What does it mean to have fight? Not the dictionary definition — we can all look that up — but the football definition. The thing that separates the teams who fold under pressure from the teams who push back. The thing you can feel in a stadium but cannot quite articulate. The thing that, right now, in February 2017, Arsenal Football Club appear to have lost.
The evidence
Let us start with the facts, because the facts are damning. Bayern Munich 5, Arsenal 1. A Champions League round-of-sixteen first leg that was supposed to be difficult but competitive, that was supposed to show that this Arsenal side had learned from previous European humiliations. Instead, we were taken apart with a surgical precision that was almost admirable in its ruthlessness, if you could set aside the small matter of it happening to your football club.
Five goals. At home. In the Champions League. This from a side that, once upon a time, went to the Bernabeu and won, that reached a Champions League final, that could stand toe to toe with the best in Europe and not flinch. Where did that Arsenal go? When did we become the side that other clubs look at and see an opportunity rather than a threat?
But the Bayern match, devastating as it was, is merely the most vivid example of a pattern that has been repeating itself for years. The collapses at Anfield. The capitulation against Manchester City. The Stoke defeats — plural, because one was apparently insufficient as a lesson. There is a fragility about this Arsenal side that surfaces at the worst possible moments, a brittleness that no amount of technical ability can disguise.
The ghost of Tony Adams
I think about Tony Adams a lot these days. Not because I want to live in the past — though the temptation is real — but because Adams embodied something that this current squad so conspicuously lacks. He was not the most gifted footballer. He was not the quickest, or the most technically accomplished, or the most intelligent in a tactical sense. But he had something that burned inside him, a refusal to be beaten that was almost pathological in its intensity.
Adams would not have accepted 5-1 at home. Not because he was physically capable of preventing it — he was a centre-half, not a magician — but because the sheer force of his personality, his demand for standards, his absolute refusal to tolerate mediocrity, would have made it unthinkable. There would have been bollockings at half-time. There would have been players dragged aside and told, in terms that cannot be printed on a family blog, that this was not acceptable.
Who plays that role now? Who stands in the dressing room after a humiliation like Bayern Munich and demands better? The silence that greets that question is, I fear, the answer.
Wenger’s final act
It feels increasingly as though we are witnessing the final act of the Wenger era, and it is not the ending anyone wanted. The brilliance of those early years — the traditions he inherited and transformed — has curdled into something stale and repetitive. The same patterns of play. The same inability to compete physically with the strongest sides. The same press conferences in which Wenger talks about the positives while the supporters seethe.
I say this with immense sadness, because Arsene Wenger changed Arsenal Football Club more profoundly than any other individual in its history, with the possible exception of Herbert Chapman. He brought us beauty, style, trophies, a stadium, and a way of thinking about football that elevated the entire league. He deserves gratitude and respect, and he will always have both from me.
But gratitude for the past is not a reason to accept decline in the present. And what we are witnessing is, unmistakably, a decline. Not in results alone — results fluctuate, seasons ebb and flow — but in something more fundamental. In spirit. In fight. In soul.
The soul of the club
Arsenal Football Club was built on fight. The club that came from south of the river to colonise North London, that won championships through sheer bloody-mindedness under Chapman and Allison, that turned “one-nil to the Arsenal” into both a joke and a badge of honour. This is a club whose identity, for the best part of a century, was forged in resilience.
Where has that resilience gone? When did we become the club that other supporters look at with a mixture of sympathy and contempt? When did “typical Arsenal” become a synonym for beautiful failure rather than stubborn success?
The answers are not simple, and anyone who offers simple answers is selling something. It is not just about Wenger, though his role is significant. It is not just about the players, though their collective mentality is clearly an issue. It is something systemic, something that has seeped into the culture of the club like damp into the walls of an old house.
I want my Arsenal back. The Arsenal that fought, that scrapped, that refused to accept defeat until the final whistle and sometimes not even then. The Arsenal of Adams and Bould and Keown, of 5-0 at the Lane and Michael Thomas at Anfield. The Arsenal that had soul.
Whether that Arsenal still exists, buried somewhere beneath the layers of commercial expansion and tactical timidity, is the defining question of this era. I choose to believe that it does. That fight is not something you lose permanently, but something that needs to be rediscovered, rekindled, demanded by those who care enough to demand it.
But belief, on its own, is not enough. Not anymore. Something has to change. The question is what, and when, and whether anyone at London Colney has the courage to make it happen.
Fight. Soul. Arsenal Football Club. Three words that should be inseparable. Right now, they feel like strangers.