Arsenal Edges Out Spurs for Final Champions League Berth

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/sports/soccer/20iht-premier20.html

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LONDON — Arsène Wenger is a soccer alchemist par excellence. Seventeen full seasons he has been in charge of Arsenal, and seventeen seasons without fail the team has qualified for the Champions League.

It did it again on Sunday in the narrowest, most intense finish to a 10-month English season imaginable. Arsenal scored just once, more than 400 kilometers away from home at the St. James’s Park fortress of Newcastle United; but it prevented the home side from scoring.

Down south, Arsenal’s London neighbor and closest rival for the last Champions League qualifying place in the Premier League, Tottenham Hotspur, also scored once, also won, 1-0. And though the Spurs’ goal was another magnificent left-foot curler from its talisman Gareth Bale, it was to no avail because — as ever in the Wenger era — Arsenal pipped Tottenham to the last available passport to Europe’s top competition.

“In this kind of game,” Wenger said, the worry lines written deep and large on his forehead, “you deal with the opponent, and with your nerve.”

He then, this eloquent Frenchman in English football, listed the adjectives as if he were reading from the dictionary: character, spirit, quality and the courage to hold their nerve when the tension acts like a tourniquet around the players’ minds.

Anyone who has followed Wenger’s career knows that he is first and foremost a style guru. He believes soccer is entertainment. He preaches an attacking, fluent, flowing game. He eschews defense as if it were alien to him.

Yet this time around, perhaps because his assistant this season has been Steve Bould, a defensive linchpin in the pre-Wenger Arsenal, the playing squad that has lacked fine forwards has ground out seven 1-0 victories, and those have proved priceless.

It was therefore fitting that the winning goal at Newcastle on Sunday was stolen by a defender. Laurent Koscielny is the quiet man, often the safety pin when Arsenal’s defense is fully stretched. Seven minutes into the second half of a frankly substandard contest he was the match winner.

Newcastle’s Yohan Cabaye had made one of his several intemperate, rash challenges. Theo Walcott’s resulting free kick was poorly defended, and Fabricio Coloccini lost sight of Koscielny. The Frenchman sneaked behind the Argentine and, with marvelous acrobatics and the timing of a striker, he volleyed the ball beyond Newcastle’s goalkeeper, Steve Harper.

Game over — though none of us knew it at the time. Newcastle’s team, which incidentally fielded six Frenchmen and was more Gallic than Wenger in that respect, was neither motivated enough nor gifted enough to do Tottenham the favor of striking back.

So down in London, all the drama of a more full-blooded game, and all the beauty of Bale’s 30-meter, or 100-foot, wonderfully struck goal, was rendered ineffectual. They handed out prizes to Bale at the finish — player of the season, the scorer of the goal of the season, a tremendous athlete and a special man.

But still the Spurs, as they have every season since 1995, have not been able to finish above Arsenal, a neighbor so close that the two are almost on each other’s doorstep.

And since it is common knowledge that there are many suitors for Bale, including Real Madrid and rumored to include both Manchester United and Manchester City, the big temptation for the outstanding player in English soccer at the moment is that if he wants Champions League sport he will have to move to get it.

Money, always money, talks in modern sports. However, the alchemy that Wenger has worked at Arsenal these past 17 years has been despite the Gunners’ move from the club’s historic Highbury home to a new stadium. That sucked funds out of the club’s transfer kitty. Great players — Thierry Henry, Cesc Fàbregas, Robin van Persie — gave great service but then went to bigger paymasters.

This was where Wenger was caught: He put the club’s solvency before the lust for prizes, and this season he was down to arguably his least-talented bunch of players. Still he got them over the line — just.

The mathematics of Wenger’s achievement is that, during the costly stadium move, he spent £9 million, or about $14 million, net over 10 seasons. And remorselessly, his team reached Europe’s holy grail.

It has again prevailed, less flamboyantly than Monsieur W. would like, but it is there.

Meanwhile, the only manager in the game to have outlasted him (so far), Manchester United’s Alex Ferguson, went into retirement on Sunday. His team, already the Premier League champion, finished in completely the opposite fashion to the tension-racked runners-ups.

West Bromwich Albion 5, Manchester United 5: the final score in Ferguson’s 1,500th and last game in charge. As Sir Alex once said: “Bloody football!”