Ranieri and Wenger swap places on football’s wheel of fortune
“The Wheel of Fortune” is not just a famous game-show, but a deep-rooted idea, found in various forms in almost all human societies and cultures, that at different times in our life we will occupy different places on life’s great roulette wheel, oscillating between success and failure, and happiness and unhappiness.
A fascinating piece by Eniola Aluko, star for Chelsea’s and England’s women’s teams, gave an example of this. She first called Claudio Ranieri, the Leicester City manager, a “master of player psychology” and then directly contrasted that mastery with the apparent amateurism when it comes to dealing with players’ minds of Arsene Wenger, the Arsenal boss.
Advancing such an argument about Ranieri and Wenger would have been considered utterly unthinkable before this extraordinary season in English football. Everything from the Premier League table itself to the relative standings of Premier League managers has been turned on its head by Leicester’s remarkable transformation from relegation battlers to title favourites. They need just one more victory from their last three games (or even three draws) to claim the crown.
Before this season, Ranieri had always been regarded as football’s ultimate “nearly man”, having managed a succession of stellar clubs (including Chelsea, Roma and Juventus) without ever winning a title. By contrast, Wenger had won league titles in both France and England and created the immortal “Invincibles” side that went a whole league season unbeaten in 2004. After a decade of self-imposed financial abstinence while the new Emirates stadium was being paid off, he was widely thought to be on the verge of creating a new title-winning team.
The difference in the general expectations of the two before the season started was probably best summed up by the “greeting” (or rather “tweeting”) that Ranieri received upon being appointed as Leicester manager by the club’s most famous former player, Gary Lineker. He openly opined that he thought the appointment was unimaginative and uninspiring, especially after his previous calamitous reign as a manager, in which he led Greece to the bottom of their European Championship qualifying table, on the way even losing to the footballing pygmies of the Faroe Islands.
And then, as it always does, the great wheel turned. Some nine or so months on from that initial, unenthusiastic welcome by Lineker, Ranieri is now on the brink of making him eat his own tweets. And what of Wenger, who before this season had been regarded as an infinitely greater manager than Ranieri? Well, with three games of his season to go, he faces the dreadful double-whammy of stadium-wide protests at the supposed staleness of his long reign and, worse, the prospect of “relegation” from the Champions League to the Europa League next season.
Of course, we are only talking about one season here, and one season that is not even over yet. Unlikely as it seems, Ranieri’s Leicester may yet fail to get the three points they need and allow Spurs to snatch the title from them and Arsenal may yet show their traditional end-of-season strength and secure a finish in the top four. Nevertheless, it is impossible not to conclude that Ranieri will be the “nearly man” no longer and Wenger may end up being hounded out of the club by the same fans who had previously idolised him.
If that happens, awful as it would be for Wenger and Arsenal, who would struggle to find a worthy successor if they are out of the Champions League, there would undeniably be something heart-warming and hope-inspiring about it, namely that the wheel of fortune can always turn, as it did with Ranieri and Wenger, and those at the bottom now may just end up at the top in future.
