The 2003-04 campaign was certainly the height of peak Arsene Wenger.
He lead the Arsenal team through a campaign where they not only saw the team win the league but also go unbeaten. However, since then it has been a downward slope. So what happened at Arsenal?
This is what their goalkeeper from that invincible era Jens Lehmann thinks –
“Arsenal made one mistake,” Lehmann said as quoted in the Express.
“At the time, probably a minor mistake, but now I think it was quite a mistake which was decisive for the coming years.
“In 2008, Gilberto Silva and myself were the last guys from that team before.
“A year before they changed Thierry Henry, Patrick Vieira, Martin Keown I think left before in 2004 but within two years they got rid of all the personalities.
“As I said, Gilberto and myself were the last one and I was coming into the dressing room when I had my little comeback and there were guys like Robin van Persie, Cesc Fabregas, Tomas Rosicky, all young guys, and after one good game they thought ‘I’m on the top of the hierarchy.
“But you could feel that there was no hierarchy because they were too young to lead at the time.
“It wasn’t their fault but there was just no in-between generation which could actually transfer the old values and the approaches to training and to games onto this new generation, there was a huge gap.
“In my opinion that was a transition that was too fast.
“They were looking at age and statistics and probably salaries and whatever, but keeping some of the good guys from before [which] was a good, sometimes nasty approach, would have helped.”
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