Wenger shows England the way to heaven

"Thank heaven for Little Girls," sang Maurice Chevalier, the French institution embraced by the world. Thank heaven, too, for another beautiful French creation – Arsenal Football Club.

At the end of a week in which so much of English football looked doom-laden and exhausted, Arsène Wenger's team arrive today in that time-expired bastion of old glory, Goodison Park, and what they bring, we can be pretty sure now, is rather more than a brilliant streak of killer form.

Arsenal, Double-winners and at last coming to impressive terms with the challenge of European competition, are also in possession of what really should be the worst-kept secret in the game.

They know how football success works – how it did so in the days of the founder of their great tradition, the blunt, tough Yorkshireman Herbert Chapman and now under the inspirational touch of Wenger.

It is probably impossible to conceive of two more differing football characters – they look now as separate as their times.

Chapman ran a squad of champions who were required to doff their caps and marvel at the wealth of the visiting baseball celebrity Babe Ruth, Wenger is the puppet-master of mobile, multi-millionaire marionettes. Chapman, who won three titles for Huddersfield before dominating the early Thirties with another four for Arsenal, was a giant in a cloth cap, a hard-nosed, pragmatic old pro who created the stopper centre-half. The elegantly clad Wenger is football's ultimate intellectual. But there is one clear link between the masters of two epochs set apart by a large chunk of the 20th century. Both had the confidence of a board who knew football genius when it was at work.

This is the most accessible, but widely ignored, secret in all of football, and fresh evidence of this screams out on a daily basis. Chelsea, who should be Arsenal's most serious opposition in the capital, are the stumbling confirmation of this neglect of the fundamentals of a winning football club. Committees do not win football glory, nor a division of financial advisors. A loud-speaking chairman doesn't do it. One man does it – a football man like Chapman or Wenger.

The talk at Stamford Bridge is of wage cuts and financial mayhem – after the extravagant spending that was never accompanied by faith in such big-name coaches as Glenn Hoddle, Ruud Gullit and Gianluca Vialli. Recently, Chelsea's chairman Ken Bates said that in the end it would come down to the touch and the judgement of his embattled coach Claudio Ranieri, who has a long-term contract with, it seems ever more likely, a bed of nails.

At Leeds Terry Venables operates under the huge shadow of the inherited debt of a club who mortgaged their future too heavily. Wherever you turn in the English game there appears to be crisis – and seeping confusion.

The England team is plainly drifting away from the expectations launched so extravagantly in Munich 13 months ago. The Premiership and the FA are locked in an unseemly squabble over the proceeds of the pooled exploitation of the image rights of members of the national team. Manchester United's captain, Roy Keane, makes huge profits from saying publicly the unsayable, or at least having it said under his name, that he deliberately sought to physically damage a professional rival, and is given a fine that is a small fraction of his return on the literary enterprise, plus a five-match ban that conveniently coincides with his rehabilitation from injury. Dennis Wise sues impoverished Leicester City for the £2.3m he lost in wages after being sacked for breaking the jaw of a team-mate. The catalogue of collapsing values seems endless. But, then, thank heaven for Arsenal.

Maybe it is too soon to say that they are about to ascend to that place where we have lodged our gratitude, but if heaven can wait for a team that is still some way short of an impeccable disciplinary record, some interim acclaim is surely not misplaced.

The recent evisercation of Leeds United, a talented team whose ambition to challenge around the top of the English game is surely not unreasonable, brought into the sharpest focus the declaration of Wenger that his team could be the first to through a domestic season unbeaten.

Sober judges who had admired the quality of Arsenal's play, and the seamless manner in which they had picked up the rhythm of last season's final push to an often exquisite level of performance, felt that it was something to think rather than say. They included Johnny Giles, who went 29 games without defeat with his Leeds United in the old 42-match season before an ambush at Stoke City. Leeds were at the time winning their 30th game 2-0.

"Arsenal are good enough to do it," said Giles, "but when you say something like that you immediately pile pressure on your team. But Wenger is a clever man and maybe he reckoned it would give him an edge in the fight against complacency. The hardest thing in football is to retain a winning team's hunger. Don Revie told us that we could go unbeaten, but he said it privately and with tears in his eyes. We had just been beaten by Sunderland in the 1973 Cup final and everyone was saying we were finished. We won the title by five points that year and I suppose Arsène Wenger would settle for a similar result, especially at this point in the season with such a long way to go.

"But if he's increased the motivation of the teams playing against him, if that was possible, he has made a big statement about his belief in his players. However wise or unwise it was of him to say that Arsenal could go unbeaten, there's no doubt it's injected something into the season – along with some brilliant football. There's no question that Arsenal have set the standard."

Wenger's achievement is all the more extraordinary when you consider the prevailing conditions. Sir Alex Ferguson has built a dynasty in the modern age, but with a traditional foundation. He worked brilliantly to produce a generation of top young players and then had the nerve to break up a successful team and bring them in. He also saw the talismanic potential of Eric Cantona. But no one has done it quite like Wenger, who lost such key operators as Nicolas Anelka, Emmanuel Petit and Marc Overmars without missing a single heartbeat.

At Everton today he is unlikely to spring the theatrical flourish of bringing one of his most extraordinary protégés, Robert Pires, back into the action, after a long injury, but clearly the brilliant Frenchman is edging ever closer to a return to an already glittering stage. With Freddie Ljungberg available again, and Pascal Cygan growing in the void left by Tony Adams, Wenger's well-being is surely lapping to the very rim of the wine glass. So what is his next trick?

Given his liking for mischief, he might just send on Francis Jeffers, a former idol of Everton who is required mostly to watch the Arsenal show like an urchin pressing his nose to the window of a fine restaurant. Jeffers is fresh from a five-goal splurge on behalf of the England Under-21 team. Wenger may just decide it is an optimum time to release him, however briefly, from the chorus line. Heaven knows, it's the kind of thing you can do when you're on top of the world.