| QUOTE |
| It’s like a puzzle from a giant Where’s Wally? book. Arsenal’s training ground has a wall-length photo of the 2003-04 Invincibles team and if you look extra hard, he’s there. Behind Robert Pires, in front of Arsène Wenger, the top of a shaven head is just visible. “There!” says Gael Clichy. “Me! My biggest mistake . . . ” Laughing, he gestures at Kolo Toure in the foreground, brandishing the Premier League trophy. “Next picture I’m there,” Clichy cackles. “You’ll see.” Footballers do not always have the personalities you expect but Clichy is just the way he plays: quick, on-the-go, as effervescent as champagne spun in a washing machine. He enjoys literature and food, as a Frenchman might, yet has integrated so well in this country he considered playing for England and his best mate is English, Theo Walcott, who he jokes to be “my brother from another mother”. Clichy, at 24, is Arsenal’s longest-serving league player and could be described as the prototype for Wenger’s current generation of footballers: skilled, athletic, positive, intelligent, at home despite nationality. His story is that of modern Arsenal. Trace it and you begin mapping one of football’s great secrets: Wenger’s formula. Rule one: prioritise recruitment. Clichy was a 17-year-old French Third Division player with Cannes when Monsieur Wenger suddenly turned up at his parents’ home. “The night before I’d seen him on TV and now Arsène Wenger was in my house!” Clichy recalls. “Honestly, I was thinking, ‘Is he really here, or is it someone who looks like him?’ I’d played 20 games for Cannes. My idea was to move to a second division team and you think. ‘I’m 17, I’m in the third division in France, and you’re asking me to go and play with Thierry Henry and Dennis Bergkamp?’ “After 20 minutes I said, ‘Okay, you’re telling me to come, but you have two left- backs, Ashley Cole and [Gio] Van Bronckhorst. I don’t want to sit in the reserves.’ He said, ‘Listen, if you come, Van Bronckhorst will go.’ I signed and the next month I picked up a newspaper and saw that Van Bronckhorst was leaving for Barcelona. I realised Wenger is someone you trust.” Rule two: don’t instruct, educate. “Each player he signs needs to have qualities. He wanted someone similar to Cole, a midfield player turned into a defender, because he likes his full-backs to go forward. He told me, ‘Improve your left foot, crossing, defending one against one and communication with your teammates’. But there were no special training routines. He leaves it to you to think, ‘These are the exercises I must do’. He signs people who are intelligent, so they can analyse their own game.” Rule three: teach players to play the “Arsenal Way’. “As a team all we do in training is move the ball. Small passes: two touches, three touches, one touch. This, we work on every day. Even when we do hard stuff like running, it’s always with the ball. If a player is touching the ball too much, he will give him two touches during the training game while everyone else is free. He likes us to play simple and to move around the box because he says even if you don’t get the ball you create space for someone else.” Rule four: blood them young. Weeks after arriving in 2003, Clichy made his debut in a friendly against Celtic, so wide-eyed he photographed his shirt hanging in the dressing room, to show his mum. By the end of 2003-04 he had made 22 competitive appearances and become the youngest player to receive a Premier League winners’ medal, aged 18 years, 294 days, a record that remains. His biggest game that season was Chelsea away. “Ashley Cole got injured and nearly any manager in the world would have taken Kolo or Lauren and put them on the left side to cover for one game. But he decided to play me and we won 2-1 (Clichy was named the man of the match). I’m sure in England only two managers can do this and it’s Arsène Wenger and Ferguson. I slept badly the night before the game but all the boss said was, ‘Listen, if I have to play you; it’s not because you’re my son and because I love you, it’s because you have the quality. If you weren’t good enough, trust me, you wouldn’t be there. So go out and be yourself’. When you think about it, there’s not a better thing you could say to a player.” Fifth and final rule: pieds sur terre. “Soon after Chelsea, I played in an FA Cup semi against Man U and the next week I was at training. I trained with the first team, had my lunch, and was ready to go home then Eddie Niedzwiecki, the assistant now at Man City, came and said, ‘Okay, you’re with the reserves this afternoon’. I was, ‘Man, I’ve just played against Chelsea and Manchester and played good. You want me with the reserves?’ The next day, the same. And I realised I’d become, not lazy in training, but laid-back, doing a poor pass or whatever. I had to keep working, all the time. But, again, it was something the boss left to me to figure out.” The Abou Diabys and Aaron Ramseys who followed, as Wenger moved away from senior signings to an all-young team, have done the same. Clichy has one worry. “I’ll talk personally, this is my point of view: it’s easier for a player to play his first games when there are people around like Sol Campbell, Lauren, Henry, Patrick Vieira — how it was for me. You know those players will do the work and win the game, you just do your job. “Now it’s more difficult because if you put Jack Wilshere there, he’s got so much quality and everyone expects him to do something great but, because the squad is short, we don’t have those (experienced) players to do the work.” The solution, Clichy says, is for the likes of himself, Cesc Fabregas and Robin van Persie to become an old guard and help the newbies, despite being young themselves. He feels Arsenal are maturing. Heavy victories against Everton, Blackburn and Wigan — in which there was no let-up against inferior opponents, past whom they put 16 goals — demonstrates that a valuable lesson has been learnt. “We realised last year that Man U were not the best team against the Big Four but still won the league, easy, by beating the smaller teams. We were more focused on the big matches. Every player will tell you, you have to play from first minute to the last, but there’s a difference between saying and actions on the pitch. “Example: when we played last year against Hull at the Emirates we could have won 6-0. We were really fantastic for the first half-hour but after that we see players doing backheels, flicking the ball, losing some balls . . . and finally Hull came back, 1-1, 1-2. They deserved to win because mentally they were strong and they really wanted those points. Us? We thought, 1-0, okay it’s an easy game.” Clichy was rested for the match against Birmingham yesterday, having bruised a leg in a clash with Wigan’s Paul Scharner while playing for France against Austria last week, but will return against AZ Alkmaar. He would like nothing better than Arsenal to break their four-year trophy drought and be in another celebration photograph, this time in the front row next to Walcott. “I guess you just get a connection with certain people,” Clichy says. “Maybe one day we were the only two young players in the team and talked to each other and since are really good friends. His girlfriend likes my girlfriend and we go out together but he loves golf and I’m so crap and every day I say to Theo stop playing golf, you’ll hurt your shoulder,” Clichy laughs. “He’s a right-winger and I’m a left-back and in training we’re always against each other. I can close him down over a short distance but he’s really, really fast, amazing, faster than Thierry. He broke the (Arsenal sprint) record again this year. When there’s a long ball I’m always trying to keep up. I’m getting old.” They might even have become international teammates. “I truly feel part of this country,” says Clichy. “I miss my family but after two or three weeks in France I need to come back to London, because that’s where I belong. And it’s funny, I was saying to Theo at one stage I thought about changing nationalities and playing for England. I had the choice.” Clichy should bear a Kitemark: made in England, made by Wenger. |
| QUOTE |
| every day I say to Theo stop playing golf, you’ll hurt your shoulder |
| QUOTE (Get Bendtner @ Oct 20 2009, 09:32 PM) |
| He just seems to consistently regress. |
| QUOTE (St. Jimmy @ Oct 20 2009, 09:33 PM) | ||
Does that mean his dribbling will improve? |
| QUOTE (bergstar @ Oct 20 2009, 10:35 PM) |
| At this rate even rafa wouldn't buy him and rafa loves a full back |
| QUOTE (Ach @ Oct 20 2009, 10:37 PM) | ||
Now that is the biggest insult anyone can give Clichy. To suggest the lover of all things fullbacks Rafa would not even buy Clichy is a sign of how far Clichy has fallen |