Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger is currently dominating Sky Sports News’ coverage after his latest exchange of words with a rival, this time Chelsea midfielder Michael Ballack.
The Gunners’ hopes of belatedly bringing some silverware back to the Emirates has been gradually receding with each passing week of late, but it’s too easy to lose site of just what a phenomenal boon Wenger has been for the fortunes of Arsenal Football Club.
Sport.co.uk picks our Top Ten Arsene Wenger Quotes (not including “I did not see the incident” or the admittedly fantastic invention of the word “footballistically”)…
1.. "If you eat caviar every day it's difficult to return to sausages." (after Arsenal fans booed a 1-1 draw against Middlesbrough in November 1998)
2.. "A football team is like a beautiful woman. When you do not tell her, she forgets she is beautiful."
3.. "I believe the target of anything in life should be to do it so well that it becomes an art. When you read some books they are fantastic, the writer touches something in you that you know you would not have brought out of yourself. He makes you discover something interesting in your life. If you are living like an animal, what is the point of living? What makes daily life interesting is that we try to transform it to something that is close to art. And football is like that. When I watch Barcelona, it is art."
4.. "There is no better psychological education than growing up in a pub when you are five or six because you meet all different people and hear how cruel they can be. You hear the way they talk to each other like saying 'You're a liar.' And from an early age you get a practical psychological education into the minds of people."
5.. "If I asked you who was the best team in the world you would say Brazil. And do they play good football? Yes. Which club won everything last year? Barcelona. Good football. I am not against being pragmatic, because it is pragmatic to make a good pass, not a bad one. If I have the ball, what do I do with it? Could anybody argue that a bad solution like just kicking it away is pragmatic just because, sometimes, it works by accident?"
6.. "Ferguson's out of order. He has lost all sense of reality. He is going out looking for a confrontation, then asking the person he is confronting to apologise. He's pushed the cork in a bit far this time."
7.. "Gerard Houllier's thoughts on the matter [international football] echo mine. He thinks that what the national coaches are doing is like taking the car from his garage without even asking permission. They will then use the car for ten days and abandon it in a field without any petrol left in the tank. We then have to recover it, but it is broken down. Then a month later they will come to take your car again, and for good measure you're expected to be nice about it."
8.. "What's really dreadful is the diet in Britain. The whole day you drink tea with milk and coffee with milk and cakes. If you had a fantasy world of what you shouldn't eat in sport, it's what you eat here."
9.. "I watched it when I got home and it looked very bad. You ask 100 people, 99 will say it's very bad and the hundredth will be Mark Hughes." (on Emmanuel Adebayor’s stamp on Robin van Persie)
10.. "We try to go a different way that, for me, is respectable. Briefly, these are the basics. I thought: "We are building a stadium, so I will get young players in early so I do not find myself exposed on the transfer market without the money to compete with the others. I build a team, and we compensate by creating a style of play, by creating a culture at the club because the boy comes in at 16 or 17 and when they go out they have a supplement of soul, of love for the club, because they have been educated together. The people you meet at college from 16 to 20, often those are the relationships in life that keep going. That, I think, will give us strength that other clubs will not have."
Honorable mentions...
"It looks like you are burned in the village quicker now than before. And the fire is always raging."
"Any man who concentrates his energies totally on one passion is, by definition, someone who hurts the people close to him."
"Everyone thinks they have the prettiest wife at home."
"When you give success to stupid people, it makes them more stupid sometimes and not more intelligent."