Sign up to FREE email alerts from Mirror - Arsenal FC Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Invalid Email

Thirty years ago, the film director Robert Altman made a movie called Secret Honor, set around ex-President Richard Nixon and the Watergate Scandal.

Secret Honor put forward the idea that Nixon set up Watergate himself so his downfall would ruin the plans of a cabal of businessmen who controlled him and wanted him to continue the war in Vietnam.

He suffered the public disgrace and took the hit to stop more American lives being lost. He chose secret honour. He sacrificed himself.

It was far-fetched. The nobility of the gesture is too much to comprehend when set against the scale of his disgrace.

Not much relevance to football, perhaps. Not now, anyway, when people tend to pass the blame better than the ball.

Not now, when we live in an age of diuretic disclosure and an exaggerated sense of self where the idea of secret honour has come to seem increasingly strange.

Not much relevance in an age of engineered public humiliation, instant gratification and brutal social judgment.

Except, I think Arsene Wenger has chosen secret honour at Arsenal.

(Image: Christof Koepsel)

I think he’s staying silent where other managers would turn around and point the finger at their club. I think he’s keeping quiet where other managers might brief against the chief executive. I think he’s taking the heat when, actually, he doesn’t really deserve it.

Sure, I keep hearing the claims about how much money Arsenal have got in reserve. And I keep hearing people saying that the problem is Wenger is just too stubborn to go out and spend it.

But the notion that he could go out and buy the best players in the world if he wanted to but chooses to sit on his hands instead is deluded.

Arsenal pay big wages, we all know that, so it is not as if Wenger is philosophically opposed to spending the club’s cash.

But, despite the vague assertions made by Arsenal chief executive Ivan Gazidis, no one knows how much Wenger has available to spend.

What we do know is that in the last 20 years, Arsenal are 15th in the list of biggest net spenders in the Premier League. They are behind Chelsea, Manchester City, Manchester United and Liverpool. That’s a given.

But they have also spent less than West Ham, West Brom, Stoke, Everton, Fulham and Sunderland.

That is the reality that Wenger has to work with. The simple truth is that, financially, Arsenal simply will not compete with the teams considered their direct rivals.

The reality is also that those teams are only still considered their direct rivals because, somehow, Wenger has kept Arsenal within touching distance of them.

While his competitors have wallowed in an ocean of splurge, Wenger’s success built a new stadium for Arsenal.

And once it had been built, he abided by a policy of fiscal prudence to help pay off the debts incurred in the construction.

So why does Wenger get all the blame? Why are more questions not asked of majority shareholder Stan Kroenke?

Why is more pressure not being exerted upon the club’s American owner to back his manager with the kind of money they need to mount a realistic title challenge?

Instead, some Arsenal fans take out their frustrations on the greatest manager they have ever had.

And through it all, Wenger has taken the heat. He has never complained about money. He has never blamed Kroenke, Gazidis or the club hierarchy.

The last couple of years, he has felt the anger beginning to grow at The Emirates as he has lost many of his leading stars.

He has felt the disillusion setting in as another year has slipped by without winning a trophy.

And still he has never complained. Still he has never sought to pass the buck, leaving others to observe that Arsenal have qualified for the Champions League in every one of Wenger’s 16 years in charge.

Amid the criticism aimed at him over the club’s faltering league position, Arsenal completed their Champions League group stage last night with a dead rubber against Olympiacos in Athens and sailed into the knockout stage.

That’s the same knockout stage that will not be featuring Manchester City, in case you forgot, and which may yet elude Chelsea, too.

To many of us, it still seems clear that Wenger is a wonderful club’s biggest asset. By a long way.

It’s why Real Madrid have courted him. It is why PSG are rumoured to be preparing a move for him now.

Without him, without his energy and his brilliance, if Arsenal pursued the same fiscal policy they do now, they would finish consistently outside the top four. But because Wenger loves the club too much to allow it to turn in on itself, because he loves the club too much to start a civil war, he keeps his counsel.

He has chosen secret honour and for that he deserves our admiration, not our scorn.

Nowt as queer as (very rich) folk

Until a few weeks ago, it seemed Roman Abramovich had all he ever wanted at Chelsea.

The club in which he had invested so much were the champions of Europe after their remarkable triumph in Munich in May.

In the months that had passed since then, they had evolved into a team of great attacking beauty.

Juan Mata, Oscar and Eden Hazard were serving up a kind of fantasy football, week after week.

(Image: PA)

Sure, they were vulnerable at the back but wasn’t this the kind of flair that Abramovich was always said to have craved in his team?

Then, instead of allowing Roberto di Matteo, the architect of Munich, to improve the team’s flaws, he sacked him.

Since then, Chelsea have taken two points from three games and their title challenge has fallen apart.

And the fantasy football has stopped dead. Abramovich has a strange way of chasing a dream.

Freddie's got guts

Andrew Flintoff’s four round win over American Richard Dawson may not have done an awful lot for boxing or suggested that he was a world champion in the making.

(Image: PA)

But criticising Flintoff, who is struggling to adapt to life after cricket, is curmudgeonly. He had the guts to climb into the ring. He deserves some credit for that.

Weaken work it out

English football is familiar with the controversy that comes when a manager fields a weakened team but last week the issue afflicted the NBA, too.

NBA commissioner David Stern fined the San Antonio Spurs $250,000 for resting star players Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili and Danny Green rather than playing them in last Thursday’s nationally televised game against the Miami Heat.

The Spurs’ coach Gregg Popovich made the decision because the game against the Heat came at the end of a long road-trip for the team.

(Image: Tim Keeton)

He decided that it was better for the Spurs’ long-term prospects if the players in question prepared for the game against the Memphis Grizzlies two days later.

Stern was furious. His view was that the Spurs’ first responsibility was to the league and that Popovich’s actions risked damaging the league.

Ian Holloway will be familiar with this scenario. He fielded a weakened Blackpool side in a narrow 3-2 loss to Aston Villa in November 2010, a move that resulted in a £25,000 fine.

Like him, Popovich very nearly had the last laugh. The Spurs kept pace with the Heat until the final seconds, falling to a narrow 105-100 defeat.

They beat the Grizzlies on Saturday night, though. For Popovich, that was probably all the justification he needed.

Price is right for British boxing

Ricky Hatton has retired, David Haye is still on his way back from the jungle and Amir Khan’s career is at a

crossroads.

British boxing has enjoyed better times but amid the uncertainty, there is one shining source of optimism.

David Price’s demolition of Matt Skelton at Aintree on Saturday was another encouraging step forward in his development.

He still has some way to go until he can be talked about as a genuine world title contender. But with every fight, Price looks more and more like the real deal.