Tuesday 24 February 2015 14:59, UK
Arsenal boss Arsene Wenger will welcome former club Monaco to the Emirates on Wednesday night for the first leg of their round of 16 Sky Live Champions League clash.
The Gunners boss spent over seven years in charge of the French principality side from 1987, steering them to both Ligue 1 and Coupe de France glory during his reign.
A key component of the club’s title triumph in Wenger’s first season was Glenn Hoddle.
Wenger signed the England midfielder from Tottenham and, ahead of Wednesday's fixture, Hoddle has been telling Sky Sports about his time playing for the Frenchman at Monaco.
Here, Hoddle recounts Wenger’s style of management, preferred tactics and innovative training regimes, which brought him major success in just his second job in management – and how the Arsenal boss has developed into the manager he is today.
Personality
"Arsene was obviously a lot younger then but he's still as enthusiastic today as he was back in those days. He had this youthful sort of excitement about him at Monaco, though, and it didn't take me long to realise this is where I wanted to be. I was going to Paris Saint-Germain but Arsene really was the one that turned my head.
"He would get quite fiery in the dressing room at half-time. That was probably because he was younger and inexperienced. Talking to some of the Arsenal players who worked with him, they seemed to think that he was very calm, but I've seen him throw a few cups around and get really uptight at times."
Fitness regimes
"I've got to say what Monaco did [compared] to Tottenham in those days in 1987 was so much more advanced. The first day Mark Hateley and myself went to walk off after a two-hour session and Arsene told us to go over to the fitness coach to warm down for 45 minutes. Me and Mark looked at each other and said 'what's a warm down?'
"Everything was structured and organised to the second so I could tell straight away what he wanted from his individuals and from his team. There was instant clarity. I had never worked so hard; three sessions per day in the first week was [like] nothing we'd done in England. It was very, very tough training, but you got fit."
Tactics
"Arsene was very positive with the way he set his teams up and got that across to me very quickly in our first meeting and that was what I was impressed with.
"I remember the first pre-season game we had and he just said to me 'you're coming too deep', because I used to come very deep at Tottenham on the right-hand side of the diamond formation.
"He played me behind the striker Mark Hateley and he said, 'I've got two players in midfield', which was an absolutely similar system to when he first went to Arsenal. He had two holding players that could really use the ball well. That was Emmanuel Petit and Patrick Vieira at Arsenal. We had Marcel Dib and Jean-Philippe Rohr at Monaco. He said 'that's their job to defend. You defend from the front, organise, mark the wingers, but we need to get the ball to you'.
"That was something that was different for me straight away but I could understand it and it suited me as a player and the team. We settled into the team pretty quickly and won the title.
"We were very dominant. We played some wonderful football; he loves to play creative football. He knew what he wanted from the team. It was pretty clear-minded; you had clarity when you went onto the pitch of the shape that he wanted and how he wanted us to play."
Evolution
"I think Arsene has learned, as you do in life, to be a little bit calmer - and you should do as you get more experience. Now he sits, ponders and studies the game a lot more than perhaps he did when he was at Monaco.
"He was always off the bench at Monaco, going straight to the referees and getting his ideas across to the players. But he's a very, very astute man, a very clever man. I ended up having a very close relationship with him and we talked a lot.
"[In terms of players], he has always wanted offensive midfielders, built around his midfield and had one or two players that make the difference. That's what he's always demanded. It was always based on offensive football."
Influence
"I was 29 when I went there and we spoke about all different things, not just football. He really did help me. He saw something in me that I really didn't see myself. He saw me as a coach before I ever dreamt of going into coaching or management, so that was something he expressed to me which made me think.
"I was out with an infection in my knee for over a year and that's when he started to say to me 'I've seen things in you'. Later in life I've seen players that I knew would go into coaching and go into management. It was just the way they were as talkers on the pitch and how they looked at things in football so I could relate back to what Arsene saw in myself.
"I almost had a season where I was looking with a different set of eyes to see what I would do personally and what Arsene was trying to achieve in the build-up to the weekend's game. It gave me a sort of apprenticeship for a year before I came back to England."
Watch Arsenal v Monaco live on Sky Sports 5 HD from 7pm on Wednesday - including the full interview with Hoddle ahead of kick-off.
