success in a league where competition is thoroughly warped by funding is a difficult concept to understand. manchester united win the league, they are successful; west brom are relegated, they are not. right? sort of. but what constitutes success for a team with maybe 20% of the resources of united? presumably stoke have had a successful season, even though they might not finish in the top half of the league. even hull, one might say, have been successful, having managed to simply stay out of the relegation zone for so long. in the case of derby last year, the argument could be made that their sheer presence in the premier league, having been dwelling near the bottom of the championship when billy davies took over, was a success. relegation was a non-issue in that sense.
happily enough, one gets the impression that this year's manager of the year race is being informed by such considerations. it appears likely that roy hodgson, having pulled his fulham side from 17th last year (and almost certain relegation prior to that) to a likely 7th place this, will be crowned the season's best, and with good reason. he's spent relatively little and worked almost exclusively with a limited squad assembled by an idiot (hello, lawrie sanchez!), even when players have been lost. the biggest mark against his name is probably the signing of the perennially useless, bizarrely overrated andy johnson for something in the region of £10m; otherwise, he's got the best out of previously limited players, people like aaron hughes and john paintsil and dickson etuhu. tony pulis is another candidate, a man who has eventually earned my respect for keeping stoke in the league, regardless of the means with which he has done it. he's crafted a physical, committed line-up, turned ricardo fuller (slightly fat, no knees) and james beattie (slightly fat, no talent) into a relatively potent attack and has developed a handful of promising youngsters in defence, despite the presence of the genuinely terrible thomas sorensen in goal.
which is all fine - it's nice that such figures are getting credit. but one man seems to be getting criticised for qualifying for yet another champions league, as well as reaching the semi finals of both the aforementioned tournament and the FA cup, all despite having a net transfer spend of around about £2m during the summer of 2008. yes, people seem to have lost all sense of proportionality: it has been yet another successful season for arsene wenger.
now, in the interests of full disclosure, i've criticised wenger this season. i've said quite often, dating back to my first few posts, that he needed to sign a new central defender & central midfielder - at the very least. of course, he didn't, spending what little money he appeared to have on andrey arshavin, who in fairness has been uniformly, and unusually, excellent since joining from zenit st petersburg. but that was more provoked by two things: first, a belief that the arsenal board had made funds available to spend, and that arsene was refusing to invest, and second, a belief that the signing of two proven players would probably be enough to allow arsenal to mount a serious title challenge.
since then, it appears reasonably clear that the arsenal board had been taking that "money is available" stance to mollify fans, lest they became disillusioned in the decision to invest £300m in that sparkly but utterly dead new stadium, and wenger has been offering himself up as a bit of a martyr, going fully behind the "we've got great young players, i want to develop them" mantra. now, this isn't to say that given the budget wenger would be pursuing a full-on shevchenko-for-£30m type policy, but he might not be buying mickael silvestre for £750k.
given this, his maintenance of a very good squad and first xi on a relatively extreme budget (one only needs to look at spurs, who have spent more than double than arsenal since wenger came on board in 1996) and his delivery of yet another season of champions league football, all whilst trying to play good passing football, and that is a successful season, even leaving out his continued injury problems - half a season without cesc, adebayor missing a considerable amount of games (although some might claim this to be a good thing), still no rosicky, diaby in and out, eduardo recovering simply to pick up more injuries, toure recovering from malaria and gael clichy & william gallas picking up injuries that kept them out of the final two-ish months.
yet, from some quarters he still gets criticism. in fairness, questionable selections have popped up a little too regularly, with an in-form arshavin dropped for the FA cup semi, abou diaby playing too much on the wing and not enough centrally and denilson just playing. but most managers make mistakes from time to time. (witness fergie's team sheets in those defeats to arsenal and liverpool this year: both flawed from the start. but then he's managing the league winners, so all criticism, valid or not, is forgotten.) most, of course is off base - the money likely doesn't exist to fund the purchases being demanded, the money likely didn't exist to fund mathieu flamini's preposterous salary demands and the money won't exist because a small section of fans moan about it.
to suggest that fourth place is some sort of failure stems from a really rather disgusting sense of entitlement, from fans that have become accustomed to that rarefied success since wenger arrived to replace bruce rioch. they seem to expect maintenance of their erstwhile position as title contenders, despite being dwarfed by the riches of their rivals. consistency in achievements and stability behind the scenes is apparently not good enough for some: it is the whining of the spoiled, absolute drivel that doesn't take into account context or the achievements & aims of a man who is probably their greatest ever manager.
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