By Boris Mellor
January 5 2006

Kevin McCara in Thursday’s Guardian believes that Wenger has overstated the case on claiming his team is the youngest of the top four clubs. McCarra argues that Wenger’s belief on this is erroneous and he provides statistics that undermine Wenger’s assertion.

To quote Kevin McCara:

"Of the three, it was Chelsea who fielded the youngest line-up this week. The side they sent out at West Ham on Monday had an average age of under 26. The figures for Wenger's and Ferguson's sides in Tuesday's insipidly goalless draw were respectively 27½ and 26½. The United and Arsenal managers are not so much prevaricating as overstating their case."

There is nothing wrong with McCarra's figures but I would argue that they are just a snapshot of one evening’s football and a very superficial snapshot at that. McCarra is a fine analytical football journalist but this time his analysis is not as sharp as it should be.

Is Wenger falsely perceiving the situation? Or is he in fact summing up the situation far more effectively than McCarra. Being a manager Wenger has different objectives and priorities to that of a journalist, not for him the benefit of snap judgements, he has to look at the whole season not just one game. Therefore when he thinks back to the team he played against Chelsea at Highbury he remembers the average age was 25.4. Also if Cole or Clichy were available they would replace the 31 year old Cygan, bringing the average age down even further. And they are the future, not Pascal. The trend is towards youth.

In this game the engine room of Hleb, Flamini and Fabregas had an average age of 21. The average age of the Chelsea engine room at West Ham was 27. That is a massive six-year difference. Of course when Gilberto is playing the age goes slightly up, but for a top club to have two out of three of its key midfielders at 21 or under is more remarkable than McCarra allows for. Thus Wenger is right to say that there is a lot of developing to be done. Of course McCarra is right in arguing that development is not guaranteed; but that does not undermine Wenger's belief that he is using exceptionally young players.

Let's approach the statistics from another angle, Wenger is not always the best at communicating his thought patterns. Sometimes he will stress that he is discussing outfield players, sometimes he just takes it for granted that everyone is on his wavelength - that he means outfield only. If we remove the 36-year-old Lehmann from the calculations of the team that faced Manchester United then the average age drops to 25.7. If we do the same for the match against Chelsea the average age drops to an incredible 24.4. One reason why the Chelsea statistics show such a young team is that the goalkeeper Peter Cech is very young at 23. That Lehmann and Van der Sar are 36 and 35 respectively clearly distorts the statistics for the outfield players.

Finally it was probably Wenger's wish to play a far younger team against Manchester United. If Robin van Persie and Ljungberg had been available then the team would have been younger. Therefore it is not only unfair to suggest that Wenger is hiding behind the age of his players, it is also a very shallow use of statistics.