Red mist threatens to darken Wenger's horizons

Gunners can settle manager's anxieties in title chase by outclassing Bolton and aiding West Ham's chances of avoiding relegation

Nobody is perfect – not even the author of the sweetest football seen in England since the days of Sir Matt Busby's Babes and Bill Nicholson's double-winning Spurs.

That conclusion is hard to avoid as Arsène Wenger seeks to guide Arsenal another step nearer their second straight Premiership title shortly after high noon in Bolton today.

Wenger, hoping to pile more pressure on his arch rival Sir Alex Ferguson before Manchester United's date at White Hart Lane tomorrow, should really be basking in an unbroken glow of acclaim everywhere outside of Old Trafford as he draws closer to another stunning triumph. He should be a king of the game dressed to the nines.

His team decorate the football landscape. They are capable of artistry to rival anything seen in this land – and for this we know the source. Wenger is the manager of biting intellect and Svengali talent.

Yet, in one vital – and potentially destructive – aspect of his otherwise visionary reign at Highbury, he recalls a scene from the classic Hollywood film All the King's Men. It features a split-screened view of a keen young reporter, who is investigating the populist politician Huey "Kingfisher" Long, talking to a gnarled old editor. Reporter: "Boss, I've been digging everywhere, but the guy's clean." Editor: "Keeping digging, kid. Nobody's clean."

In Wenger's case the flaw is hardly a shovelful of dirt away. In fact, it was on the surface again this week as he and his club – and the Football Association vice-chairman, David Dein – fought against the refusal of the referee Mark Halsey and a video review panel to consider an appeal against last week's dismissal of Sol Campbell for elbowing United's Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.

When the verdict was confirmed by the FA yesterday, Wenger issued a statement that would have suggested shocking irresponsibility in some raw young managerial scuffler. He declared: "The team will support Sol. The team will fight for him and try to win the League and FA Cup for him. There are examples of people who have done 10 times more than him and they are not punished."

If this had come from Wenger's counterpart today, Bolton's Sam Allardyce, heads would probably have been shaken and the diagnosis would have been excessive strain after a season of relentless battling against the drop. So what can be made of these words from a man whose team were playing heavenly football before before he let it slip that he thought they could go all season without defeat?

Only that they are a travesty of common sense – and an outright contradiction of the style and the brilliance of the rest of Wenger's work.

"We'll win it for Sol," he declares, but what is this noble cause? The vindication of, at best, an illegal and dangerous use of the elbow, an offence which is increasingly common and which in the past has led to horrific pictures of mangled faces and litigation.

Campbell's offence was far from the worst example of the brutal genre, but, despite the euphemisms of Wenger and the television analysts Graeme Souness, Alan Shearer and Andy Gray, there was no doubt that the Arsenal centre-half had broken a law of the game and committed a foul which is among the game's most dangerous. So when Wenger, an erudite, philosophical football character at all times except when one of his players has added to an already shocking disciplinary record, says his team dedicate their success to a team-mate who will be banned from the last acts of the drama, what is he really saying?

Is he elevating a breakdown of professionalism into a cause worthy of a crusade, and, if this is so, why does he not throw in the gut-churning simulation of injury displayed by Martin Keown and Ashley Cole during the season and the "diving" of Francis Jeffers and the stamping of Dennis Bergkamp and the over-the-top tackling of Patrick Vieira?

These surely cannot be the marks of his regime that Arsène Wenger would want to commemorate?

How much better it would be for himself and his club if he did what Ferguson did that year of Eric Cantona's explosion at Selhurst Park, when United lost a key player for six months and an accumulation of disciplinary problems imposed a trophy-less year, and a defeat in the Cup final at Wembley, on England's best team.

Ferguson moved against poor discipline then. He had seen spelled out at Wembley the extent of its corrosive effect. He even managed to half-curb the "warrior" instincts of Roy Keane – and Manchester United did not stop winning until last year.

Now, instead of mulling the damage over the years of an astounding 49 red cards and all the "totting up" suspensions, Wenger drags his brilliant team into a kraal of paranoia which in intensity is beginning to match the high point of Ferguson's rage against the football authorities and the world in general.

It is behaviour which becomes staggering when you analyse the nature of all Wenger's success in football. It has been founded on a brilliant understanding of the potential of players to develop their game and grasp priorities on the field.

Thierry Henry came to England as a speed merchant of questionable impact. Now he is the certainty to be enshrined as the player-artist of the year when the game's professionals honour their peers at the Professional Footballers' Association annual dinner at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London tomorrow.

Vieira was a callow reserve in Milan. Almost overnight he became a rival to Keane as the most influential midfielder in English football since Souness. Robert Pires, last season's Footballer of the Year, has developed a killer's eye on top of exquisite skill.

So it goes as Arsenal, schizophrenic in their journeys between beauty and various brutalities of the spirit, make their final thrusts for a title that might just be denied them because of the avoidable absence of their best defender.

Wenger says that Campbell's banishment is a conspiracy of injustice. He talks about a witch-hunt of his players. He fuels the angst that should have no part of the make-up of a team capable of the football which promised an extraordinary artistic triumph at the start of the season.

Such quality may well surge forth again at the Reebok Stadium today. Bolton's brave fight against relegation may be put to the point of the Gunners' wit. But then what guarantee is there against a riot of protest and emotional dishevelment if a vital decision goes against Arsenal? Can Wenger claim to have worked on the need of mental equilibrium in his team with his emotional railing against the Campbell decision? Surely he has been doing precisely the opposite.

Meanwhile, Arsenal hover around a dazzling point in English football history where it could indeed be argued they have achieved levels of grace unseen since Busby sent out his Babes and Nicholson assembled the midfield of Blanchflower, Mackay and White. In between, there have been great teams, of course, but perhaps never quite one like Arsène Wenger for colouring the sky with all that is best in the art of football.

At Bolton today the hope must be for a glimpse of that sky – once the red mist has cleared.