(London): It was revealed today that the retirement of Arsenal's head hypnotist is causing problems in Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger's tactical planning for games.

Hypnotist Paul Stephens has worked with Arsenal for many years and has been credited with many breakthroughs including convincing Patrick Viera every opposition player was Monsieur Broulard, his much hated maths teacher, prompting his uncontrolled violence.

However, Stephens retired at the end of the 2008/09 season and now Arsenal are suffering after the new squad hypnotist has been unable to remove or adapt Stephens' most successful work, his selective blindness hypnosis of manager Arsene Wenger.

Since his very first season in charge Wenger has used Stephens to hypnotise him pre-season so that during games he is incapable of seeing any Arsenal players on the pitch, thereby assisting in his denials of indiscretions in post match interviews.

The resounding success of this scheme has meant Wenger is now coming off his 12th year running winning the Brian Clough Memorial Denial Award, gifted to the manager who, during the season, misses the most fouls and ungentlemanly conduct by his own players.

Now, however, without a changing of Stephens' work last season, Wenger is still blind to any player who left Arsenal in the 2009 pre-season.

This was most pronounced during yesterday's game against Manchester City when confusion was seen repeatedly on Arsenal's bench.

"It was a nightmare from start to finish," admitted assistant manager, Pat Rice.

"We kept trying to tell him to mark Adebayor, press him tightly, do anything to stop him... and all he would say was he would if Adebayor was brought on.

"With (Kolo) Toure playing as well he couldn't understand why so many balls were being stopped around their box, he kept blaming divots and wind flow patterns..."

The Arsenal players came out for the second half noticeably confused after Wenger's half time comment telling them "this'll be easy, I can't understand why they've started the game with nine men" and were increasingly bemused after his post match berating of Emmanuel Eboue who he blamed as the scorer of Adebayor's goal.

"Obviously Arsene figured it was an own goal," said Rice. "Eboue was the most obvious candidate then."

There was one plus point to come from the confusion however, as his blindness allowed him to ignore an alleged stamp by Adebayor on Robin Van Persie which led him to be the first manager in the history of the Premier League to use the phrase "I didn't really see what happened" for the one-millionth time in a post match press conference.

To commemorate this Wenger was thrown a small party and presented a gold carriage clock that automatically adds 6 minutes to every 90 minutes counted and a cake in the shape of a pair of glasses.

There was a moment of sadness however when he looked around the room full of respectful Arsenal players, exclaimed he couldn't believe he'd been left alone at a time like this and began to weep.