Of all the nonsense spoken by football managers after matches (and we are talking here about a great deal of nonsense), the most nonsensical nonsense was surely spoken by Arsene Wenger. Edward Lear, the poet made famous by his collection of nonsense poems, would be turning in his grave had he witnessed the articulate Frenchman’s diatribe following Arsenal’s inglorious defeat at Bolton.

“We deserved to win the game,” a dit Monsieur Wenger.

Call me a killjoy but how can a team deserve to win after it loses by two clear (and well-taken) goals? And, like the well-trained media-savvy boss that our onion seller most certainly is, he went on to explain that Arsenal’s style of pretty, passing football is kind of unappreciated in the midst of the mill towns ‘up north’. Well, Arsene, have I got news for you, old chap. Britain is (more or less) a democracy, and the hairy-a**e teams which play outside the confines of N5 are as much entitled to win games as Arsenal, however cloth cap and pork pie their image may be.

Actually, Wenger is wrong on both counts of what he is implying. Let’s expose the myths. Firstly, that Arsenal play this pretty-passy-Brazily-styly-football. Yes, I acknowledge that they have played some glorious football over the Wenger years, and when they are on song, they can be a delight to watch. But, to use an expression from the man on the Clapham omnibus: ‘Do me a favour’. Every team in the Premiership plays attractive football at times, including, dare I suggest, Bolton Wanderers. The myth that Wenger and his luvvie media friends espouse is that the Arsenal way is to play that kind of football. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In the 40-odd years I have been watching football, Arsenal have had a reputation for being more than a tad edgy with an enviable list of bone-crunching hard men who would serve as bit-part players in an Edgar Wallace crime movie. Peter Storey, Frank McLintock, Charlie George, Lee Dixon, Tony Adams, Emmanuel Petit, Patrick Vieira and more lately Robin van Persie spring to mind. Such was Lee Dixon’s hatchet job on David Ginola in a League Cup game in January 1996 (admittedly in the pre-Wenger era), that Newcastle's French winger was reduced to tears in the dressing room after being sent off for retaliation. I was at that game at Highbury, and seeing the smug satisfaction on the faces of the Arsenal fans when Ginola was red-carded after the most extreme provocation from Dixon was enough for me. I have no truck with any particular London team, but from that day on I became an avowed member of the anti-Arsenal fan club.

The difference between myself and Wenger (aside from about £1m a year in wages) is that I fully own up to the atrocities and war crimes committed by my beloved Leeds United in the 1960s. I now realise they were a bunch of thugs and I am happy to stand up and be counted. But when Wenger sends his hatchet men out to ‘stifle the opposition’, as he did time and time again with Petit and Vieira, to me it is nothing more than a metaphor for on-pitch thuggery. And it is not only that fateful day at Old Trafford when Martin Keown (oops, forgot him in the original list) behaved like a serial offender let loose an hour after closing time.

So I put this to you Gooners. There is absolutely nothing wrong with winning titles and cups, and for that feat alone, Wenger deserves an enormous amount of praise. But I ask you to consider how those titles and cups have been won. Were they really won through intricate triangles of passes between craftsmen at their peak, or were they won through a defence and midfield that gave a new meaning to the socialist cry in the Spanish civil war: ‘No pasaran’ (no way through)?

Now the second count: J’accuse Monsieur Wenger of being an absurdly bad loser. Does he really expect Big Sam Allardyce and the other journeymen clubs in the Premiership to lie down and die because touchy-feely Arsenal are not winning every game? I saw the highlights of Bolton-Arsenal and it seemed to me that Monsieur Allardyce got his tactics spot on. He, too, has a plethora of unintellectual hard men at his disposal – but he also has a bit of skill up front and it seemed eminently reasonable that Arsenal left the mill town with nowt.

It might just be that Arsenal’s game has been rumbled by some of the Premiership also-rans – after all the Gunners' home form is nothing special this season. That’s fine, they are a good young side in a period of transformation. They will come good again, and they will play great football again. But for the time being, they are not the best, nor the prettiest, and Monsieur Wenger should take the advice of Ena Sharples, the glorious Coronation Street character: “If you haven’t got ‘owt good to say, don’t bloody say ‘owt.”