Country: Wales
4th May 2002, Millenium Stadium, Cardiff
At around 3pm two teams are led by their managers from the cramped Cardiff tunnel into glorious spring sunshine and loud cheers from all around. It’s the first all London FA Cup final for 20 years and features heavy favourites Arsenal against local rivals Chelsea.
This was an Arsenal side at their absolute peak, the league back then was a duopoly with the Gunners the only side in the country to take a sustained fight to Alex Ferguson’s Manchester Utd, the most dominant team of the PL era.
The Gunners had won the title already that season, sealing the deal at Old Trafford thanks to a Sylvain Wiltord goalproviding one of the most celebrated moments in club history. In fact, the league awards for that year were an Arsenal clean sweep as well.
Arsène Wenger had won Manager of the Year. Red haired and red hot Freddie Ljungberg won the PL player of the season, Robert Pires won the Football Writer’s player of the year, Thierry Henry had pipped Man Utd’s star striker Ruud van Nistelrooy to the PL Golden Boot by a single goal and even the Goal of the Season was won by an Arsenal player, an incredible bit of magic from Dennis Bergkamp against Newcastle deservedly won it.
An hour and a half later with his final act as an Arsenal player, legendary captain Tony Adams held the FA Cup aloft after two wonder goals from Ray Parlour and Ljungberg had completed a famous double.
With the FA Cup win Arsenal were comfortably the best of the rest behind the historic big two of Manchester Utd and Liverpool in terms of trophies won. They’d been crowned Champions of England 12 times, had won 8 FA Cups and the League Cup twice.
Chelsea meanwhile had much slimmer pickings, they’d won the league twice, but you’d have to go back almost half a century for their last win. In terms of FA Cups, they’d won 3 to go with 2 League Cups but this wasn’t surprising. They’d never been one of English Football’s powerhouses.
7th March 2017, Emirates Stadium, London
Arsène Wenger hangs his head on the sideline, as Bayern Munich winger Douglas Costa runs clear of a shambolic offside trap before squaring it to Arturo Vidal for a tap in. The scoreboard flashes 5-1 on the night and 10-2 on aggregate. Around the ground, apart from the rapidly emptying seats and boos, banners and placards are held up by the Arsenal fans telling Wenger to go. These are the dying embers of Arsenal’s time in the Champions League. Their 19 seasons of consecutive is a record in English football isn’t close to being broken but they’ve failed to qualify in the four previous seasons and today seem further away than ever.
Do great people ever look back? Are they only capable of looking forward to their future achievements? As he fendedoff questions in the post-mortem following the Bayern hammering, was Wenger able to remember the good times? Could he still feel the sun’s warm glow from that balmy day in Cardiff? His opponents from that final now sat 10 points clear of the Premier League, on course to win their fifth title in the fifteen years since. Arsenal had won just once in that time.
Wenger was the sole survivor from both sides from that triumph. The players had long since moved on and apart from the odd hold out playing in disparate corners of the globe, most had hung up their boots. Only he had raged against the dying of the light, stranded on an island that was once a country he knew well.
One year later even he was gone, whether he jumped or was pushed wasn’t clear, in any case he’s never managed anywhere again since.
With his departure, his reign became an item of history like those of Graham and Chapman before him. It will be reminisced about by the people who were once there until as with all things it will slip from first to second-hand accounts.
It might seem arbitrary to pick these two dates to focus on but for me when I think about them, they stand out. They both signify ends. The end of Wenger and Arsenal’s time at the top table is obvious enough for the latter but the 2002 FA Cup Final also represents an end as well. One year later Chelsea would be under new ownership and football in England would be transformed forever, Arsenal one of the teams particularly affected by that change. If the theme of the first decade of the Premier League would be one of modernisation, the next decade would represent aggressive expansion.
If it’s unfair to say football had left Wenger behind by 2017, it had certainly changed. Unlike the stagnant wage growth for most ordinary people in 21st Century Britain, the Premier League had seen an explosion in employee earnings. In 2002 the average wage was £611,000 a year. Now it’s over £3M.
The duopoly of the Wenger – Ferguson era was no more either. In a fitting reflection of the ever-widening wealth gap and increasing poverty numbers in contemporary Britain, there were soon to be 6 dominant clubs in English football with an ever-growing financial disparity between them and the rest of the league. Football clubs owned by states or hedge fund billionaires now spend the entire GDP of a small nation in a single summer and even that is no guarantee of success.
Three years after Wenger left Arsenal, on a mild summer’s night in Porto, Chelsea won their second Champions League trophy. Apart from the blue kit, this was a different club to the plucky underdogs Arsenal had beaten in that long distant cup final. Arsenal meanwhile finished 8th for the second year running. Their lowest in almost two decades. What happened?
We’re prisoners of the moment, as individuals we’re unable to experience the passing of time, only able to look back with ever dwindling memories in quiet moments of reflection at friends we once knew or places we once visited. I don’t remember those 15 years passing so quickly but I want to.
In this series I want to look at how we got here. The story of Arsenal and Chelsea since that game in Cardiff is one that deserves a closer look. Any story can be summed up in simple points, but the joy in any journey isn’t arriving at the destination, it’s the journey itself.
At around 3pm two teams are led by their managers from the cramped Cardiff tunnel into glorious spring sunshine and loud cheers from all around. It’s the first all London FA Cup final for 20 years and features heavy favourites Arsenal against local rivals Chelsea.
This was an Arsenal side at their absolute peak, the league back then was a duopoly with the Gunners the only side in the country to take a sustained fight to Alex Ferguson’s Manchester Utd, the most dominant team of the PL era.
The Gunners had won the title already that season, sealing the deal at Old Trafford thanks to a Sylvain Wiltord goalproviding one of the most celebrated moments in club history. In fact, the league awards for that year were an Arsenal clean sweep as well.
Arsène Wenger had won Manager of the Year. Red haired and red hot Freddie Ljungberg won the PL player of the season, Robert Pires won the Football Writer’s player of the year, Thierry Henry had pipped Man Utd’s star striker Ruud van Nistelrooy to the PL Golden Boot by a single goal and even the Goal of the Season was won by an Arsenal player, an incredible bit of magic from Dennis Bergkamp against Newcastle deservedly won it.
An hour and a half later with his final act as an Arsenal player, legendary captain Tony Adams held the FA Cup aloft after two wonder goals from Ray Parlour and Ljungberg had completed a famous double.
With the FA Cup win Arsenal were comfortably the best of the rest behind the historic big two of Manchester Utd and Liverpool in terms of trophies won. They’d been crowned Champions of England 12 times, had won 8 FA Cups and the League Cup twice.
Chelsea meanwhile had much slimmer pickings, they’d won the league twice, but you’d have to go back almost half a century for their last win. In terms of FA Cups, they’d won 3 to go with 2 League Cups but this wasn’t surprising. They’d never been one of English Football’s powerhouses.
7th March 2017, Emirates Stadium, London
Arsène Wenger hangs his head on the sideline, as Bayern Munich winger Douglas Costa runs clear of a shambolic offside trap before squaring it to Arturo Vidal for a tap in. The scoreboard flashes 5-1 on the night and 10-2 on aggregate. Around the ground, apart from the rapidly emptying seats and boos, banners and placards are held up by the Arsenal fans telling Wenger to go. These are the dying embers of Arsenal’s time in the Champions League. Their 19 seasons of consecutive is a record in English football isn’t close to being broken but they’ve failed to qualify in the four previous seasons and today seem further away than ever.
Do great people ever look back? Are they only capable of looking forward to their future achievements? As he fendedoff questions in the post-mortem following the Bayern hammering, was Wenger able to remember the good times? Could he still feel the sun’s warm glow from that balmy day in Cardiff? His opponents from that final now sat 10 points clear of the Premier League, on course to win their fifth title in the fifteen years since. Arsenal had won just once in that time.
Wenger was the sole survivor from both sides from that triumph. The players had long since moved on and apart from the odd hold out playing in disparate corners of the globe, most had hung up their boots. Only he had raged against the dying of the light, stranded on an island that was once a country he knew well.
One year later even he was gone, whether he jumped or was pushed wasn’t clear, in any case he’s never managed anywhere again since.
With his departure, his reign became an item of history like those of Graham and Chapman before him. It will be reminisced about by the people who were once there until as with all things it will slip from first to second-hand accounts.
It might seem arbitrary to pick these two dates to focus on but for me when I think about them, they stand out. They both signify ends. The end of Wenger and Arsenal’s time at the top table is obvious enough for the latter but the 2002 FA Cup Final also represents an end as well. One year later Chelsea would be under new ownership and football in England would be transformed forever, Arsenal one of the teams particularly affected by that change. If the theme of the first decade of the Premier League would be one of modernisation, the next decade would represent aggressive expansion.
If it’s unfair to say football had left Wenger behind by 2017, it had certainly changed. Unlike the stagnant wage growth for most ordinary people in 21st Century Britain, the Premier League had seen an explosion in employee earnings. In 2002 the average wage was £611,000 a year. Now it’s over £3M.
The duopoly of the Wenger – Ferguson era was no more either. In a fitting reflection of the ever-widening wealth gap and increasing poverty numbers in contemporary Britain, there were soon to be 6 dominant clubs in English football with an ever-growing financial disparity between them and the rest of the league. Football clubs owned by states or hedge fund billionaires now spend the entire GDP of a small nation in a single summer and even that is no guarantee of success.
Three years after Wenger left Arsenal, on a mild summer’s night in Porto, Chelsea won their second Champions League trophy. Apart from the blue kit, this was a different club to the plucky underdogs Arsenal had beaten in that long distant cup final. Arsenal meanwhile finished 8th for the second year running. Their lowest in almost two decades. What happened?
We’re prisoners of the moment, as individuals we’re unable to experience the passing of time, only able to look back with ever dwindling memories in quiet moments of reflection at friends we once knew or places we once visited. I don’t remember those 15 years passing so quickly but I want to.
In this series I want to look at how we got here. The story of Arsenal and Chelsea since that game in Cardiff is one that deserves a closer look. Any story can be summed up in simple points, but the joy in any journey isn’t arriving at the destination, it’s the journey itself.