release of the sacking, the tantalising prospect of a Curbs or a Sparky coming in and giving everyone a good kick up the backside and possibly doing something about the back stick at corners. Arsenal devotees – and I am not just talking about the shouty ones on Arsenal Fan TV here – are deeply frustrated virgins.
Sigmund Freud, triffic little player although he did not bother with the golf, first wrote about the Oedipus complex in The Interpretation of Dreams,
published in 1899, the same year Arsene was appointed manager of Arsenal. Unlike Wenger, Freud adapted and tinkered with his theories over his long career, refining his famous concept of the child’s unconscious desire to possess his mother and kill his father.
While Freud did not, as far as we know, write extensively on The Premier League Sack Race, he might have enjoyed the febrile, brutal urges it engenders. If the football club could be said to represent the idealised Mother: nurturing, sustaining, enveloping, then the manager must be the Father: controlling, ordering, frustrating. Only by killing Father can the love for Mother truly be expressed and realised. For the love of Arsenal, they must destroy Arsene.
One Arsenal son who certainly looks like he’d be on board with slipping Daddy the hemlock and giving Mummy a good old go of the va-va-voom is Thierry Henry. The Sky Sports man was at his sly, sleek best yesterday, his already world-class levels of self-satisfaction dialled up just a soupcon more as he oh-so-carefully rebutted questions of what he would do as Arsenal manager by firmly reminding Football Presenter Droid of the hypothetical who-me-no-that’sdefinitely-not-a-knife-upmy-sleeve-nature of such an enquiry. Thierry would, beyond doubt, be a disastrous appointment for Arsenal as manager, but that has long ceased to be the point.
What Arsenal need is the liberation of extermination, and who better to show the way than Thierry’s Super
Sunday colleague Graeme Souness, a hanging judge of the central midfield, who growled of Wenger simply: “Guilty”?
What Arsenal fans want, and indeed what they need, is to taste blood, to feel the power of destruction, to summon once more the awesome annihilation of your Patrick Vieiras and your Tony Adamses rather than the neurotic piddling of the Xhakas and the Wilsheres. Only through death can Arsenal come back to life. Start preparing that severance package, Mr Kroenke and bring on the wicker man.
The time has come, and we will all feel like new boys and girls for it.