‘Invincibles’ no more: Thierry Henry and Patrick Vieira are finding life tough in the dugout

STADE LOUIS II, MONACO — For every Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, there is a Thierry Henry. For every man that returns clutching some of the old, lost magic, there is the man, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his overcoat, watching a club he loves fall apart.

Trevor Brooking was not able to save West Ham from relegation while Alan Shearer could not salvage Newcastle. Henry, too, might be unable to rescue Monaco, the club where he made his name.

It is five months into the season and Monaco have yet to register a home win.

Henry had led them into two derbies in four days, both were drawn 1-1 and, as he acknowledged, draws are not enough when you are second bottom.

Emotional encounter

Both were emotional occasions. When Henry had broken through at Monaco under Arsène Wenger, Marseille were the great enemy. Their encounters decided titles. For Sunday’s game, Henry threw in Cesc Fabregas, who on his debut demonstrated that the improbably generous three-and-a-half year contract Henry had offered him at the age of 31 was not a deal for an old mate.

Fabregas watched this derby from the stands, wrapped in a scarf. This match had been scheduled for early December but was postponed because of the yellow-vest protests that had paralysed France. Since Fabregas was not a Monaco player then, he was ineligible.

Ordinarily, last night’s derby with Nice would have been in a lower key, had they not been managed by Patrick Vieira, the man with whom Henry had shared 281 matches for Arsenal and France, the man with whom he had played World Cup finals and won Premier League titles.

Bizarre reunion

“It was bizarre,” Henry said afterwards. “When I saw Patrick coming out of the dressing room, it was bizarre. We used to play together and here we were about to play each other. So, we gave a nod to that but then we got lost in the match.”

Although Henry grew up amid the grim tower blocks of suburban Paris and Vieira was born in Senegal, they are Cote d’Azur boys. Henry learnt his trade at Monaco, Vieira along the coast at Cannes.

“When I was at Monaco, all I heard was: ‘There’s a guy at Cannes, you’ve got to see him play,’” said Henry. “I said: ‘Yeah whatever’, but when I did play against him, I saw what they meant. He dominated; he did exactly what he wanted.” That game in October 1995, finished like this one, 1-1.

After this match Vieira was the angrier. Nice had played most of the game with 10 men and but for a squandered penalty would have won it. They had planned to have dinner after the game but Vieira told Henry he would prefer to go straight back on the bus.

Monaco’s fall from grace

Monaco may be a gilded playground but when Henry returned in October the games had become nasty and the gilt was wearing thin.

Monaco had won the French title in 2017 largely because of two Portuguese men, the manager Leonardo Jardim, and the sporting director Luis Campos, who had been Jose Mourinho’s chief scout at Real Madrid. Campos would unearth young talent, Jardim would coach them and then they would be sold for vast profits.

Since the club’s owner, the Russian oligarch, Dimitry Rybolovlev, was fighting a messy and expensive divorce, was furious with the Monaco authorities for not granting him a passport that would help him avoid the long, cold reach of Moscow and was being investigated for fraud, there were few other sources of income.

Turning Monaco into a Southampton on the Mediterranean worked better than anyone could have imagined. Kylian Mbappé, Bernardo Silva and Benjamin Mendy won them the title and earned them enormous fees.

However, when Campos left to join Marcelo Bielsa to form what proved a disastrous partnership at Lille, he quit with a warning, if Monaco did not keep recruiting well: “The club will quickly collapse because the other sources of revenue – ticketing, merchandising and television rights are not enough,” he said. Monaco did not recruit well. The club very quickly collapsed. In October, Jardim was sacked.

Difficulties for Nice

Despite the fact that he remarked before the game that he never saw himself as a manager – “I had given too much to the game, I didn’t think I had a manager’s soul” – Vieira appears more secure than Henry.

Over the Christmas break, the two had met up for coffee in London and, Vieira remarked, discussed “all sorts of things”. Then, Nice were comfortable, challenging for a Europa League place. They still are but the ground has begun to shift. Just before Saturday’s 1-0 win over Bordeaux, the president, Jean-Paul Riviere and his managing director, Julien Fournier, who had run the club together for more than seven years, resigned, citing problems with the club’s Chinese owners.

The feeling in the corridors of Nice’s Riviera Stadium, where Roy Hodgson’s England had been humiliated by Iceland, was that Vieira felt exposed and vulnerable. Pressed about it last night, he remarked: “I am not the master of this ship.”

If Unai Emery’s regime continues to crack and split, the thought of the man who captained the Invincibles returning to Arsenal might appeal, even to someone as unimaginative as the club’s owner, Stan Kroenke. Publicly, Vieira’s stance is that he “will never leave”. Privately, there must be doubts.