Arsene Wenger is blocking the return of Thierry Henry according to a story in the Mirror which absolutely stinks of agenda.

Thierry Henry was previously given a choice between coaching with Arsenal and continuing his media duties and the Invincible chose the latter. It was an understandable call from Arsene Wenger, no matter how much you want Henry back at the club. You simply cannot have a person coaching the players one day and slagging them off on TV the next.

Now we are being told that Stan Kroenke’s son, Josh, wants Henry to return to the club until the end of the season to help arrest the slump the side find themselves in. The board have sent out an SOS, the report tells us, Henry has answered, and Sky Sports wouldn’t stand in his way.

The problem? ‘A stubborn Wenger’.

Now, no matter what you think of Wenger, this sort of story is designed to undermine him in the eyes of the players and the fans while pointing to the board as people who are trying to fix it – if only he’d let them.

They are the board. If they really wanted to do something about it – they could do something about it. But they are a bunch of cowards, too afraid to speak for themselves, preferring instead to hide behind the tabloid.

The Mirror even say that the reason Henry didn’t return previously was because Wenger saw him as a threat when this very clearly was not the case. It was well documented at the time that it was down to the conflict of interest with his media duties.

The Mirror have been carrying a lot of stories lately, many of which seem to have come from Ivan Gazidis.

It stinks of an agenda from a bunch of people who don’t have the balls to stand behind their own convictions and face down the man who has defended them completely for over 20 years.