Alexis Sanchez Fallout Feels Like the Beginning of the End for Arsene Wenger

When the moment finally arrives to start the arduous process of condensing Arsene Wenger's career at Arsenal into a timeline, dropping Alexis Sanchez for a crucial match against Liverpool may make the cut as the epochal moment when it became clear the light had finally gone out on the Frenchman's time in north London.

Wenger reasoned both pre- and post-match that it was a tactical decision. For much of the weekend, the general consensus seemed to be his tactics were an unmitigated disaster, unless purposely designed to help seal a departure at the end of a 21st season in charge at Arsenal. In which case, they were pretty much spot on.

A 3-1 defeat at Anfield was Arsenal's fourth in six matches in all competitions. It saw them drop out of the top four for the first time since September as Liverpool supplanted them in third place.

Wenger's head was on the block, the guillotine was glistening and the crowds were gathering. Then, on Sunday evening, via a leak to the national press, he was given if not a pardon, then certainly a temporary reprieve.

It would appear, as many suspected, Sanchez's omission from Arsenal's starting XI was in all likelihood a decision framed more from a disciplinary perspective than a tactical one.

According to widespread reports, relayed here via The Guardian's David Hytner, "Sanchez stormed out of an Arsenal training session last week and was involved in a dressing-room slanging match with some of his teammates.

"[…] Sanchez stunned his teammates by walking out of the session and, when they returned to the changing rooms to find him, there were angry words between some of them and him. The flashpoint is believed to have kicked off after an incident with another player."

All of which makes more sense when searching for an explanation as to why Wenger would drop Arsenal's one bona fide world-class player, who was on a run of six goals in his previous seven starts.

Wenger has likened life as a football manager to priesthood, but even his most devote acolytes must have questioned their faith when Saturday's teamsheet started to circulate. The Emirates is a church forever teetering on crisis, but Wenger seemingly falling out with his best player could prove seismic.

As he has been keen to point out more than once of late, Wenger is still "lucid" enough to understand the consequences of his actions. He is fully aware those twitching at the curtains and peering over the fence would never really have bought the line it was a decision arrived at purely by a desire to be "a bit more direct and strong in the air." He sounded about as convincing as a father going to a record shop to buy a Stormzy for his son.

Notwithstanding the fact Sanchez has scored 17 Premier League goals (roughly a third of Arsenal's in total) while none of his team-mates have reached double figures, is arguably as direct a player as there is in English football and isn't half bad in the air, it was the type of call that only in victory could have been interpreted as anything other than misguided to the point of being plain odd. 

Even then, the Chilean's omission would still have been the story. And so it is.

It's not hard to sympathise with a 67-year-old having to deal with a man-child nearly four decades his junior. By all accounts Sanchez sounds high maintenance, but then a big part of the job has always been about managing egos. Earlier in the week, Wenger had described himself as "a specialist in masochism," per the Evening Standard's James Benge. Clearly he wasn't joking. It'd look lovely on a banner.

Yet, whichever way you cut it, whether firmly ensconced in Team Wenger or Team Sanchez, or anywhere in between, Arsenal's manager does not come out of this sorry episode covered in glory. Far from it.

Either it was a discipline issue, or it wasn't. Either leave him at home, or play him. Wenger's lily-livered reprimand saw Sanchez relegated to the substitutes' bench, then summoned just as soon as he was needed. It smacked of desperation: "Get to your room this instant! Come back I don't know how to work the TV remote."

To quote America's youngest president Theodore Roosevelt: "The unforgivable crime is soft hitting. Do not hit at all if it can be avoided; but never hit softly."

It's really hard to find any coherence in Wenger's thinking. At best it is horribly muddled. Who benefits from how he handled the situation on Saturday?

Sanchez will now know he is as indispensible as he thinks he is. The last thing Arsenal's board need as they attempt to tie him to a new contract is have him watch his team-mates from the sidelines. He'll never sign now.

Wenger looks like he has lost the plot and not played him through choice, or is too meek and mild to put Sanchez in his place properly. As for the rest of Arsenal's players, they're likely questioning themselves, Wenger and Sanchez. Betting has been suspended on the Premier League's most existential club appointing Jean-Paul Sartre as Wenger's successor.

If Wenger sticks to the party line that his decision was purely a tactical one, it's arguably even worse. 

Mesut Ozil's absence through illness meant Sanchez could easily have been accommodated in a deeper role, even if Wenger maintained he wanted the powerful Olivier Giroud as his focal point. To have four attacking roles and not allocate one to Sanchez would be certifiable. In cruder terms, no starting XI that includes Granit Xhaka, Francis Coquelin, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Alex Iwobi and Danny Welbeck is good enough to leave out Sanchez. 

After watching Jamie Vardy have a field day against Liverpool's high and shaky back four in Monday night's 3-1 victory for Leicester City, Sanchez must have felt he could have given any of Joel Matip, Lucas Leiva or Ragnar Klavan a torrid evening.

Dropping him completely would have been a statement. Wenger desperately needs to blow away the suffocating film of ennui that has wrapped itself around the whole football club. Like dust on a building site, it has slowly seeped its way into every porous surface, from the dressing room to the boardroom to the stands.

In dropping him and then bottling it at the first sign of trouble by bringing him on, all he has really done is disperse it even more.

Wenger clearly left him out to try to wrest back a bit of control, to reaffirm a hierarchy at the football club. Maybe in part it was about him proving to himself he could still make big calls. No call is bigger than dropping your best player. This was his Ruud Gullit benching Alan Shearer for the Tyne-Wear derby moment. To make his point though, he should have kept him there.

Sanchez is the only player left in that Arsenal dressing room whom if dropped could cause enough of a storm to shake things up. Wenger is wise enough to know when you make a big call, you need to get it right. Rare has he got one as wrong as this.

Sir Alex Ferguson made a habit of making this type of decision to avoid complacency creeping in at Manchester United. Sometimes it was as if he just enjoyed waking everybody up. If he had caught Sanchez smirking (as many have claimed) when Roberto Firmino opened the scoring for Liverpool on nine minutes, the Arsenal man would have been out on the pitch quicker than he might ever have imagined. More than likely an irate, red-faced Scot would have tossed him there.

In fairness, castigating Sanchez for his behaviour on the bench in that first half would be like complaining to a zookeeper because you think a monkey might have been smirking at you. It's a wonder Sky Sports didn't resurrect their Player Cam function for one game only. He might not have done himself any favours by being snapped wearing a lopsided grin, but had the cameras focused on Arsenal's other substitutes, it's likely they too would have demonstrated a full gambit of emotions.

"

Arsenal fans aren't particularly happy with Alexis Sanchez https://t.co/jdPujwl5jb pic.twitter.com/cHOsW4wPpt"

— sani inuwa memai (@SaniMemai) March 5, 2017"

Wenger has clearly run out of patience with Sanchez's own lack of it. An almost pathological will to win often manifests itself via verbal volleys in the direction of his team-mates, or even on occasion full-scale foot-stamping tantrums. And that's in public view.

It's not very Arsenal. But at the same time his frustration mirrors those of the supporters.

Against Bayern Munich in last month's disastrous 5-1 defeat in the Champions League, Sanchez looked like he was intent on disproving the age-old adage no man is an island, all in the space of 90 minutes. A majority of the club's supporters would likely argue it's the other 10 players and the manager that are the problem.

In John Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent, which sounds like an apt title for Arsenal's current malaise, he wrote: "Strength and success—they are above morality, above criticism. It seems, then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it. Is there a check in men, deep in them, that stops or punishes? There doesn't seem to be. The only punishment is for failure. In effect no crime is committed unless a criminal is caught."

There will be many that believe Wenger has committed far more serious crimes than Sanchez this season. The Frenchman should take heed from American politics. Should this spat become a popularity contest, there will only be one winner.

If Saturday was a peek into what life may be like post-Sanchez, it made George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four seem like a beacon of positive prescience. Arsenal TV as 2017's equivalent of the Ministry of Truth is as frightening as Orwell's original dystopian vision.

Before the game, Wenger had spoken of the stamina required to manage one of Europe's elite clubs, per the Evening Standard: "Basically you get 90 per-cent aggravation and 10 per-cent job satisfaction and you have to give everything in your life for that." 

For 45 minutes, those Arsenal supporters cocooned in the away end at Anfield would have snapped your hand off for such an aggravation-to-satisfaction ratio. Over half an hour had passed when Xhaka shot so high over Simon Mignolet's crossbar that the old guy with the telescope off the John Lewis advert lobbed it back. A chorus broke out of, "We've had a shot." It was Arsenal's first of the day.

This type of desultory discord, when exasperation has plateaued to the point where anger no longer seems a sentiment worth being roused, will cut Wenger as deep as any expletive-ridden rant. When irony becomes common place, club board members start to exchange glances where no words are needed. 

It's hard to recall a significant moment in Liverpool's box in the first period. That's because there wasn't one. Arsenal failed to have a single touch in the opposition penalty area. Liverpool had 13.

The physical game Wenger was purportedly after was exemplified nine minutes in when Liverpool took the lead. Mignolet's long, straight kick saw Firmino beat a too high Laurent Koscielny to a flick on, before via Philippe Coutinho and Adam Lallana the ball was worked out to the irrepressible Sadio Mane. Firmino gleefully scooped his low cross up into the roof of the net after Coutinho had missed it.

Wenger is forever being criticized for only playing one way and lacking a plan B, so to all get indignant because he elected to go a little longer seems like a proverbial case of wondering where your cake has gone while wiping cream off your face.

In theory, how he set his side up, in an attempt to bypass Liverpool's press and give them no space to launch their famed counter-attacks, seemed sound enough. In practice, it lasted less than 10 minutes before Firmino's opener.

Playing uncharacteristically deep, they looked more well oiled than well drilled for the rest of the half, but given what else was going on, getting mad at Wenger for his tactics would be akin to fuming at OJ Simpson for his speeding.

In the absence of cherubic continuity king Santi Cazorla, a more important player than Ozil, Arsenal's engine room can look as vacuous as the inside of an Easter egg. Only Wenger could sign a holding midfielder in Xhaka who can't tackle. He's like Paul Scholes on acid.

Coquelin was even worse, but at least he didn't cost £35 million. Without Cazorla alongside him, he looks a little boy lost. He got mugged of possession so often in that first period it looked at one stage as if the Merseyside Police might step in.

Had Wenger not replaced him at half-time to allow Sanchez's belated introduction, he'd have been fielding questions from human rights organisation Liberty in his post-match presser. To be fair, he'd probably have preferred that than a deluge of enquires as to the state of his relationship with his star striker.

It somehow seemed significant Arsenal were being bullied by the quintessential Arsenal player in the shape of Lallana. Jurgen Klopp has transformed him from being the type of easy on the eye footballer Wenger likes to collect into a one-man pressing machine, replete with a sumptuous touch. Wenger would have settled for just admiring the touch.

Had he joined Arsenal instead of Liverpool when he left Southampton, there's little doubt he'd still be the prettiest girl in the village, who left for the smoke to pursue a modelling career but didn't get any bookings because she has no edge or discernible features. Being pretty is only enough at Arsenal, it doesn't cut it in the real world. Maybe that's what Sanchez is complaining about.

The famed Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung said of the hardest thing in life to swallow, "Through pride we are deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune."

With Arsenal 2-0 down at the half-time after Mane drilled in after a Liverpool move so perfectly constructed it was as though they were following the sharp lines of an architect's drawing, it's fair to say that little voice made itself loud and clear to Wenger. If it hadn't, a louder one from the Arsenal end would have got the same message across.

He'd never admit it, but Wenger wouldn't be human if secretly he didn't loathe how obvious Sanchez made his mistake in omitting him look. Especially as ultimately it counted for nothing. Arsenal were a completely different side with Sanchez in it. Who'd have thought it?

Within four minutes of the restart, Giroud had crashed the crossbar with a fine header, via an excellent touch from Mignolet. Within 12 minutes, Arsenal had reduced the deficit after Sanchez's delicious pass bisected Nathaniel Clyne and Matip to allow Welbeck to dink across Mignolet with the type of finish that deserves to be framed and hung over a mantelpiece.

In stoppage time, it looked as though Sanchez would provide the type of conclusion Hollywood loves, only for Matip to get in a decisive block. When the ball found its way to Lallana, he showed the type of game intelligence in holding the ball up imperiously and then spraying it through to Divock Origi that should have universities queuing around the block to award him an honorary degree.

Origi's daisy-crusher of a cross fitted the onrushing Georginio Wijnaldum like a Savile Row suit. It may just be the best team goal scored all season.

Liverpool's victory was a fifth of the season against fellow top-six sides. From nine such matches they have claimed 19 points. Chelsea have the next best record against the top six, with 13 points from eight games. Arsenal, in honorary fashion, have won just one of seven such encounters, picking up a paltry five points in the process.

At full-time after briefly acknowledging Arsenal's travelling contingent, Sanchez was the first player down the tunnel. He had seen enough. Maybe he's had enough.

Klopp recently said Claudio Ranieri's sacking by Leicester City ranked alongside Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as one of the most mystifying decisions of 2016/17. He stopped short of adding Sanchez's omission to that list, though one suspects it's only because of a long-standing respect for Wenger.

Instead, he played down the significance of Arsenal's lineup, if not without first giving a little metaphorical squeeze to the man Liverpool were keen to sign from Barcelona before the bright lights of the capital proved too alluring to resist.

"We expected a response from Arsenal, especially when Alexis Sanchez was on the pitch because he is a world-class player," said Klopp, per the Liverpool Echo's James Pearce.

You just never know when he might become available. Whether it's before or after Wenger could well shape the club's future.

Just as likely is the countdown has started already for the pair of them.