James Lawton: The two faces of Wenger - intelligent football man and graceless whinger

There are times when Arsène Wenger seems to be at the heart of football, its best values and one of its likeliest chances of satisfying the old yearning for a game of beauty.

Then there is this other guy, the one who stepped up yesterday to say that winning the Champions League is not only absent from his obsessions but also no kind of guide to the merit of a manager. So why did he whine so gracelessly after the prize eluded him at the Stade de France last spring? Because somewhere in the brilliant network of Wenger's thinking, in the soaring idealism of his view on how football should be played, in his constant search for new talent of the finest quality, a circuit appears to be broken.

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One moment he is football's Voltaire. The next he is the village bigot. How else can we explain his refusal so often to see any argument other than his own? How do we square the image of the masterful football teacher with the manager whose reaction - if he reacts at all - to crass behaviour by his players is at the very best ambivalent?

What did he have to say about Thierry Henry's insufferably arrogant behaviour towards the Wigan goalkeeper Chris Kirkland? Nothing that meant anything. Did he slap down his hugely promising midfield protégé Cesc Fabregas when he had the impertinence to insult Mark Hughes, a manager and former player of great standing? No - and why? Presumably because Wenger, from a perspective that invariably shifts according to his own circumstances, believed Fabregas had a point.

Hughes came to defend his club's place in the FA Cup with infinitely thinner resources than those of Arsenal and his crime was to make the challenge facing his hosts as difficult as possible. When he succeeded, he got lip from Fabregas and from Wenger there was the straight-faced assertion that replays, for so long the lifeblood of the FA Cup, should be scrapped.

On the value of winning it all in Europe, Wenger is right in only one narrow respect. It is when he says that in 51 years of European club competition more than one mediocrity has got his hands on the supreme prize - and it also happens to be true that some of the greatest team-builders in English football, men like Bill Shankly, Don Revie and Bill Nicholson went unrewarded at the ultimate level. Anyone reluctant to accept the first point cannot have been in the stadium in Bari 16 years ago when Red Star Belgrade beat Marseilles in a penalty shoot-out. The game was execrable and finished goalless, which was bad enough even before the Red Star coach admitted that his entire strategy was to play for the stalemate. But then bad things happen. In Wenger's case it is so often the result of some routine needling by Jose Mourinho.

Mourinho drew some praise in this corner earlier this week for his stylish reaction to a hard night in Portugal, a 1-1 draw against Porto which came at the expense of another injury to John Terry, but he was in a much more familiar mode when pointing out to Wenger that he had still to get his hands on the trophy which has been on his own CV for three years.

Wenger's warmest admirers can only have groaned when they saw that their hero had not only responded to the taunt but had done so at such length, and in such a meandering way, that Mourinho's schoolboy boasting, far from a vanity to be contemptuously dismissed by a man of superior intellect and superb achievement of his own, was plainly pretty much an arrow to the heart.

The Arsenal manager's response should have been dry and brief, something along the lines of Pope Pius XII's response when he was told that Stalin was asking how many armoured divisions the Vatican had at its disposal. "Tell, my son, Joseph," said the Pope, "my divisions are in heaven." Instead of dispatching Mourinho elegantly, Wenger rambled: "There are plenty of people working in France in Divisions two and three who I rate very highly because what they do is absolutely sensational. I feel as well that maybe the manager at Watford has as much merit as I have. It is very difficult to judge."

This would be all very well if Wenger was conducting a seminar deep in the forest glades where the French have their custom-built training centre. But he is not. He is scrapping at the very top of football, and in 10 years he has learnt better than anyone that, however beautifully you play, there is an imperative to win. It is why Sir Alex Ferguson is honest enough to say that he aches to know again, at least one more time, the glory that comes with the world's greatest club trophy. Has Ferguson somehow got it wrong? Of course not. He is accepting, as Wenger should, that the higher you go the sweeter the victory.

It is why Jock Stein, the least inflated of men, was so pleased to become the first British manager to win the European Cup in 1967, when his superb Celtic team, raised from a 20-mile radius of Glasgow, outplayed the powerhouse of Internazionale. It meant that all his achievements, and those of his players, would be given a weight and recognition that otherwise might have been too easily assigned to the backwaters of Scottish football. Stein said that he wanted to go beyond mere victory. He also needed to score a triumph for football over the cynical defence of the master coach Helenio Herrera.

No doubt Wenger will carry most neutral hopes when he keeps faith in his younger players in tomorrow's Carling Cup final against Chelsea. An Arsenal victory would represent another superb achievement for their manager, this time in using the least regarded of the four available trophies as a perfect testing ground for inexperienced players of thrilling promise.

But would he swap it, and all that it offered for the future, for nothing more concrete than another sniff of the greatest prize in Europe? Whatever he says, we can be certain he would. Why? Because he simply protests too much. The result is not the football argument of an intelligent man, but just another cry of pain.

Anthem protests out of tune with fact that Ireland has moved on

Inevitably there will be protests at Croke Park today when England play rugby and "God Save the Queen" is played in a place which has become so identified with Irish patriotism.

Two weeks ago when a foreign game first invaded the stronghold of Gaelic sport - and the "Marseillaise" rang out across the north side of Dublin - objections were relatively muted but, naturally, reservations will be more apparent with the booming sound of the old Empire. However, one household name in Irish sport expects the issue to subside around the time of the first kick to touch.

He says: "It was brave of a majority of the Gaelic Athletic Association to vote down Regulation 42 [which forbade the playing of non-Irish sport in the old ground] but the truth is they were the ones in touch with reality. If you had a vote of the nation at large I'd say at least 80 per cent would be in favour of the decision. The world moves on." For fear of crankish reaction, he goes anonymous, but he knows of what he speaks. As a boy he was whipped across the legs by his Christian Brother teachers. For playing soccer.

Premiership clubs pay price for squeezing fans until the pips squeak

Forgive all those who have not been overwhelmed by the generosity of clubs like Blackburn and Bolton lowering their ticket prices - or Chelsea freezing theirs.

It wasn't altruism. It was an understanding, finally, that the rich juicy melon of football had been squeezed so hard that the pips were beginning to squeak. That was made most apparent by the empty seats at the Reebok Stadium, when Bolton played their compelling FA Cup replay with Arsenal - a dish that promised much in drama and delivered more.

The Chelsea fans' spokesman who said that the vast increase in television revenue made the strongest case for a reduction in prices was making the key point. In all the greening of football since the Premiership cut itself free from the economic dead wood, the fans were the people the game forgot.

Now they have made their point. By saying, inevitably, that enough was enough.