Buck has to stop with Wenger as his Arsenal 'project' unravels

SOCCER ANGLES:IT'S AROUND three years now since Arsene Wenger, when asked about his future at Arsenal, said that he had "started a project three or four years ago and I want to reach the end of it", writes EMMET MALONE

Given the manner of Wednesday’s defeat in Milan, however, it seems flattering even to describe this current team as a work in progress and impossible to guess when the manager might reckon he will have completed his work.

The fall-out from the match has been a little strange, with a great deal of criticism heaped upon the players that were so well beaten at the San Siro, but rather less on the man who has assembled the group, picked the team and decided upon the tactics.

The scale of the success enjoyed during Wenger’s early years in north London, it seems, continues to afford the Frenchman a lot of protection.

The club has not won a trophy since the FA Cup in 2005 but the bulk of fans continue to regard the manager as a hero, preferring to point the finger at players who fall well short of the standards set by their predecessors during the early part of the last decade, and a board who some blame for not providing Wenger with more financial fire-power.

Wenger’s wages bill is the fourth largest in the top flight but he has certainly tended to spend less in terms of transfer fees than most of his rivals at the upper end of the Premier League table, although the choice, he has always maintained, has been his own.

When the club’s last set of accounts were published it was suggested he had around €60 million at his disposal but the 62-year-old has variously explained that he has no need to invest heavily in outside stars when he believes that the players already at the Emirates can succeed or that the players he would like to bring in are simply overpriced. “We do not buy superstars,” he observed not so long ago, “we make them”.

The raw material for such transformations, though, has become harder to source amid greatly increased competition for young talent and it was hard to spot any superstars in the making on Wednesday, when a somewhat, but not hugely, depleted side was completely shown up by a Milan team that, while it leads Serie A at the moment, had only managed two wins in a Champions League group that included Barcelona but also Viktoria Plzen and Bate Borisov.

Wenger has taken some stick for getting his tactics wrong and some too for not starting Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, the 18- year-old winger, but he did have what was arguably his first-choice defence out on the field for just the third time this season and that was probably just about the department in which things went most horribly wrong.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic who, almost inevitably it turns out, Wenger could have signed when the striker was first trying to engineer a move away from Malmo more than a decade ago, ran riot and Milan could easily have scored more than the four they did.

The upshot is that, assuming Arsenal do not perform a miracle in the return leg, they have one trophy – the FA Cup – along with qualification for the Champions League next season to aim for now over the last few months of this campaign.

They may have their work cut out reaching the quarter-finals of the FA Cup today when they head back to Sunderland for the afternoon’s late game.

A couple of months ago the tie might have been regarded with a fair bit of confidence but their hosts have been transformed since the arrival of Martin O’Neill to such an extent that, having been relegation candidates at the start of December, they have, under his guidance, outperformed Arsenal in their last 11 league games, taking 22 points compared to the Londoners’ 17, scoring the same number of goals – despite not getting seven in any one outing – and conceding four fewer.

When the two sides met in the Premier League last week, Arsenal prevailed thanks to an injury-time winner from Thierry Henry, but the veteran striker is gone now and that game was played a couple of days after Sunderland’s extended cup replay against neighbours Middlesbrough. This fixture however comes on the back of Arsenal’s traumatic thumping and the journey back from Italy.

The second goal of qualifying for the Champions League next season is, in any case, much more important that winning the cup, but it is no more straightforward. With the first three qualification spots essentially gone, Arsenal find themselves embroiled in a battle with Chelsea, who have plenty of problems of their own, Newcastle and Liverpool for fourth place. The cost of not making it would be huge.

Going out at this stage of this year’s competition means Arsenal will pocket much the same as the €30 million they got last season rather than the €50 million they would have received had they gone on and somehow won the competition outright.

Failure to qualify for next year, though, would leave them having to decide whether they wanted to even take the Europa League seriously when actually winning it would bring in just €10 million or so (Liverpool and Manchester City both went out last year in the last 16 and got €6.1 million for their trouble) while potentially putting such a strain on the squad that they would fail to qualify for the far more lucrative premier European competition again.

In addition, it would mean that the club would be sitting down for contract extension talks with their most prized player, Robin van Persie, with both parties painfully aware that the club was losing its grip on its place at the game’s top table.

Similarly, transfer targets would have to be wooed without the attraction of Champions League football to a club that traditionally does not pay top dollar – van Persie, for instance, is on around €100,000 per week, half what Wayne Rooney and many Manchester City stars get these days – with the result that the club’s slide might continue, potentially making the youngsters who do make the grade harder to retain when, in turn, their deals run out and rivals come calling.

Wenger is right, of course, when he says the finances of football at the likes of Chelsea, City and now Paris Saint Germain are little short of lunacy, but until Uefa’s financial fair play rules kick in fully they are what he is up against.

Arsenal’s infrastructure, to be fair, is second to none and the club’s own financial position will be bolstered in a couple of years when major commercial deals with long-term sponsors come up for renewal. But events this week suggest that the manager has miscalculated in his attempt to keep the team competitive in the meantime.

His players are simply not good enough and, for that, Wenger really has to shoulder some of the blame.

Wolves eye Curbishley

THE Wolves fans who called for Mick McCarthy to go after the defeat by West Bromwich Albion last week may have been less thrilled to have got their way when the shortlist of would-be replacements contained two managers sacked because their teams had been struggling at the wrong end of the table over the previous few weeks.

In the circumstances it is probably no great surprise that Alan Curbishley emerged as the favourite for the post although it's just possible the punters were thinking a little bit bigger than the 54 year-old, who became a contender for the England job at one stage on the basis of his achievements with Charlton. He also had a remarkable first few months at West Ham but has not been in a dugout for around three and a half years.

Big Mick, meanwhile, looks as though he will be falling back on his impressive record in the Championship when it comes to getting his next job.

Fifa turn a blind eye to missing funds

CLAIMS this week that the Trinidad and Tobago Football Federation lodged some €500,000 intended for victims of the Haiti earthquake into accounts controlled by former Fifa vice-president Jack Warner (right) and has been unable to obtain clarification regarding what became of the cash comes as no great surprise really.

The football family have been united in its hard line towards Warner since . . . well, since he made the mistake of backing a loser when his old ally Sepp Blatter stood for re-election last year.

There had for many years before that been stories, some of them very well documented, of Warner’s misdeeds, most notably his handling of Trinidad and Tobago’s ticket allocation for the 2006 World Cup. But Fifa never saw fit to take any serious action against a man who was very much onside with the leadership back then.

Now that he is gone, the organisation claims there is no need to investigate what he might have been up to.

It is, at best, cynical stuff, and the fact that Uefa, under the leadership of Michel Platini, and most of its associations including, it is believed, the FAI, backed Blatter last time does little to inspire any great faith that things will dramatically change for the better if, as expected, the Frenchman replaces the Swiss native in 2015.