The claws are out – bigtime

As it was in the beginning............

 Consider this from one Arsenal player to another Arsenal player.

"Fabregas is the captain but he is not a leader”.

Whao! What a bombshell. In the perfect, sterilised world that Arsene Wenger has created at London Colney for his pampered ensemble, that statement has the same effect the hydrogen bomb, ”Little Baby” had on Hiroshima and Nagasaki . It was seismic. A huge, huge force of nature that goes against everything Arsene Wenger and his Colney crèche stands for.

It’s the sort of thing you hear all the time coming from inside Roberto Mancini’s dysfunctional Manchester City where no fortnight goes by without one disgruntled player aiming barbs at either Mancini, his teammates or assumed injustice in the whole world.

Back to Arsenal and all things bombastic.

"It's a personality thing and a leader can be young. It's something they are born with. We are lacking leadership and we need leadership to go forward. There isn't a leader. I don't see one player as a leader.  At Arsenal it's more of a collective team at the moment, everyone is talking - but a leader is always important for a team."

What the hell is going on?

..............so it is hugely different at present

The statement, in case you haven’t heard was from Denilson, the ex-captain of Brazil’s U-17national side who has been a Gunner since Wenger bought him from Sao Paolo in the summer of 2006. He has been slowly integrated into the side after the hugely respected Gilberto Silva took him and the misfiring  Julio Baptista under his wing and helped them settle down at the club.

Denilson has impressed and frustrated us all in equal measure since he stepped into the shoes of Mathieu Flamini from season 2009. He’s supposed to be a defensive midfielder but he clearly lacks the ruggedness for such demanding task and often falls short of expectations.

I hate to hammer on people’s weaknesses like this, but when you’ve been given chance after chance to make amends and step up to the plate, I can’t help but vent some criticism.

For Denilson, Flamini’s departure was a golden chance to show what he could do and sadly he hasn’t lived up to expectations. This season has seen him pushed to the bench by the mercurial (and more painfully), younger Jack Wilshire. Jack, as we all know has been simply untouchable, making it more and more difficult for Denilson, whose other names are Perreira Neves, to get a look-in.

However the background to all these bare-knuckled attack on Fabregas began two weeks back during the FA Cup game against Leeds at Emirates. Denilson fouled Leeds’ Max Gradel inside the 18 yard box and conceded a penalty. Leeds went onto score it and we faced a rather uncomfortable afternoon as we huffed and puffed without any effect.

It wasn’t until the 89^th minute, with serious aggravation and anxiety spreading through the crowd, that we managed to equalize through another penalty – scored by none other than  Fabregas, the  perceived “non-leader”.

In his post match comments, Fabregas later callously attacked Denilson by saying:

“They (Leeds) scored from a penalty that, at this stage when you are a professional footballer you cannot give away this type of penalty so easily".

As a professional indeed, Denilson ought not to have given away such a cheap, senseless, stupid penalty. But Fabregas as well, as a professional and a skipper of professionals ought not to have knocked down his colleague in full view like that. It was an et tu Brute moment. A betrayal of sorts which must have caught Denilson by surprise and when the implication of what Fabregas said has settled-in, stirred up anger.

That anger was what led to the “non-leader” statement.

To douse the smouldering embers, Fabregas was quoted to have dismissed Denilson’s attack as “just a misunderstanding”. But we all know it is not. It has shaken the publicly-touted and well-groomed image of the club as an oasis of glacial calm. Wonder what Wenger would be thinking now.

He ought to know better though. Denilson, who grew up in Brazil’s infamous, drug, gangster-infested favelas and lost his mother at the tender age of 10, once described the volatile but hugely-talented Romario as his footballing idol. Despite the legendary animosity between Brazil and Argentina, Romario is Brazil’s answer to the Argentine enfant terrible.

At 23, Fabregas is just three months older than Denilson who turns 23 as well on February 16.So sticking the knife in, the way Fabregas did after the Leeds game would have riled the Brazilian even more, coming from your own captain who isn’t talking from a standpoint of years and years of superior experience.

It however gives us fans a better picture of what goes on behind the scenes. Unlike the carefully managed (and sometimes doctored) reflections we are constantly fed with by Wenger. Since the loose cannon Adebayor headbutted Nicklas Bendtner at White Hart Lane in a Carling Cup semifinal in January 2009, we’ve not had a good, old civil scrap to chew on at Arsenal.

It may sound like an ego thing on Denilson’s part but methinks he’s just giving as good as he got from his supposed leader.

We can’t for now hazard a guess where this will all lead to, but with both players constantly linked with moves away from the club, this might just make Wenger reconsider offers for both, or one of them again – at least in the interest of peace at the crèche.