In the decade since the Invincibles and the flying food at Old Trafford, Arsenal have lost that touch of brute force and nastiness necessary for success at the highest level

Perhaps the strangest part of what happened the day Arsenal lost their Invincibles status against Manchester United is that, however much the evidence pointed to Cesc Fàbregas, we are still waiting for the formal identification of whoever reached for that slice of pizza and, to quote Ashley Cole, hit Sir Alex Ferguson “straight in the mush”.

The common suspicion that it was Fàbregas, an unused 17-year-old substitute, was strengthened by that passage in Cole’s book reminiscing unsympathetically about watching the pepperoni flying over his head towards Ferguson and “slip off that famous puce face and roll down his nice black suit”, before offering a clue that the culprit was neither English nor French.

United’s players have always been convinced it was the youngest member of Arsène Wenger’s squad and Gary Neville will tell you that when he and his team-mates got wind of it they retreated to their own food table for retaliatory ammunition. It had needed Ferguson to put a stop to it otherwise the back corridors of Old Trafford might have resembled the final scene from Bugsy Malone.

Fàbregas, however, has always denied it. Arsenal have operated a policy of dressing-room omerta apart from one occasion a few years later when Martin Keown corroborated the Fàbregas link on a radio interview. Yet Keown had left Arsenal the previous summer and, in the absence of strapping a polygraph to the alleged perpetrator, Ferguson puts out his updated autobiography next week admitting he is still none the wiser. “They say it was Cesc Fàbregas who threw the pizza at me but, to this day, I have no idea who the culprit was,” it reads.

The 10th anniversary is on Friday and, plainly, Wenger’s men would rather airbrush it from their memories judging by the little scene that unfolded when my colleague Amy Lawrence interviewed Kolo Touré for her new book about Arsenal’s unbeaten 2003‑04 league season, Invincible, and the conversation turned to how their 49-match unbeaten sequence was sabotaged in Manchester the following October. Touré’s first reaction was to close his eyes and grimace. The disappointment had never left him, he said, and it was unmistakable sadness on his face. He had his fist clenched, and he was banging it against his heart. “I still have that here,” he said.

At Arsenal, they would rather remember the unity and brilliance that went into establishing a top‑division record and rightly so given that it was the stuff of football dreams. Patrick Vieira, the embodiment of that team, was inducted into the National Football Museum’s Hall of Fame on Thursday, exactly a decade after the 49th game of that run had resulted in a 3-1 defeat of Aston Villa at Highbury.

Keown was at the ceremony and listening to their stories, looking at these men in their crisp black suits and thinking they would not look out of place on the door of a high-street nightclub, it was a reminder not just that Wenger once assembled the most formidable and physically imposing team of their era but also, perhaps, what the current side sorely lacks.

Wenger’s greatest teams were not just capable of brilliantly joined-up football and making opponents feel, as Neville once said, like they were “marking the Red Arrows.” They were, for the most part, wholly formed men of the world and even if they did sometimes blur the lines between what was right and what was wrong that always tends to be the way for the teams with the greatest competitive courage and, ultimately, the more cluttered trophy cabinets.

Rio Ferdinand makes that point in his latest autobiography, explaining how unnerving it could be to play against Dennis Bergkamp when the great Dutchman never looked him in eye and generally gave the impression his veins contained ice. Ferdinand says there have been only a handful of other opponents who have made him feel that way and names Lionel Messi and Zinedine Zidane among them. You could stare at them, nudge them, shout at them; they would just blank you. “One time when I was quite young, at Leeds, I asked Dennis Bergkamp: ‘Do you want to swap shirts after the game?’ ‘I don’t swap shirts,’ he said, just completely cold. It made me feel even more inferior to him. He stomped me out like a cigarette. I hated him when I played against him after that.”

Arsenal still have their days, but at some point they have lost that streetwise edge. Sam Allardyce once told me that one of the reasons why he packed his Bolton Wanderers side with so many six-footers was because his team had stood next to Arsenal in the tunnel at Highbury and felt physically inferior. Roy Keane went to war with Vieira but now says if it had ever become physical the odds would have been heavily stacked in favour of the Arsenal man.

A team’s personality can always be gauged by away results and, aside from all the acclaim for the subject of Lawrence’s book, people tend to forget that Arsenal did not lose on the road when they won the Double in 2001-02 (the current team have gone four years since they won away against a side that finished in the top four).

The previous record had been set 26 years earlier by a Nottingham Forest side that went 42 successive matches unbeaten and, like Arsenal, attracted great acclaim for their style of football. Yet Brian Clough’s great team did feature two players, Larry Lloyd and Kenny Burns, who formed the ugliest, meanest central defensive partnership of their time and, in the days of disciplinary points, strategically used to plan their assaults on rival centre-forwards depending on who was closest to a suspension.

Lloyd broke his foot in the middle of the 1977-78 season and Clough immediately signed David Needham from QPR to replace him. Needham played impeccably for six weeks until Lloyd was fit again. Clough put him straight back in and Lloyd remembers it as one of the great compliments of his career. “He turned to Needham first: ‘David, you’re probably wondering why I’ve left you out. You’ve done ever so well since I bought you. David, I really can’t fault you. You’re a lovely boy. If my daughter were looking to bring a man home to marry, you’d be that man. You’re that nice, David, I’d have you as my son-in-law’. Then he pointed at me. ‘I hate that fucking bastard over there. And that’s why you’re not in the team. You’re not a bastard like Larry Lloyd. And, son, I want a bastard in my defence.’”

At Chelsea, the leadership qualities start with John Terry and run right through the team, incorporating Branislav Ivanovic, Nemanja Matic, Diego Costa and many others. Manchester City’s championships have been won through sturdy men such as Vincent Kompany, Pablo Zabaleta, Yaya Touré and Gareth Barry. Ferguson’s successful teams always had immense courage and, if necessary, a bit of brute force.

The same applied to Arsenal back in the day, with a dressing room comprising some of the sport’s strongest and most demanding characters. It is just not so easy to see their physical and mental toughness these days, and perhaps that game at Old Trafford was the first clear sign of what was to come remembering the way Neville and his brother, Phil, ganged up and eventually broke José Antonio Reyes. Neville devotes a full chapter to it in his autobiography. “‘It’s a football match,’ Ferguson had said in his team-talk. ‘You’re allowed to tackle. And no other team tackles them so let’s make sure Mister Pires and Mister Henry know today is going to be hard. Today is going to be different.’”

Arsenal have lost 75 league games since the Invincibles era and almost a third of them, 22, have been to United or Chelsea. They particularly tend to crumple when the opposition is from Stamford Bridge and that was an intriguing line from Keane the other day about the modern dressing-room culture of teams posting celebratory selfies on Twitter, sometimes from fairly routine wins, and what it said to him about a “lack of characters and good lads”.

Did he mean Arsenal? He did not mention them by name but the odds, I would say, are roughly the same as Fàbregas’s fingerprints being found all over that pizza.

Wily Redknapp knows time is running out

It can be difficult sometimes with Harry Redknapp. Anything positive – and, heck, there isn’t a great deal of that right now – gets a football writer immediately lumped into the “Friends of Harry” camp, as if there is a secret group of us who break bread and clink wine glasses with him every Friday night. He divides opinion like few others and is the teller of enough white lies that it’s not difficult to understand sometimes if people think he is as slippery as a mackerel.

Equally, his achievements are more pronounced than many are willing to admit and it always seems slightly unfair to me that someone with a promoted team can face the sack seven games into the new season because his team have found it difficult to adjust.

That, however, is the nature of the business and Redknapp is streetwise enough to recognise the signs. Increasingly, it looks like he might not make it to a second anniversary at QPR and, after that, who can really say whether he will have the stomach to start again somewhere else – if, that is, there would there be another Premier League job for him.

He is 68 on his next birthday and when Tottenham sacked him in June 2012 he was on record as saying he was surprised how little he missed the sport and having a better idea why Joe Royle and various other managers in the same age bracket were telling him he would be better off cashing the cheque and staying away for good.

Redknapp was tempted back by the old urges but the impression here is of someone who has not fully connected with QPR during his 23 months in the job. If the guillotine does come down there are no guarantees when, or even if, he will be back.

Mourinho’s humility needs a shake-up

José Mourinho, once again, was indulging us with multiple sarcasms. “I appreciate the comments,” he said, for the benefit of Aston Villa’s manager, Paul Lambert, and his assistant, Roy Keane. “I think they are both great examples of polite and very well educated people, and because I’m a humble guy who tries to learn every day and with every experience, I appreciate the comments.”

Let’s put this in perspective: offering an early handshake is not the greatest crime in the sport and maybe it is a bit rich to get a lecture in sporting etiquette from Keane when he is promoting a book that also tells the story of going into the opposition manager’s office for the customary post-match drink and ending up throttling one of the coaches with his tie.

All the same, it should hardly be a surprise to Mourinho that it might provoke a response from Keane, Lambert and others if he sticks to what he says and continues with that strange routine of going over to the opposition dugout when the match is still actually being played. It is a public form of belittling, intentional or not, and someone as humble as José should surely realise that.