RocktheCasbah I think you're doing him a disservice there, I'm sure he assisted the greatest goal I ever saw at Highbury - Ian Wright's lob against Everton... Rocket of a right foot.
Well these things are all comparisons relative to other Arsenal players, so someone is always being done a disservice whatever pick you make... the only exceptions being any of the Arsenal strikers who aren't Henry!
I think all the teams being picked that are heavy in Wenger era defenders would struggle in today's league (and by struggle, I mean probably finish a close 2nd to City). PL teams are much less naive these days; they're more tactically astute, more like the continental teams that Wenger's sides traditionally struggled against. They'd take one look at teams with Henry, Vieira and Pires in them and universally adopt very well organised deep blocks to deny the space in behind and deny them any transitional moments, which is where those teams were truly lethal. If these selections were in the league today, the majority of games would see an awful lot of horseshoe football (particularly at the Emirates). Rather than the rip-roaring, full-length of the pitch interchanges between Cole/Pires/Henry that we remember so fondly, janky sequences of passes between Dixon, Adams, Lehmann, Campbell etc in front of a wall of 11 players would be the more common sight. Opposition sides would be happy to sit deep, nullify the greatest asset those players had (in transition), and set traps for our defensive players to fall into, which they'd do more often than even our current, occasionally leaky rearguard.
