There was a time when Arsene Wenger could sit in the boardroom before a London derby and feel confident about all that was going to happen when his team played.
“I think they know what to do,” he replied when somebody once asked him before Arsenal played Spurs if, as it was now getting close to kick-off, he shouldn’t be down briefing his players, pinning sensationalist newspaper articles on the dressing-room wall and using any of the other methods managers employ to ward off that feeling of powerlessness?
“I think they know what to do.” It could have been a mission statement for the Arsenal Wenger shaped from 1996 to 2004. Whatever the circumstances, his players knew what to do, even if the circumstances insisted that it was now time to stand up and fight.
Wenger was a great manager whose genius depended on extraordinary levels of self-control, a self-control which reflected the trust and faith in the people he considered to be his artists.
About an hour into the game at Upton Park on Saturday, West Ham won a free-kick on the right of the Arsenal box. Dimitri Payet tried to take it quickly but referee Craig Pawson called him back.
Payet’s brain works fast but in this instance, it required no creative vision. Arsenal had told him what to do. As Payet prepared to take the free-kick, not one Arsenal player had come out to defend it. They all remained in the box, allowing Payet freedom to play the ball to anyone, if the referee hadn’t intervened.
“I’ve never seen that,” Glenn Hoddle said on commentary, and it was possible he meant at any level of the game.
By then, of course, Arsenal had thrown away a two-goal lead and their heads had been scrambled by Andy Carroll so maybe it was understandable that every one of them huddled together in the box, suffering from some kind of Stockholm syndrome where they couldn’t leave the man who was holding them hostage.
They had bonded with Carroll in the most traumatic circumstances as he scored what might be seen as the classic Andy Carroll hat-trick – header, deflected volley after a mishit swing with his right foot, header.
For Carroll, these are important times and, after the game, he was asked if he was ruling himself out of England’s European Championship squad as if he was a cabinet minister being asked where he stood on Brexit.
Carroll smiled but confirmed he was very much ruling himself in, looking like a man who is receiving a great reaction on the doorsteps, and is confident of the campaign that lies ahead.
Carroll may be impossible to resist for England if he has another day this season as productive as he had against Arsenal.
He may not have one more day like that. After the game. Slaven Bilic described Carroll as the best header of the ball in the world, but added a familiar warning.
“He’s got to stay away from those injuries and live…. he’s professional, but he’s got to be totally dedicated to his career and to football, then he is simply unstoppable.”
Bilic said there are no limits for Carroll if he could find that dedication, but as he had said the same thing in January after Carroll had scored against Liverpool, it may be that it is just one of those things that people say now, knowing it will never happen, like asking Wenger to sign a top-class central defender.
A couple of years ago, Jamie Carragher wrote of Carroll’s time at Liverpool that “he found the intensity of playing three games every week difficult. Before he might have been used to getting himself right for a match on a Saturday, then spending time socially with his mates — as we all did when we were young — but at Liverpool the training and professional demands are relentless.”
The demands at West Ham may be less intense, but even they seem to have been too much for Carroll. His start against Arsenal was his first in the Premier League since January, and Bilic’s warnings suggest that Carroll has found a kind of contentment in his marginal role.
For the next two months, none of that will matter. They are already war-gaming scenarios where Roy Hodgson would need Andy Carroll in France which may also create an Andy Carroll-shaped hole in the event that Hodgson decides to do without him.
If those war games then become reality and England need to send a big man on to get something from the game in the last ten minutes, questions will be asked if they don’t have a big man – and not just any big man, The Big Man.
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Carroll may be too tempting to resist. He allows all of us to become wistful, to hark back to the time when terror was part of the game for a centre-forward, while also harking back to the time when a player could maybe see the match on a Saturday as an important part of the week, but no more important to the well-rounded individual than “spending time socially with his mates”.
Back then they saw their mates socially at the right time, of course, even if there were few times that were the wrong time.
Carroll hasn’t made the leap forward which is part of his old-fashioned appeal, a necessary adherence to tradition.
Arsenal, too, have remained true to traditional values in their season’s collapse, taking it to extreme levels at the Boleyn Ground as Gabriel tried to deal with Carroll like a lab assistant in a disaster movie who realises too late that what he has discovered will bring doom for us all.
On Saturday, Wenger was asked if he felt powerless watching his players collapse under the Carroll threat, “Look I’m not here after the game to blame absolutely the players,” he said.
Wenger sounded as if he had moved even beyond blind faith in those who mattered most to him. “We still not have found a machine that can measure the intensity of love,” he said once, but he is now looking forlorn and broken with no place left to go.
Arsenal’s season didn’t begin to unravel at the Boleyn Ground, but they may never recover from the symbolism of that encounter. The man who did so much to change English football had been undone by the man who wants to change it back.
