Arsenal were once disappointed at winning the title - Jens Lehmann's return will bring that 'Invincible' mentality back
Lehmann's 2003/04 side was the last time Arsenal won the title and now Wenger is looking for a way to get back to that special alchemy possessed by his greatest ever team
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Your support makes all the difference.It was 13 years ago when Arsene Wenger decided that his team needed one more mental lift, to take them to the next level, to help win back the Premier League from Manchester United and hold off the challenge of Chelsea.
David Seaman had just left for Manchester City and Wenger decided to replace him with another experienced accomplished goalkeeper, but one with an even more vocal outgoing domineering personality. Wenger identified Jens Lehmann, Borussia Dortmund’s 33-year-old, as the perfect fit. Arsenal spent just £1.5million and Lehmann was final piece of the jigsaw that became the Invincibles.
That was the last time that Arsenal won the Premier League title and this summer Wenger is looking again for a way to get back to that special alchemy possessed by his greatest team. Despite three FA Cup wins in the last four years, they have never truly looked like putting together a title challenge. Even when they had all the pieces in place, in 2007-08, 2010-11, 2013-14 or in 2015-16, they fell away at the end. The mentality was never quite right.
Mentality does not spring out of thin air, though, it is nurtured by people. And the most acute criticism of the mentality at Arsenal over the last decade is that the senior players who sustained it have all left, and not been replaced. Wenger has always been a hands-off light-touch coach and in the great Arsenal teams, the standards were set and maintained by the senior players. It is a cliché but also true to say that there are not enough leaders and talkers in this Arsenal camp. Not enough of a challenge to the younger players to push themselves.
So it makes perfect sense that Wenger has gone back to the man who helped him to get the mentality right last time. Lehmann will join Arsenal not even just as a goalkeeping coach but as a senior member of the team with Wenger and Steve Bould. Lehmann has always wanted to be a manager, rather than a goalkeeping coach, and at Arsenal this season he will have the chance to influence far more than just shot-stopping drills.
It is all slightly reminiscent of that brilliant decision from a much younger Wenger to sign Lehmann for the first time back in 2003. Even that was a decision at least as much to do with character as it was with simple goalkeeping competence. Wenger told Amy Lawrence for her fascinating book ‘Invincible’ that having watched Lehmann he liked “his attitude, his intelligence, his personality”. He knew that Lehmann was different from most “in the way he is intense, argumentative and speaks his opinion”. Which is exactly what Arsenal want from him again this time.
The Arsenal dressing room that Lehmann entered in 2003 was far stronger and more vocal than this one, though, but Lehmann fitted in perfectly, because he had to. That team had won the double in 2002, remember, and should have won the Premier League in 2002-03 before collapsing in the spring. They just needed an extra push.
That is what they got from Lehmann and the benefit of signing a 33-year-old who had played for Dortmund, Schalke, AC Milan and Germany is that he felt naturally at home in a winning environment, in a way that, for example, Manuel Almunia could not. “I think my strength was that I didn’t really care,” Lehmann says in Invincible. “Because I was older than the others, apart from Martin Keown. I’d won a European trophy, which they hadn’t, apart from Dennis Bergkamp.”
As soon as Lehmann came in he started to drive his team-mates on. Even players who had been at Arsenal for years, and been part of the great 1997-98 and 2001-02 sides. Even huge names like Patrick Vieira and Thierry Henry were not spared if Lehmann thought they were not working hard enough. “Jens argued with every single player in training,” Vieira said. “Because he wants you to get concentrated, he wants you to work hard, he wants you to win.”
Lehmann did have precisely that affect when he showed up at Arsenal. They famously did not lose a league game that season and even the moment when they won the title with a 2-2 draw at White Hart Lane stung for Lehmann because he had given away a late penalty from which Spurs scored their equaliser.
The idea now that an Arsenal player might be disappointed because of the circumstances in which they won the Premier League sounds absurd. But this was a very different time and a very different Arsenal team. Wenger needs to get some of that old Invincibles mentality back if he ever wants to win the title again. And how better than by bringing back one of the men who was so integral to it?
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