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By Tony Attwood
Under Bruce Rioch, and indeed I would venture to say in the latter part of his reign, under George Graham, Arsenal was just another football club. But from the moment he arrived, I felt that to Arsene Wenger, Arsenal was THE CLUB. In my view Wenger, then worked to make sure that everyone employed at Arsenal, saw it as THE CLUB, and that feeling has continued to today, as Arsenal have won the League in their record-breaking 100th season in the top division.
As I write this, in the summer recess after that 100th season, I am disappointed that the publicity unit within Arsenal FC deliberately chose not to make a big thing of this being the 100th consecutive season in the top division – and indeed their failure to pick up on this point looks rather foolish, when we note that uniquely Arsenal won the League in their 100th consecutive season in the League. But I guess they had a reason for not mentioning this point – although I can’t imagine what that reason was.
However we have reached in our story the season 1996/7, the only season when Arsenal had four managers. That seems excessive but as a result of moving on Rioch, Houston and Rice they finally brought in a man who ranks alongside Herbert Chapman in the history of the club.
Rioch seemed to me to be mighty miffed that he got the sack after coming fifth in what turned out to be his one and only season as manager, and that I think was the problem – he saw fifth as ok, while this was a club that had in earlier times regularly won things. Worse, Arsenal went out of the FA Cup to Sheffield United of the Championship in the third round.
So Rioch left on 12 August 1996, and even to the most adventurous and hopeful of us supporters of the day, that seemed really odd. For one thing, the opening game of the season was on 17 August (West Ham at home) . For another, no one knew who the new manager would be, although it seems Stewart Houston assumed the job was his for the asking when he took over as caretaker.
But there doesn’t seem to be absolute proof that Houston thought he was in for the job. Of course, as we now know, he wasn’t, and indeed, seeing his record as a manager after this moment shows us why.
The fact was that even if Arsenal had been thinking of him as a possible permanent replacement, his results at Arsenal were pretty poor. His opening league results were won two, drawn two, and lost one, while his opening European match was a 2-3 home defeat to Borussia Monchengladbach. For a team that now contained not just Ian Wright but also Dennis Bergkamp, Paul Merson and four of the famous defence (only Adams was missing until he returned in late September), this was clearly not good enough.
So Houston, on finding he was not going to be Arsenal’s permanent manager, left to be manager of Queens Park Rangers and took on Bruce Rioch as his assistant.
To those of us watching at the time, it looked to all the world as if Houston’s prime interest was in sticking two fingers up at the Arsenal board, and if that were so, it failed miserably. Houston and Rioch were both sacked by QPR just over a year later, with the club closer to the foot of the renamed “First Division” (the second tier) than to the top, fighting for the promotion the pair had promised the board. It is also worth noting in passing that after a spell at Ipswich, Houston went to be Graham’s assistant at Tottenham, where again he lasted but two years. He later became a scout for Arsenal, which seemed about the right level for him until he retired in 2020.
But to return now to 1996/7, after Houston walked out on Arsenal in September 1996, having been told he would not be the next Arsenal manager, Pat Rice took over as interim manager, until finally Arsene Wenger finished his commitments in the Far East. However, Wenger showed his knowledge of both European football and the situation at Arsenal by starting work before he returned to England, signing Remi Garden and Patrick Vieira, and then taking over on 1 October 1996.
So what did the world make of Arsenal having a French manager? There was a lot of negativity about the appointment, certainly, reflecting a vision popularised by the media that somehow not only was English football different from that in the rest of the world, but really no one but the English understood it. And indeed there was something in the view that English football was different from football played elsewhere – but that “difference” did not mean “better,” in any particular way.
And yet English league football was constantly projected by the media as somehow superior to football anywhere else in the world, and in some ways this did indeed slow down the progress of football in England.
But as it was, Wengers’ purchase of non-English, or perhaps one should say, non-British and non-Irish players caused a lot of negative commentary, although this was set aside by Arsenal rising to the top of the league by the start of November.
But as Wenger began to develop the team to his own model (he was quoted as saying that he was instructed upon arriving not to touch the by now famous defence of Dixon, Winterburn, Keown, Bould and Adams), slowly even the most pro-English fans realised that they were now seeing a different, more superior form of football.
Indeed, this was obvious from the start, with just one defeat in their first 12 matches, which saw Arsenal begin November at the top of the First Dvision.
But as the club started to lose the occasional matches (particularly with a run of no wins, three draws and a defeat in December and then a run of two draws and then a run of one goal scored in five matches in February) such results gave journalists the chance they had been looking for, to return to their nationalistic roots, suggesting that no manager who was not English could ever triumph in the league in Engalnd. We invented the game, they suggested, and we knew how to play it. These foreigners just didn’t get it.
But there was a further problem since at this time only the top two would make it into the qualifying round for the Champions League. But the 3-1 win over Derby County in the final game (having been one down at half time) saw Arsenal finish third, equal on points with Newcastle in second, but seven points behind Manchester United at the top. It was the club’s best finish since winning the title in 1991.
However, this also represented a turning point in relation to the media’s attitude toward Arsenal, as they picked up on the fact that Wenger was indeed able to identify and bring in players from across Europe who offered skills and abilities which left many English players wondering how on earth they could be bypassed so easily. Thus, it was with some glee that the scribblers noted that the top scorer for Arsenal had not changed. “All these clever-clever foreigners,” they suggested, “but Wenger still needs an Englishman to score the goals.
28 different players represented the club in four competitions, and there were 12 different goal scorers. But it was Ian Wright who shone through as Arsenal’s top goalscorer of the season. he scored 30 goals in 41 appearances. It was a staggering achievement.
