Maybe that 2-1 victory over Manchester United in a memorably even and entertaining match at the Emirates stadium yesterday sent a shudder of remorse through those pathetically ingrate Arsenal supporters who had resorted to booing the recent on-field effects of Arsène Wenger’s management. Their repentance, obviously, is as worthless as their disapproval and both the manager and his vast constituency of admirers in the stands would be infinitely more concerned with the possible significance of the performance and the scoreline as an indication that the team are poised to soar away from an excruciating sequence of results.

The bookmakers certainly have a measure of faith. Yesterday morning Ladbrokes had Arsenal at 14-1 to win the Premier League championship with United at 15-8 to retain their title but by late afternoon the London club had been trimmed to 7-1 while the odds against Sir Alex Ferguson’s men had been extended to 9-4 (Chelsea remain steady at 5-4 on to finish at the top of the table).

But, whatever the betting says, the uplifting defeat of United told us nothing about Arsenal we didn’t already know. This was football versus football and when that is the case Wenger’s young marvels seldom fail to impress. The real question is whether it means anything in relation to the tendency they have shown this season to be undone by the kind of relentless, and not always legitimate, robustness that undid them at Stoke last weekend in a fixture which became retrospectively bitter after one of the winners suggested the losers lacked spine.

Wenger is entitled to his indignant insistence that his players have plenty of courage. But he would struggle to rebut the accusation that they are often alarmingly short of the defiant hardness needed to enable their total commitment to skilful football to flourish against the harsh, sometimes bullying physicality bound to be thrust at them by technically inferior opponents. The game has never seen a truly outstanding team that did not have a core of combative toughness, a quorum of individuals whose aggressive willingness to respond positively to rough treatment if it came their way provided leadership and reassurance for the less martial natures around them and ensured there could be no suspicion of collective softness.

Artistry has never had a licence to consider itself sacrosanct on the field and the most gifted players are obliged to accept that the referee’s capacity to offer protection is limited. Great talents must be ready and able to look after themselves, a point emphasised when Pele once told me: “Always I play very strong, very rough maybe. But I never start to play anyone unfair.

Sometimes when a guy has the intention to hurt me then I have to be hard with him – then I would have to pay attention.” Even that spirited attitude could not save him from being brutally incapacitated in the World Cup finals of 1966 but when Brazil reached their zenith in the Mexico finals of 1970 he and his teammates delivered the perfect example of how to combine the ultimate in skills with steely competitiveness.

No footballers ever played more beautifully but underpinning all the grace and refinement, all the exquisite movement and brilliant explosions of deadliness was the integrated warrior spirit of a group as rich in character as it was in ability. There, laid out before us, were the old, unchanging truths about what constitutes a great football team and prominent among them was the simple reality that even geniuses have to be prepared to battle for the right to express themselves.

Of course, Wenger is the last man liable to require lessons from distant history on the value of battlers. His successful Arsenal squads of the past were awash with them (Tony Adams, Martin Keown, Patrick Vieira, Sol Campbell leap instantly to mind, and that embodiment of the game’s high arts Dennis Bergkamp was eminently capable of being cunningly hurtful). In fact, for years Wenger was more likely to be criticised for fielding too many collectors of red cards than for sending out sides handicapped by callow vulnerability. And after yesterday’s win, which was reward for allying the familiar delights of their swift, incisive passing with admirable drive and tenacity that were maintained right through the 96 minutes of the demandingly stretched contest, he will be in no mood to believe the current crop have deficiencies substantial enough to preclude serious contention for the league title.

Perhaps the boosting of self-belief surely inseparable from this achievement will reduce the likelihood of the draining away of confidence during a match that cost them a seemingly impregnable lead against Tottenham recently and doomed them to a crescendo of frustration in their midweek Champions League meeting with Fenerbahce. They weren’t muscled out of those encounters, so they shouldn’t have too much trouble persuading themselves that, with swagger restored, the flaws responsible for the disappointing results can be avoided in the future. But objective outsiders will continue to harbour doubts about the relevance of yesterday’s stirring victory over equally purist opposition to the weaknesses revealed in cruder company. Still unresolved is the question of how they will cope the next time a visit to an awkward outpost of the Premier League confronts them with the problems they so miserably failed to solve at Stoke. Whether or not the great French manager cares to admit it, the answer may be a matter not of sophistication or morale but of bone and sinew and of the kind of pitch-into-the-fray leadership that only physical authority can supply. Arsenal, as United will testify, are pretty marvellous as they are but their challenge for the championship would be considerably strengthened by an injection of old-fashioned animal vigour. To those who regard such musings as philistine, there is a straightforward riposte: wouldn’t that 7-1 look a lot more attractive if Adams and Vieira in their prime were on the team-sheet?

Hamilton will never match Ali’s greatness

LEWIS HAMILTON’S winning of the racing drivers’ world championship fully merited the tidal wave of celebratory ink unleashed in the nation’s newspapers, and the 23-year-old himself deserves every decibel of the acclaim that has been reverberating around him since he closed so dramatically on the title in the sodden gloom of the Interlagos circuit in Sao Paulo last Sunday.

Hearts normally unstirred by the excitements of a sport that is as much about machines as about men yielded happily to the magnetism of a human story too entrancing to be obscured by technology. As not only the youngest champion Formula One has known but the first black driver to gain the honour, Hamilton is a true and cherishable prodigy. And it is precisely because he and his talent are so special that some of the claims made about the momentousness of what he did last weekend seem almost to besmirch his actual achievement and potential with their freewheeling hyperbole.

We have been told, for starters, that it will be natural for him to have a bigger global impact as a sports figure than Tiger Woods. If the sole criterion is earning power, that may just be possible. Still, there could be the odd billion of the world’s population who think that Tiger’s credentials for being considered the greatest golfer who ever lived count for something. Perhaps Hamilton’s feats on the track will so outstrip those of Fangio, Clark, Senna, Schumacher and all his other brilliant predecessors that he will attain a Woodsian status in his discipline. But there’s many a hard mile to be driven before that thought can be entertained.

However, it is when the talk of how monumentally dominating Hamilton can be in the sporting landscape reaches the point where comparisons with Muhammad Ali are mooted as legitimate that my eyes begin to roll. Lewis Hamilton is an utterly remarkable young man but anybody who imagines he, or any other racing driver, can bestride and transcend the history of sport as Muhammad has done should gulp down a couple of tranquillisers and try to sleep off the delirium.

No flies on Cummings

WHEN 80-year-old Bart Cummings made his record in the Melbourne Cup yet more outrageous on Tuesday by saddling Viewed to bring him his 12th training success in Australia’s greatest race, I remembered a long conversation with the already venerable virtuoso on the morning after Kingston Rule gave him his eighth Cup win in 1990. Over breakfast, I found him not only an endless source of roughhewn wisdom about his craft but an engaging master of Aussie succinctness. He had obviously been honing the gift since early in his career. Back then a health inspector threatened to close down his operation. “There are too many flies in this stable,” said the inspector. “How many am I allowed to have?” asked Bart.