Dah...huyu Wenger bado wanamng'ang'ania tuuu.....Binafsi ningependa aondoke,hana jipya.........aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh
'Ive no doubt well extend his contract'
Chief Executive Ivan Gazidis has "no doubt" that Arsène Wenger will extend his contract at Arsenal.
ARSENAL FOCUS
Who is there to guide Arsenal's great leader?
By Wayne Veysey
It is a question frequently asked of dictators. At what point does their supremacy sway from strong, visionary leadership to absolute power and control?
GettyImages
Wenger has established strong control in his time at Arsenal
While Arsene Wenger is far too conciliatory and reasonable to be labelled a dictator, there is a growing debate about whether his status at Arsenal is healthy for the club that has become his life's project.
It was an issue mostly ignored in the inquest that followed Arsenal's FA Cup and Premier League meltdown as the phone-ins, message boards and newspaper columns concentrated on defensive weaknesses and Wenger's failure to unearth another centre forward treasure during the transfer window.
Yet it is a question worth addressing to a club that partly owes its global reputation to Wenger's 14 years of brilliant stewardship. Who is there in the boardroom or the training ground to say, 'Hang on a minute, Arsene. Are you absolutely sure about this?'
At most clubs, this would fall to the board of directors - usually in the form of the owner or chairman and the chief executive - or the senior coaching staff, typically the assistant manager. Not at Arsenal, a club that is as idiosyncratic off the pitch as it is on it.
The boardroom power lies not in the hands of the chairman - Peter Hill-Wood is an affable yet marginal figure - but in the shape of a low-key Denver-based billionaire and a Geneva tax exile. While Stan Kroenke and Danny Fiszman's influence can be felt in the club's growing international commercial strategy, neither would ever dream of taking Wenger to one side and asking whether Manuel Almunia is truly deserving of his status as Arsenal No. 1.
Another American, Ivan Gazidis, is barely 12 months into his tenure as chief executive and, while he is understood to have built a harmonious working relationship with the Arsenal manager, it is has a long way to go to match the Wenger-David Dein alliance that marked the 1998-2005 trophy-laden years.
Like Dein, Gazidis keeps Wenger's diary free of wearisome contract and agent negotiations - what the Frenchman terms the 'ugly work' - but, unlike the former Gunners' vice-chairman, Gazidis is rarely spotted at youth-team and reserve matches and is too new to these shores to have carved out a reputation as an incomparable networker.
The coaching staff, other than Pat Rice, the bespectacled Irishman whose association with the club stretches back 46 years, are low profile figures. Rice sits alongside Wenger on match days and assumes the public role as his No. 2.
Yet the French general's most trusted lieutenant is Boro Primorac, a big, bald Bosnian who first became acquainted with Wenger when they were on the Cannes payroll in the early 1980s - Primorac a rugged central defender (he was good enough to captain the former Yugoslavia) and Wenger the assistant manager.
Primorac is never picked out by the television cameras and shuns interview requests with a self-deprecating shrug: "Why would you want to speak to me? I'm not important." The evidence, however, is to the contrary. The 55-year-old is a highly-valued tactician and Wenger's chief sounding board on players, tactics and team selection. Only chief scout Steve Rowley - rated as one of the best in the business - has the manager's ear to the same extent on recruitment and transfers.
Empics
Primorac during his time at Cannes
On match days, Primorac's routine - both at half-time and when the final whistle blows - is to scurry down from his seat in the stands to offer any technical or tactical observations to his boss and long-term friend.
"Boro is an encyclopaedia of world football," said Arsenal great and former goalkeeping coach Bob Wilson. "Name a player and he'll know his height, weight and which foot he favours. He watches tape after tape on football, channel after channel. He's Arsene's ally and they share the belief that the three most important things in the game are technique, technique and technique."
Primorac and Wenger were rival managers in the France Championnat in 1993 - Wenger at Monaco and Primorac at Valenciennes - but their bond was secured by the match-fixing scandal that resulted in the jailing of Bernard Tapie, the Marseille president.
Primorac's evidence was critical in bringing Tapie to justice and Wenger was impressed enough by the Bosnian's courage and integrity to offer him a coaching job after moving to Grampus Eight in Japan in 1994. They have been comrades every since.
"If Arsene Wenger was to leave Arsenal tomorrow, Boro Primorac would go with him. Pat Rice wouldn't," said former Arsenal midfielder Ray Parlour. "Boro is clearly Arsene's right-hand man."
Wenger has admitted to sometimes signing players - such as Luis Boa Morte - purely on Primorac's recommendation, evidence enough of the Arsenal boss's faith in his most trusted adviser.
One long-standing Arsenal insider told
Soccernet that Primorac's influence is immeasurable: "With Boro, it is not about title or responsibilities or anything like that. He is just not interested. But Arsene listens to him and respects his opinion. Wherever he goes in the future, Boro will go with him. [Fitness coach] Tony Colbert and [goalkeeper coach] Gerry Peyton would probably be the only two others."
With Wenger, it is not a matter of approachability. Any journalist who has spent any amount of time at one of his press conferences knows that he is thoroughly decent and charming to one and all. The histrionics are saved for the touchline and the unsustainable explanations for a defeat at the immediate post-match inquest.
The problem is that, even more so than that other uber-successful workaholic, Sir Alex Ferguson, the Frenchman is a control freak. He personally runs all the daily training sessions himself. There is no young footballer being watched by Rowley and his scouting network that Wenger does not already know.
"It's not that no-one dares question Arsene," the source said. "He is surrounded by astute men who know their stuff. But they are of similar minds. The directors are happy because he provides last-16 Champions League football on a shoestring and the coaching staff are happy because he treats them well and they all buy in to what he is doing."
When he was in talks with the club hierarchy to sign his last contract two winters ago, Wenger remarked that he was "not untouchable". The fact he even publicly said it suggested he knew he actually was. And no-one at Arsenal seems to mind too much.
