I wonder whether that sensation of an ‘anti-Arsenal media’ is less down to Spurs and Man U supporting producers and editors (as the conspiracy theorists always tell us) and more down to the simple fact that the media is full of pundits and journalists who worship at the altar of old-fashioned English footballing values, seemingly oblivious that they are exactly the values that hold us back. Wenger, by bemoaning dangerous, ‘tough’ tackling, by prizing technique over power, by taking an educated, cosmopolitan attitude to football, represents everything that they have been taught to hate, but everything that we need to embrace if we are to win a major tournament

I figure we’re all going crazy at the moment, desperately refreshing our twitter feeds in the hope of transfer news, so rather than bore you all with more supposition and rumour mongering, I thought I’d talk about something completely different! I figured I’d even take a break from obsessing solely about Arsenal and take a wider look at English football.

Yet again the subject of the English national team’s failure is on the back pages. This time Richard Scudamore feels he needs to defend the Premier League and its influence on the game. And in answer to the countless pundits bemoaning the influx of foreigners ruining our national team, Scudamore makes the blindingly obvious point that there’s no real coming back from: “We have not won the World Cup since 1966. We didn’t start until 1992. What happened between 1966 and 1992? Whose fault was that?”

And that’s the question. Whose fault is it? We Arsenal fans are used to having the ‘foreigners are ruining our national team’ argument flung at us. While we now fly the flag with our ‘British Core’ we’re probably still more famous for being the first team to field an entirely foreign match day squad back in 2005. And as Arsenal fans you are probably used to pointing out the absurdity of the argument. For foreigners to be to blame for the England team’s ineptitude there would have to be a noticeable drop in performance from about the end of the 90’s. Of course that hasn’t been the case. We failed to even qualify for the World Cup in 1994. And from 1970 we didn’t qualify for a single international tournament for an entire decade!

The reason we fail is not an influx of foreigners, it is very simply that some of our most cherished footballing values are massively self-defeating.

The myth of Steven Gerrard

Does any man symbolise the ‘perfect’ English footballer more than Steven Gerrard? A one man battering ram who runs, and shoots and tackles harder than any man alive, who rescues games from the jaws of defeat with sheer bloody-minded energy and hard work and who will charge 50 yards just to stop a defender having an easy clearance.

And yet, when he plays for England, he often just looks…well…a bit rubbish! He’ll charge around like a headless chicken, lacks any kind of discipline, often fails to find a team mate with the simplest of passes, and then tries to overcompensate with a wildly inaccurate Hollywood pass. (There is no better example of this than the 3-2 defeat to Croatia that prevented us qualifying for Euro 2008.)

And so we all started to wonder – why does the Liverpool talisman never deliver for England? The answer is depressingly simple – at Liverpool he was playing alongside foreigners like Alonso who were able to deliver everything English football isn’t interested in: technique, control, and tactical discipline. In many ways, Gerrard’s greatest performances sum up his limitations better than his worst – the superhuman comebacks against AC Milan in the Champion’s League in 2005 and West Ham in the FA Cup in 2006. Both were games in which seemingly certain defeat meant that tactics and discipline and control could go out the window. And in that kind of situation, Gerrard is your man. He will charge around like a figure from a football comic and tackle and kick and run harder than any man on the pitch and maybe, just maybe, by sheer force of will, he’ll save the day.

But in modern football that simply isn’t enough, and the English game just seems incapable of realising it. There was, after all, a perfect solution to the ‘Gerrard problem’ that we seemed unable to grasp. All the while pundits and journalists were asking the desperate questions – ‘How do we get the best out of Gerrard? How can we play Gerrard and Lampard at the same time?’ But no one seemed to even consider the sensible answer, which was ‘Who the hell cares, let’s build a team around Paul Scholes!’

If Gerrard represents all of English footballs weaknesses, then Scholes’ international career sums it up just as well. Here we have a guy that Xavi reveals was the most admired player, constantly held up as an example, at La Masia, and we’re busy shifting him onto the left wing to accommodate Gerrard!

Tony Pulis and the ‘contact sport’ obsession

English football’s obsession with power and violence dates back to the dawn of the game. There is a wonderful quote in Wilson’s ‘Inverting the Pyramid’. It dates from 1863 when one of the great debates of the game was the use of ‘hacking’  (the kicking of opponents’ shins as a valid form of tackling!) F.W. Campbell of Blackheath made the case for: ‘If you do away with [hacking], you will do away with all the courage and pluck of the game, and I will be bound to bring over a lot of Frenchmen who would beat you with a week’s practice.’ It sounds a little familiar doesn’t it? Whilst other countries moved on, we are still, exactly 150 years later, stuck in the same basic mindset and having exactly the same debate, albeit about 2 footed tackles and the like, rather than hacking.

Consider media reactions to Tony Pulis’ Stoke as another case study. Now let’s be fair to Pulis, he kept Stoke in the top flight with his brand of football, and there is basically nothing wrong with that. But imagine he was managing in Spain (stop laughing at the back); he would have been a pariah. Yes, they might have grudgingly recognised that he got results, but the basic gist would have been that he was a huge stain upon football and nothing about his team was to be desired or admired. In England, the reaction was basically the opposite – the basic gist was ‘it’s not Tony’s fault if other teams don’t like it up ‘em, he’s paid to get results and he’s got them’, with the occasional grudging admission that the football wasn’t very good.

Forget the rights or wrongs of the debate for a moment. The simple fact is that this basic cultural bias, pervading from the top to the bottom of the game, means that we will produce 100 Cattermoles for every Xavi, whilst Spain will produce the reverse.

English Managers are just terrible

Along with the moan about the influx of foreign players, the other common complaint is that English managers don’t get a chance anymore. Well let’s get this straight, English managers don’t get a chance because most of them are bloody awful, and it is a step forward for the English game that they don’t get a chance because it means that the top clubs have realised this!

Just like the pundits who set the tone for the national conversation about football, English managers are mostly ex-players. And they, more than anyone, are indoctrinated in the misguided values of the English game. These are guys who, in every sense, come from another era. A time of waterlogged pitches and crunching two footed tackles. A tactically rigid, uninspiring, alcohol fuelled era, with, by today’s standards, an almost amateur attitude to the game.

Furthermore they are also, for the most part, simply not very clever. There are surely exceptions, but the simple fact is that education levels amongst English footballers always was, and continues to be, abysmal. (The book ‘Soccernomics’ by Kuper & Szymanski has an eye-opening section about education at the academy of an English club. To fulfil the ‘education’ requirement every one of them took a single GNVQ in ‘Leisure and Tourism’!)

And yet as pundits and managers these guys are expected to be qualified to analyse in-game tactics, trends in fitness and nutrition, wider footballing cultural trends, problems facing the national game, how to best nurture our young footballing talents and so on and so on. You just need to watch this excruciating video and compare Matthew Syed’s eloquence to Tony Cascarino’s cliché fuelled nonsense to see the problem.

When McClaren got fired and the FA promised a ‘root and branch’ review of the English game, Match of the Day had Paul Jewell on. And I distinctly remember that one of the key points he made was the the FA was totally out of touch because (and I’m afraid I’m having to paraphrase from memory since I can’t find footage of the moment) ‘what kind of a phrase is root and branch?’ he asked. ‘That’s not football talk, is it? What does it even mean?’

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, when faced with questions about the future of the English game, Paul Jewells biggest concern was that the phrase ‘root and branch’ was a bit too intellectual sounding and so had no place in football!

Now, before anyone jumps down my throat I’m not saying that all English footballers are stupid, or that it is impossible to be a top manager without an education, but a lack of intellect is certainly going to be a barrier to a player throwing off these cultural shackles. (No doubt there are also exceptions, but Gary Neville is the only one that springs to mind.)

The ‘Anti-Arsenal Media’ and We Want Our Arsenal Back

Of course, if any man in the game represents a challenge to these ingrained cultural values it is Arsene Wenger. He has already completely transformed one aspect of the English football scene for the better – that of nutrition and fitness – and has been fighting a one man crusade against the Tony Pulis’ of this world ever since. And so, instead of accepting the status quo and producing Cattermoles, he endeavoured to produce Wilsheres instead.

And I wonder whether that sensation of an ‘anti-Arsenal media’ is less down to Spurs and Man U supporting producers and editors (as the conspiracy theorists always tell us) and more down to the simple fact that the media is full of pundits and journalists who worship at the altar of old-fashioned English footballing values, seemingly oblivious that they are exactly the values that hold us back. Wenger, by bemoaning dangerous, ‘tough’ tackling, by prizing technique over power, by taking an educated, cosmopolitan attitude to football, represents everything that they have been taught to hate, but everything that we need to embrace if we are to win a major tournament.

I also wonder if it isn’t a key factor at the root of the ‘We Want Our Arsenal Back’ movement in our own fanbase. It’s not simply xenophobia, it is a (probably correct) sensation that the modern Arsenal represents the antithesis of almost everything that is regarded as sacred in the English game. I just wish they realised how fantastic that is; that it means that for that past decade our club is at the forefront of making English football better.

Follow Alastair on Twitter over @albrookshaw