The praise for Cesc continues, this time Arsene shining a light on the bushel of his talent,

I don’t like to say too much that a player is the best but Cesc is not only a talented player but he is also very demanding of himself. If he keeps that he will improve tremendously. People forget that his only 20 and look at the kind of performances he produces and what he did on Tuesday night against big players

It is only right that he gets the plaudits for his displays this season, not just on the basis of the San Siro. He had dipped by his own standards in recent domestic games but hopefully, Milan will prove the boost he needed.

However, Arsene was at pains to point out that the young Spaniard is not working in isolation,

Football is first a team sport and team sport needs time, patience and understanding and it’s not always down to individual qualities. Since the beginning of the season I came out in favour of this team because I feel there is a real hunger, a real desire, a real togetherness and a real spirit in the side. They are happy to have won in Milan but they want more. We are now in the final part of the season and that is when the real strengths of the team come out

And that is the crux to all of their efforts so far; it is what they can achieve. Will they win something as due reward or will it be a ‘Leeds’ season as was so often the case for Revie’s team where they challenged for trophies but in reality won only a small proportion?

Arsene meanwhile was the subject of a pointless attack from Jose Mourinho although as I think about it, I struggle to remember when anything that the sacked Chelsea manager had to say was spouted for reasons that were anything other than nefarious.

Mourinho displayed ‘manager envy’ from being unemployed – ah, there was the point, he’s unemployed and no-one has a beat a path to his door so he needed the oxygen of publicity in his quest for other people’s jobs – and also that Wenger has enough credibility with his employers to be allowed to rebuild a squad. The ‘Setubal Sulk’ relished the opportunity to spend other people’s money with gay abandon and won trophies on the back of it. He was unable to do so with any style or grace on or off the pitch which is reason he was handed his P45.

The response was quite telling, the contempt with which Arsene views his former rival is quite clear and that their philosophies on life appear so at odds with each other that they could never be anything other than the way that they are.

Still, if Arsene was feeling a tad unloved, Emmanuel Adebayor saw to it that the warm feeling in his heart was restored by acknowledging the debt of gratitude

To pay him back is going to be very difficult. At Monaco, from June to December I scored only one goal in 19 games. How come Arsene Wenger came and looked for me? It is something special. He is the one who gave me a chance to become who I am today. I want to keep on enjoying myself and listening to him

The loyalty he engenders amongst the players is something that a lot of industrial leaders would die for. Well, perhaps not that extreme but you get the drift. Adebayor touched on the reason why but Gilles Grimandi elaborated. Put simply, the players know that Arsene really wants them to play for his teams.

Unlike other clubs, we prefer to limit and really follow only a few players. We start to oversee them when they are 16 or 17-years-old and then until 20 if needed. We follow them for three of four years and maybe they will sign one day

Players are not in the dark in this process. Football is an incestuous industry and everyone knows, or has a pretty good idea, of the identities of the leading clubs scouts. When they spend that long following a player on and off the pitch, it makes the player know that they are talented and deemed good enough for a club of Arsenal’s stature.

As a club, Arsenal is not unique in the manner in which they assess potential signings; the key difference with English clubs is the long term and global nature of their scouting network. Everyone else is playing catch up. Whilst that wider view may grate with some, it is an investment in the clubs future and exploiting untapped resources.

Commercially it  makes sense except that for a global business, football is extremely parochial; the governance structure is archaic, smoke-filled rooms, back slapping have simply been modernised into sterile boardrooms and non-descript powerbrokers who lose all sense of proportion thinking that the quick buck is a long term solution. Except the failure to recognise the cyclical nature of the sport is something that will cause many to fall by the wayside.

Take this season’s Champions League Quarter Finals. It is something like the third in four seasons where at least three of the last eight have been English clubs; from the media coverage, you would think that this is how it should be, there is a divine right for this to occur. Arsene put them right on this one, merely that it is a small cog in the cycle that has been going on for decades; the Spanish, French, Italian, German and Dutch have all had periods of dominating the competition as have English teams. Now it is their turn again and no doubt within the next two or three seasons, someone else will be at it and the media bemoaning all of the foreign players as the root cause.

Wigan on Sunday so a Preview of that and the papers in the morning. ’til Tomorrow.