Wenger puts his trust in his players

Group H/Steaua Bucharest v Arsenal:Arsène Wenger may be going for a fourth Premier League title but he continues to rethink and revise his methods.

"Success is paralysing," says the Frenchman. "If you don't change anything, three years later you are suddenly not successful and you don't know why. You want to repeat quality but also to improve quality, so you have to change. When you lose there's also a resistance to change but when you are a manager you can't be scared to put pressure on and to take a risk by changing. You can't be scared of change."

Wenger has every right to feel "life is beautiful" at the moment for his Arsenal side, but accepts that could all change very quickly. They travelled to Romania yesterday for tonight's Champions League clash with Steaua Bucharest sitting pretty at the top of the Premier League.

Victory in eastern Europe would make it eight in a row for Wenger's emerging squad, who have shown few signs of missing star man Thierry Henry, sold to Barcelona during the summer.

Wenger has seen enough football during his 11 seasons in charge to know how quickly the scenario could change. With the revolutionary zeal of a latter-day Robespierre, Wenger has created and undone three great teams at Arsenal. Tony Adams and Lee Dixon, mainstays of the 1998 Double-winning defence, were peripheral figures when the feat was repeated in 2002, their colleagues Nigel Winterburn and Steve Bould already gone. Emmanuel Petit and Marc Overmars were moved on to Barcelona.

Then David Seaman, Martin Keown and Sylvain Wiltord made way for Jens Lehmann, Kolo Toure and Gilberto Silva as Arsenal went unbeaten in 2004. Today, only those three remain of the "Invincibles" and, two points clear at the top of the table and with a game in hand, Wenger might be on the threshold of a fourth great side.

Few foresaw it when even Thierry Henry was deemed superfluous but Wenger's decision seems to have been spectacularly vindicated. "The most talented player I have worked with is certainly Thierry Henry," said Wenger. "He had pace, power, skill, intelligence.

"He had maybe some other problems but he was gifted as a footballer. If I let Thierry Henry go it is because I was convinced at the moment of the decision that we will be successful. When you make decisions you know you have to win football games.

"The basic quality of being a manager - and I always say it when a young coach starts - is to trust people. The second part is resistance to stress. "

Wenger certainly trusts his players. Three months after Cesc Fabregas's 17th birthday he was handed his first Premier League start, in a 4-1 win at Everton in August 2004. Now 20 and seven games into Arsenal's season, the Spain midfielder is already being tipped as this year's footballer of the year.

Fabregas is the mainstay of a team that has an average age of 23 years and eight months, and Wenger has two reasons for employing such young players. The first is psychological. "There has been research done by psychologists which explains that at 18 to 20 years old a person's motivation is set, and after that you cannot change them," he said.

"It is about the environment they are in at that age and how they feel, but if somebody is not motivated you cannot instil it in them later."

The second, appropriately for a man whose contribution has propelled Arsenal into the top tier of richest European clubs, is financial.

"The cycle of life is like a (bell) curve. It goes up like this and then it goes down like this," he said.

"Most of the time in football, clubs pay the maximum wages to players at 29, 30 years old, when they are on their way down. Here we like to buy players when they are on their way up. This is the most exciting squad (I have coached at Arsenal) because they have all been educated by us."

Wenger was speaking at a dinner organised by the French Chamber of Commerce in Britain.

Steaua Bucharest owner Gigi Becali said he will sack interim coach Massimo Pedrazzini if his side lose tonight. Pedrazzini took the reins on a temporary basis last month following the shock resignation of Gheorghe Hagi, who blamed ongoing tension with Begali.