James Lawton: Wenger needs right recipe to keep Arsenal hungry for success

Riding the taunts of Sir Alex Ferguson with a glint in his eye, luxuriating in a balance sheet that in these straitened football days might have been written by Mary Poppins on speed, Arsène Wenger thrust a blade at the heart of his Old Trafford rival the other day when he sniffily rated Rio Ferdinand good but "overpriced" at £30m.

It was the barbed word of a man plainly confident that he can keep the Double-winning Arsenal caravan rolling triumphantly through another season at a time when mere financial survival represents for so many the acme of success.

So why do the bookmakers ignore the all-consuming accomplishment with which Arsenal finally devoured the domestic prizes last season and rate them mere 7-4 second favourites to United at 5-4? Partly, no doubt, it is do with Ferguson's expensive but persuasive attempt to remove the defensive frailty which so undermined all his team's efforts last season.

Ferdinand is not a snip by anyone's standards, but least of all those of Wenger, who had profits of nearly £40m on the signings of Nicolas Anelka, Marc Overmars and Emmanuel Petit and could still face larceny charges in the cases of Patrick Vieira, Thierry Henry, Robert Pires and Fredrik Ljungberg . However, the young centre-half was by some distance England's most impressive performer in the World Cup and, with the return to fitness of Gary Neville and the full waxing of Ferguson's competitive rage, even Wenger's self-belief is not so great as to wipe away all fear of massive retaliation from Old Trafford.

Where it leaves Wenger going into tomorrow's Community Shield game with Liverpool, who have scarcely thrown in the towel with their signing of the potential sensational Senegalese El Hadji Diouf and his World Cup team-mate Salif Diao, is unquestionably the new season's most intriguing question.

Plainly, he carries two imperatives into the new campaign. He has to solve rank underachievement in the Champions' League and also prove that the extraordinary vein of form Arsenal touched domestically in the decisive phase of last season can be smoothly reproduced.

As ever, the overwhelming assumption is that the success of one season is the nutriment of triumph for the next, and certainly there are reasons to believe that Arsenal, with the big and hitherto somewhat languid Brazilian Edu showing signs of stirring himself into new levels of achievement and the Frenchman Pascal Cygan indicating that he might well resupply at least some of the will and the confidence so relentlessly provided by Tony Adams, have the means to reinforce last season's glory.

But do they have the appetite, the desire which every so often wells up in a team and brings, for various periods, a dramatic transfiguration? That was certainly the case last season as Arsenal so beautifully separated themselves from the pack. While Ferguson shuffled his imposing hand of cards with ever-increasing frustration, as Gérard Houllier rose from his sickbed in the hope that his Liverpool could make that one last stride to the mountain top, Arsenal inhabited their own zone of excellence.

They were buoyed by a rush of both talent and adrenalin. The talent is always there but the adrenalin is not, and though it would be a little optimistic to expect to see too much of it gushing around the Millennium Stadium tomorrow, the demeanour and the snap of Arsenal will be measured keenly enough by their master. Though persistent failure in Europe is a fact he cannot escape, Wenger can point to an almost seamless regeneration of high performance at home. After winning their first Double, Arsenal did not drown in hubris. Indeed, they ran United to a breathless finish in the year of the treble, a historic feat which would have been denied their rivals if Dennis Bergkamp, of all people, had not missed an FA Cup semi-final penalty.

But there are new elements of trial this coming season. How, for instance, is the head, and the competitive heart, of arguably Arsenal's most important player, Vieira? Neither was much visible in the implosion of France in the World Cup. After France had been out-run, and out-thought, by the land of his birth, Senegal, in the opening game in Seoul, Vieira trudged from the field with his head down. It stayed in that position through most of the subsequent action against Uruguay and Denmark.

He looked like a man who had run, for the moment at least, to the end of something and we can be sure that when Ferguson made his latest verbal onslaught, with suggestions that Vieira would have preferred to be performing at Old Trafford this season at the heart of it, he felt he was probing a pressure point at Highbury. Certainly it is true that Ferguson tends not to talk mean just for the sake of it. Wenger, you have to suspect, has been obliged to cultivate the commitment of Vieira for some time, and that particular challenge will not have been swept away by the winning of an English Double.

Beyond that is the wholesale reanimating of a team which so recently brilliantly explored the horizons of the domestic game. No one now knows better than Ferguson to maintain the hunger of a successful team. Repeatedly he returned to the issue as United moved from one crisis to another last season. "We will have to see," he said after a particularly disappointing performance at Anfield, when David Beckham was withdrawn from the game, "if some our players still want success as much as they once did. If they don't, we know the solution to that."

Wenger's style is naturally a little less forthright, at least in any public address to his players, but it is reasonable to presume that a similar declaration will come soon enough from him if Arsenal indeed linger at the starting gate.

He has built for himself an extraordinary position of strength. Arsenal, unlike their critically stretched London rivals Chelsea, have achieved both success on the field and insulation against the worst effects of financial meltdown. But in the end even the most perceptive, and visionary, of coaches depends on the ambition of his players. That is a feast which, however well the table is prepared, is not always moveable. It means that when Wenger says grace before tomorrow's first snack of the season the chances are he will do it with just a little extra passion.