Patrick Vieira admits he can scarcely believe Arsenal have gone nearly two decades without winning the Premier League title.
Vieira won three championships in a nine-season spell with the Gunners and captained the Invincibles side – Arsenal’s last top-flight success in 2004.
The former Arsenal skipper will be in Crystal Palace’s dugout on Monday night when his old club travel to Selhurst Park.
Mikel Arteta’s side have improved this season, and face Palace knowing that a win will boost their top-four ambitions.
But when asked if he would have believed back in 2004 that Arsenal would go the ensuing 18 years without further Premier League success, Vieira replied: “Not really. During that period of time I though Arsenal would be challenging for the titles.
“It is more difficult now and it is more competitive. There are more teams who are capable of winning.
“There is a cycle where Manchester City are the team, and now there is Liverpool and Chelsea. And Manchester United will be there to challenge, too, so there are five or six teams who can win the Premier League.
“But it is important for Arsenal to get to the Champions League because of the stature of the football club.”
Nearly two decades on from Arsenal’s unbeaten Premier League campaign, Vieira, who left for Juventus the following year, says he remains in touch with a number of his former term-mates.
He added: “I still speak to Thierry [Henry], Robert [Pires], Martin [Keown] and Dennis [Bergkamp].
“When we talk, we talk not just about football, but everything in life.
“We are friends because we spent so much time together, sometimes more than we were with our families.
“We won, we lost, we went through different emotions and shared important moments of our lives together.”
So, would a win against his old club mean more to the Frenchman?
“No, not at all,” he said. “It is three points on the table, which is the basic answer. Our performances have to be good if we want to win that game, and we want to win the game.”
Back in October, Alexandre Lacazette scored in stoppage time to deny Vieira a win on his return to north London.
Vieira said: “The game is never finished until the referee’s whistle. It’s about the concentration we have to have, especially against those kind of teams.
“We played with personality and we tried to dictate the tempo of the game. Of course we knew it would be tough and difficult. But what we can take from that was those crucial moments we have to manage well.”
REUTERS