Is this thing on?
I suppose it is, but then again it isn't an issue of whether it's on or not, but whether anyone is seeing it. You know what they say about the tree falling in the woods...
But this is not a place for hopelessness or cynicism, this is a blog dedicated to the mighty Arsenal Football Club. So there might be a bit of hopelessness or cynicism, but not so much that it is dispiriting. My name is Alex. I am a relative newcomer to soccer, having been a close viewer for just over two years (that is, I am American). I am graduating from the University of Delaware with a Bachelor's degree in History (Political Science minor) this year, which means, of course, that I am scrambling from career counselor to career counselor considering how to get a job in the too-near future. One consultant recommended that if I would like to become a journalist (one of several options, none of which by any means are slam-dunks), then given my reputation for writing, I would "make an excellent candidate for starting a blog"--her exact words.
So here I am, no longer cluttering up other Arsenal blogs with lengthy comments, striking out on my own with a blog to point potential employers to. My aim is to create a blog that focuses on the play of the team, rather than the news and gossip that fills up the weekdays in between games. Here I will break down my view of every game, analyzing individual performances, team tactics, successes and failures, explaining why we lost and exploding when we won. Unfortunately, on the birthdate of the Arsenal FC Project, I regrettably must do the former.
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This season, I think Arsenal has played some very good soccer, and coming into this hard run of games beginning with the trip to Villa Park, I believed we had a more legitimate shot at the title than we had all last season. However, at the beginning of this game, Arsenal came out playing garbage soccer. Arshavin squandered some early chances and made the game look, at least from a “highlights” point-of-view, more even than it was. The best chances at the start came from Man U’s own giveaways in the midfield, which were capitalized upon by one or two players—usually Arshavin and Fabregas—to reach the box quickly, but the boys could not finish the job. And they really needed to, because Arsenal was not creating anything on their own. Unfortunately, the boys were not playing as a team for most of the first half. Between bad passes and players not making themselves open, we surrendered possession too easily and too often. The story was worse on the defensive end, and I must say, the lack of cohesion on defense has never been more striking. Players like Arshavin and Nasri appeared to consider pressing defenders and midfielders on-the-ball a part-time job. The ball pinged all around the midfield at Man U feet, to end up on the wings, where players like Nani and Park had their way with our fullbacks, putting balls in the box. And when the ball came into the box, the center of the defense was caught in fire-drill mode. By the end of the first half, Arsenal had conceded two very-preventable goals, though they could have conceded five or six very-preventable goals.
The first goal exemplifies how woeful the team was defensively. The ball comes to Nani outside the box on the left, who has a ton of space that Clichy, playing too close to the middle, must close down. It looks as if Nani gets pinned to the sideline by Clichy and Nasri, who has tracked back, but Nani toe-pokes it between the two of them. Denilson is there when he gets inside the box, but Nani positively blows past the Brazilian—who just stands there—and makes for the endline, at which point he chips in a cross to the far post. Almunia reaches-full stretch and dives backward to touch it out, but he does not clear the bar, and it goes down as an own-goal. Now let’s take names. Clichy was at first caught out of position, and when he appears to pin Nani, he doesn’t make the tackle, and the winger beats him with a fairly simple touch around Clichy’s back. It was poor play as a fullback, but he has the defense at least to say that maybe it was Nasri’s duty to make the tackle, as Clichy’s back was to Nani (doing the pinning) while Nasri was facing Nani. However, Nasri played the pedestrian, standing there, not putting his foot out—if anything he was a hindrance. Denilson, also, just stood there, and moreso than Clichy and Nasri, played too-softly. In the box or not, he had to play far more aggressively than he did. Almunia is also to blame for not putting the ball out, but really, he was at full-stretch, backing up, with Park to worry about at the far-post, totally unmarked (and whose fault that was, I am not sure), so I have to say it was a difficult play to make. It is a damn shame that in another big game, we concede an own-goal.
And in like other big games, we concede a second shortly after the first. This was a team concession, and really, a well-done counter-attack from Man U. I believe it was Evra’s ball that cut through the mass of our players after cleaning up a corner, and found an aggressive run from Nani. Half our team chased him all the way down the field, and the furthest man back, Vermaelen, covered the only man forward, who I believe was Park, and the team realized too late that Park was not the only man forward. Alas, Wayne Rooney, in increasingly typical fashion, ran full-speed down the middle of the field, and absolutely everyone except Vermaelen, who turned away from Park after realizing his teammates’ mistake all too-late, did not notice his presence until he slotted the ball away. Just about everyone at the scene of the crime was ball-watching, letting up on their runs back when they reached the box when the threat was still there, but I think it is fair to single out one player more than the others—Denilson. Rooney ran through the whole team, but he ran right past Denilson, whose head was turned in the opposite direction. When you look back at the replay, the expression on his face when the ball comes to Rooney says it all. Just atrocious.
In the first half, the team made two primary mistakes in possession. Sometimes, they did what I call “hitting the end of the chain.” The ball would reach a lonely Arshavin with no support around him, often because the team was too slow on the transition from defense to offense. Arshavin, not being a true striker that can hold up play consistently, would lose the ball, and the team would be back on defense. Other times, the team played too deep. Again, this comes down to a lack of real forwards on the field. Most of the time we had only two players beyond the halfway line, often just beyond it, regardless of how long we had the ball. Because players off the ball did not make themselves open at the front end, Man U was able to pressure way up the field and force all kinds of poor passes. Most of all, and most frustratingly, everyone on the team made mistakes that added up in the end. Poor passes, poor decisions, poor touches…every Arsenal player had a few of these throughout the first half.
The second half was much better, because except for one moment in which they relived the first half and conceded a third, the team played like a team. But I will discuss the goal first, because everyone likes good news second—and this was certainly bad news. This was another stinker, almost as bad as the second goal. It began with a poor touch from Denilson around the halfway line, which came to Carrick. Meanwhile, Park ran past the two of them and did not stop. Rosicky went in for a tackle, but Carrick calmly passed it to Rooney, and then Song and—critically—Vermaelen rushed at him. Instead of turning and taking on either of them, Rooney passed it back to Carrick, under no pressure from a recovering Rosicky, and, too easily, floated the ball over the defense to Park. He ran about 40 yards with Song, Nasri, and Vermaelen chasing him, and a 2-on-1 situation in Man U’s favor alongside him, and did it all alone, slotting it past Almunia at the near-post. There are three major culprits here: Denilson, for giving the ball away; Vermaelen, who in choosing to take on a Rooney far from goal, with his back to goal, let Park run right down the field with no pressure whatsoever (where was Gallas? Where was Sagna?); and Almunia, in his first really costly mistake of the game, for leaving what was virtually loads of space open at his near-post. Clichy was the last man back, but it would be tough to blame him for leaving Park onside, since the rest of the defense was either at or pas the halfway line.
After that, however, the team played well. Players completed the simple passes simply, whereas they complicated them in the first half. More players opened themselves up as passing outlets, especially the fullbacks, who were anonymous in the first half. In short, everyone completed their passes in the second half, and things opened up. They moved up the field quickly and as a team, and forced Man U to track back, and when it came time to defend, most of them (but not all) did their tracking back far more aggressively than in the first half. And, they pressed upfield to get possession further and further upfield. The new mettle that came into the team showed itself in our highlights. Interestingly, we looked most threatening when the ball floated around the box, going from head to head and looking for a finish. We found a finish, too, when the ball found its way to Vermaelen’s feet for a very nice scissor-kick that rebounded off Brown for a goal. During a good spell of possession, Nasri on the left put in a very good cross in the middle where, for once, we had plenty of heads to find. And damned if it wasn’t Walcott, who played quite a decent game coming off the bench, who headed it back for Vermaelen, whose bit of skill brought me back to those glorious few weeks at the start of the season when it seemed like we could have played him like a striker. A deflection it was—a necessary one, too, since Van der Sar had the shot covered—but Arsenal deserved the consolation. It is a shame that for all the “pass-and-move” good play that the boys strung together in the second half, the goal had to go down as an “ugly” goal. In fact, throughout the whole game, our best chances seemed to be “ugly” chances, whether from a giveaway in the midfield that should have been capitalized on (a la Chelsea), or from the ball floating around the box.
What do you say about this game, except that if they play the way they know how to, the way they passed-and-moved in the second half, the game is a real contest. But once again, Arsenal falls to the only opposition that critics rate on their level. I cannot watch this game without thinking that the boys were victims of their own bad psychology. They may be getting older and more experienced, but they still psyche themselves out. They do not know that they can win, and they do not play like it. Against Chelsea, after Vermaelen’s OG, it looked like men against boys (hence my reference to them as such throughout this piece), as play looked rushed, desperate, and poor, and Arsenal players all over the field had their heads down, looking glum, sullen, and hopeless. This display wasn’t quite as bad. Instead of rushed, desperate, and poor, the play was simply poor, and instead of playing worse throughout the game, we began to play better and more calmly. Perhaps it would be a stretch to say that they played with hope, but they played with more heart and positivity, and only a few players were looking at the ground with every little misfortune (I’m looking at you, Andrei).
Arsenal does not win when players dribble past three or four players, or with unexpected passes that turn an entire defense. The former has always led to nothing in Arsenal’s system, and I don’t think I have ever seen the latter from Arsenal in all the time I’ve been watching. Arsenal wins by passing and moving, passing and moving. Throughout most of the second half and in glimpses of the first half, I felt like I was watching someone flipping a switch, as pass, we’re further upfield, move, we have options, pass, we’re further upfield—all in a simple and composed manner. Too often, players attempted passes to players that were not open, and it didn’t work out. Players on the ball were caught without options off the ball. Several times, I saw the likes of Fabregas skill his way through a midfield, but three passes later, Man U would have the ball right back. The defense should have been far better than what it was, but the team’s real downfall was losing the ball as much as it did, because the players did not play by the rules. Pass and move, they create chances; if they don’t, Man U dominates possession, and that’s what happened.
That is, I reject the idea that when a team is down, the way to get back on top is to “change their approach,” and implicitly, that the best teams in the world adapt to their opponent and beat them on their terms. John Terry does not play like Didier Drogba when Chelsea is down three goals—he continues to play like the player he is, only better and more consistently than he had played when Chelsea conceded the three goals. Arsenal did not lose to Man U because they are a one-dimensional team that Man U could handle any day of the week, because they knew how to handle Arsenal’s approach, and Arsenal refuses to change—meaning, in the minds of yellow commentators, that Arsenal does not and will not play physically enough against a robust Man U team that throws the team about like rag dolls. That sort of description leads one to believe that Man U players pushed Arsenal players off the ball with ease on defense, and then powered through Arsenal defenders offensively with arm-bars and sheer strength. I saw none of that in this game. What I saw was an Arsenal team that dramatically underperformed throughout most of the game. Not only did they not attack the way they know how to, they did not defend the way they know how to. When they did these, the attacking looked almost effortless and created chances, and the defending was aggressive, definitely physical. Arsenal has the reputation it has because of moments that characterized the defending of most of this game, when players were content to watch the ball, let the opposition run with the ball without pressure, and hope that teammates will make the tackle—not because Arsenal is not physical, or because we have the weakest players physically, but because they do not fight for the ball throughout the whole 90 minutes. Psychology and consistency are what keeps Arsenal from winning titles—not the players’ qualities, not the team’s qualities, not how the manager tells them to play.
I do not mean to say that Arsenal does not have only intangible problems, or problems totally within the players’ control. First of all, as I’ve indicated already, Arshavin cannot continue playing as “the” central striker. Wenger has said this before, and so I am surprised that he did not start Bendtner. Arshavin cannot play to his strengths in the out-and-out striker role. He is a world-class player with the ball at his feet, as he can change his pace and direction as well as anyone in the world, and on the wing, he can be counted on to beat his man a few times in a game. He has an eye for the assist, and has a deadly strike from the edges of the box. These qualities make him a top-class winger or second-striker, but it makes him a poor choice for playing in a lone-striker role. While Arshavin plays “dressy,” with all styles of turning and juking on the ball, a lone-striker must play simple. A lone-striker must deal with having few touches on the ball; Arshavin loves the ball at his feet. A lone-striker must distribute to his midfield accurately and consistently; Arshavin cannot do this. Arshavin’s goals all come from dribbling past his man and powering the ball in from medium- or long-range—while his goals are memorable, I cannot remember one goal he has scored with a single touch, from short-distance, or with what a critic would call “finesse”. In short, what makes him a great wing-forward makes him a deceptively poor striker. For my money, he has not had a good game playing in the middle yet, despite some cracking goals. However, in those end-of-game situations when Wenger has put him out wide (in the case of this game, when Bendtner came on), I have caught glimpses of a totally different player, Arshavin as he wants to be known. It’s frustrating to see what he can do in one part of the field, and know that he is being wasted in another part because of the squad’s injuries. What’s worse, he seems to be growing frustrated and sulky himself. I hope he isn’t eyeing the transfer window coming in June.
There were two very worrying players on the field: Clichy and Denilson. Clichy, in this game and in the trip to Villa, looks like a much slower player. Remember when Clichy, as recently as last season, constantly ran up and down the wings, when he looked like the one player that never, ever stopped running? Injuries seem to have marred him more than the average player, it seems, as not only was he fairly anonymous throughout most of the game on offense, but Nani was outstripping him almost every time the ball came to the left side. Clichy of old never got beat on pace by anyone, ever. It was extremely worrying to see our first-choice left-back get so thoroughly hammered, when we’ve been looking forward to his return as a relief from the nail-biting times of seeing wingers square up against Traore and Sylvestre. At this point, an over-worked Sagna seems to be our only really high-quality full-back—and Bac isn’t exactly a world-beater himself. Wenger may need to keep his eyes out for a fullback come transfer season, unless the reserves have a really great prospect coming up. For my money, Gilbert or Coquelin are not going to become true first-teamers any time soon. And then there’s Denilson, who was a disaster. This is another case of, “what happened to last season’s solid first-teamer?” Perhaps it’s his own niggling injuries, but when this guy has played badly over the last month or two, he reminds of Eboue at his most hated. Responsible in part for every goal, he looks completely lost tactically. Defensively he was useless, and that area of the midfield ahead of Vermaelen and Clichy looked quite porous. His anonymity put Song in fire-drill mode, making him cover far more space than one player should have to, and probably made Vermaelen and Clichy look worse than they were. He completed a few little passes and showed up to connect some forward play, but at the end of the day he was a weak link with no clear role.
The defense has to play better. While Clichy was terrible, Sagna also had several bad moments, from getting caught upfield to getting caught too close to the middle (something of a characteristic of his play). Gallas and Vermaelen, to be honest, had many bright moments, but took turns making their own mistakes in positioning and execution. While each had highlights in which they saved goals—Gallas twice, and Vermaelen at least once, with an honorable mention for being the only player that seemed to be trying to stop the second goal—they more than made up for them with huge mistakes that led to great chances for Man U, if not for one or more of the goals. Then there’s Almunia. He can perhaps be excused for the own-goal, though it is certainly an argument. But that does not stop him from a characteristically mediocre performance, as no spectacular saves come to mind, only low-lights: leaving too much space on the near-post for the third goal, giving away an awful clearance right to an attacker…the usual for this guy.
But everything bad started with the midfield and punished the defense. Of the three (five?) midfielders, only Song played consistently well. Song chased the ball all over the field, playing more physically than any of his teammates by miles. He tackled the opposition at the front, middle, and back of the field, and even powered his way through the defense for a few shots. The rest of the midfield did not come close to his effort. Denilson, as discussed, was terrible. Nasri has proved himself to be a neat and tidy player, and to his credit probably had one of the best pass-completion rates of all of them with great movement off the ball to match (like I said, “pass and move,” and we win), but his tracking back is lazy to say the least, and when he finds himself one-on-one with an opposing player with the ball, he never—never!—puts a boot out. For all his passing and moving, it must also be said, he does not push the envelope enough for a designated attacker. While Song wasn’t afraid to rumble forward and push his way through the box when the rest of the team does not, I can’t think of a moment when Nasri did not choose to distribute rather than do something truly dangerous. Rosicky was much the same. Perhaps he is a bit more physical and runs with a bit more commitment, but he was neither effective in his one-on-one defense nor was he committed enough to win any balls. His attacking, too, was inconsistent, as he rushed one too many passes for cheap giveaways, had some bad touches and moments of hesitation that slowed down attacks, and in general did not show off the one-touch passing effectiveness that he is known for.
Finally, there was Fabregas. This was a game that showed why he is not the best midfielder in the world yet. For all the credit he gets, he is not a midfield maestro…yet. Against Man U, he needed his teammates to string together some passes first before he could get involved in the passing rhythm. There were few moments, especially in the first half, when the boys could do that, but when sounded out it looked like: “Vermaelen, Song, Gallas, Vermaelen, Song, Clichy, Denilson, Nasri, Song, Fabregas…” and then Fabregas would get every other ball. He is not as central to the play as is widely assumed. Sure, he made some world-class runs. Was he really that involved? No. When we got into a rhythm, he would be in position to find the ball. His greatest assets in this game were accuracy and dynamic movement. But he didn’t make any world-class, groundbreaking passes, he was not pulling strings with every pass, and really, he did not influence the game like a player who deserves to be called a “maestro.” And where was the physicality he had been playing with of late? Fabregas did not come close to running this show.
And so, Wenger and the Arsenal must go to Stamford Bridge to beat the best team in England after a very mediocre performance at home against the second-best team in England. My goal for this difficult run from Villa to Liverpool was nine points: now our maximum possible is seven. The title seems to be slipping away, but if the boys can dust themselves off and take three points, they will be right back in it. Arsenal always plays their best after the critics write them off. The team can definitely play better than they did here. If Clichy can prove that he’s not damaged goods and that he’s just coming back from injury, if Diaby comes back to fill that box-to-box position with more confidence, and if they can show some real determination to prevent counterattacks and keep the ball in their half, we just might have a contest on our hands. The team has the quality, they just need to clean up their play and show it.
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Please leave some comments and tell me what you all think. Keep it clean and polite. I know this one is late (a whole match late in fact), but the next one will come in the next two or three days, and I hope to make this a habit enough that I put out posts the day-of or day-after. I promise the next one will be shorter.
Chelsea loses its first game at home this season. It is their first loss at home in fifteen months. Manchester City breaks a decade-long record of not scoring in Stamford Bridge by putting away four goals. Wayne Bridge does not shake John Terry's hand. Chelsea loses two men to red cards, Belletti and Ballack. Tevez scores a brace, and on his second, Bridge joins the celebration. Bridge is subbed out late in the game, and receives mixed applause from Chelsea fans. I speculate that Abramovic has just about had it with his team's players. THAT. IS. AWESOME.
