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So how could Arsenal recover from a season like 1994/5? A season in which Paul Merson was removed from the squad suffering from multiple addiction problems, George Graham was sacked, and then banned from football, and Arsenal itself finished 12th in the league while a former Tottenham player lobbed Seaman from 40 yards to take the Cup Winners’ Cup.
After such turmoil, there needed to be a new Arsenal with new players and a new management if the club was going to get back to its previous position, and re-establish its good name.
Not every decision turned out to be the best one – Bruce Rioch was certainly not the man that we really needed as manager – but secondary effects also count, and it was Rioch (or those advising him) who brought Dennis Bergkamp from Inter Milan for £7.5m. So maybe he can be forgiven – to some degree.
It took Dennis quite a while to settle down in a club that was clearly in shock from all that was going on around the players, but thank goodness he stayed, for we got to see not just his goals, but a style and quality of play that had never been seen before from an Arsenal team.
But there was something particular with Dennis that made him so incredibly special. It was not that he could score amazing goals; he could also see where everyone else in the team was. At first, it almost looked as if his team-mates couldn’t believe the passes that were being delivered to them, but if that were to be the case, they quickly got themselves sorted and were ever more ready to receive a pass that no one else could have imagined. And just for good measure, he became the Netherlands top goal scorer.
However, in 1995/6 there was still something missing: a manager who could develop a team that now contained Tony Adams and Dennis Bergkamp. Bruce Rioch did his very best, I’m sure. But the fact is that he came from management spells at Millwall and Bolton Wanderers, before his one season (1995/6) at Arsenal, and sometimes it showed. After Arsenal, he took time out from management and didn’t return until 1998, with Norwich City, followed by Wigan Athletic, before taking another long break, by which time Arsenal had flown on to an utterly different level.
Thus we see 1995/6 as an interim season, one which Arsenal did rather well to finiish up fifth in the league. But the club, even with Dennis, only scored 49 goals in the league – six fewer than Wimbledon who came 14th. That alone was really not what Arsenal expected – and that with Bergkamp in the team was most certainly not what the fans expected.
Did Rioch know that he was only there for a season from the start? I can’t believe that was the case, not least because he only officially left the club one week before the start of the 1996/7 season, presumably with a very big payout.
Did Arsenal realise they were going to get through four managers in the first two months of the next season? Surely not. None of this looked like or felt like the Arsenal that we knew from days of yore.
But we should not forget that Rioch in his one season, took Arsenal to fifth in the league. Yes a long way behind Manchester United, and yes, 49 goals was very disappointing, but Merson had returned and played well.
However, the season had ended poorly, and it was possible that Rioch knew his time was up long before the rest of us did. The final eight games in the league led to three wins only, and two of those were by just one goal. Yet the season had started well with no defeats in any of the opening seven games. And indeed it should be remembered that this was a team that now included Bergkamp and a revitalised Merson. Seaman was still in goal, and Dixon and Winterburn were sold as full backs and Wright was still firing.
But not even the FA Cup could bring any joy as second division Sheffield United brought an end to that idea in the third round, and the League Cup and the FA Cup in January. Losing the Cup Winners’ Cup in the final on 10 May seemed to sum up the “near but not good enough” notion of the whole season.
Bruce Rioch left his job officially on 12 August 1996, and with the new season just three weeks away, that seemed to symbolise the mess that Arsenal were in. Stewart Houston came in as caretaker, but lasted only three weeks – and it became clear that no one had told him that there was no chance of his getting the job permanently. Pat Rice took over for the next four weeks, and talk was rampant that Arsenal were about to appoint a manager who no one in England had heard of.
Tony Adams made a comment which was widely reported and became notorious, on hearing the nationality of the man whom no one had seen, saying “He’s French – what does he know about English football?”
Finally, it was realised that the new man was staying on at his current job in Japan out of loyalty to his contract. And so we had the strange situation of new players arriving before the new manager did on 1 October 1996.
The media of course, had a field day. And typically, as matters improved, none of the journalists who had knocked Wenger so remorselessly before he arrived had a word of apology to offer.
But had they had any honour or decency, they should have done. More on what did happen, in the next article.
