So Paddy Got Up - an Arsenal anthology (14 page)

The FA Cup final success was, in truth, something of a fluke. United recorded 20 shots to Arsenal’s five; eight on target to Arsenal’s one: one, in 120 minutes. That quite clearly wasn’t playing ‘the Arsenal way’, but the trophy was in the bag. The frustration, then is, why couldn’t Wenger have shown a little more pragmatism during other key moments? Arsenal have missed out on trophies when they became too predictable, too easy to play against. Often, it has been against much weaker opposition. The 2004 Champions League quarter-final defeat to Chelsea stands out as a missed opportunity, a time when Arsenal could have set up more intelligently over the two legs, but eventually went out to an inferior team. The 2011 Carling Cup final defeat was Arsenal at their worst: horrendously predictable and easy to play against. Birmingham were an awful team, relegated at the end of the season; yet Alex McLeish tactically out-thought Wenger, with Arsenal content to play their usual brand of football. Wenger is the manager that every fan wants to be in control of their club long-term, but arguably not the man to win individual contests.

Plan A?

But if we’re going on about plan B, what was plan A? After all, we can’t take Clough’s view on tactics as gospel. Rinus Michels, the legendary father of Total Football at Ajax, thought of tactics as everything on the pitch. If we take this view of tactics, Wenger is a genius. He is unashamedly a romantic, insisting upon open, attacking football. “I believe the target of anything in life should be to do it so well that it becomes an art,” he told Martin Samuel of the Daily Mail. “When you read some books they are fantastic, the writer touches something in you that you know you would not have brought out of yourself. He makes you discover something interesting in your life. If you are living like an animal, what is the point of living? What makes daily life interesting is that we try to transform it to something that is close to art. And football is like that.”

It’s astonishing that Wenger has managed to instil this as such a core principle at a club like Arsenal, a club who spent the years before Wenger arrived being mocked for their awful football. “Really, Arsenal were terrible,” says Nick Hornby, in David Winner’s book ‘Those Feet’. “It was as bad as it ever got just before George Graham got sacked.” That was 1995. Three years later Arsenal were winning the league in the most fabulous way possible, with two of the old guard, Steve Bould and Tony Adams, combining for the brilliant clinching goal at home to Everton.

Wenger’s ‘art’ was never likely to be questioned when Arsenal were winning the league, but probably his greatest achievement is that he managed to sustain support amongst the vast majority of Arsenal fans when things were going poorly, partly because of the style of play. To justify poor results because of the way the poor results were achieved is, in simple terms, extraordinarily cheeky. It is roughly equivalent to a used car salesman maintaining the full support of his boss, despite never selling any cars, because he turned up for work every day dressed immaculately. “If asked you who was the best team in the world you would say Brazil,” Wenger said in 2009. “And do they play good football? Yes. Which club won everything last year? Barcelona. Good football.”

He’s got a point; ‘style’ and ‘results’ are not mutually exclusive, but the sides he mentioned were managed by men, (Dunga and Pep Guardiola), who were both tactical obsessives. It’s probably easier for a pure tactician to play attractive football than it is for a beautiful football advocate to become a tactical master.

Development of Wengerism

That’s not to say that Arsenal have had no shape or system. Wenger’s sides have never been like the mid-2000s Real Madrid Galacticos, for example. The system used has always seemed to be a by-product of the players on offer, however. Studying Wenger’s formations over the years isn’t particularly enlightening, though it’s interesting to review something he told Gianluca Vialli back in 2006. “I think 4-4-2 is simply the most rational formation in most cases,” he said. “In fact, it’s the essence of reason. With a 4-4-2, 60% of your players are covering 60% of the space.”

The real progression of his tactics has not been about static formations; it has been about the method of attack. When he first arrived, Arsenal were based around playing on the counter-attack. Marc Overmars was flying down the left; Ian Wright and then Nicolas Anelka were providing pace over the top, whilst Ray Parlour had a great turn of speed on the right. Even Bergkamp wasn’t slow. In fact, when Arsenal did physical tests of their players in the 2003/04 season, at 34, Bergkamp was the third-quickest player at the club, behind Thierry Henry and Jermaine Pennant. That’s from a start line featuring the likes of Ashley Cole, Robert Pires and Sylvain Wiltord.

Think back to the three games that clinched titles for Wenger, and all three conjure up memories of goals on the break. Overmars was the key man in the early days, with the two goals he scored in the aforementioned 4-0 win over Everton – picking up the ball to feet in midfield, and simply roaring past the opposition on his way to goal. Freddie Ljungberg darting through the Manchester United defence to set up a rebound for Wiltord in 2002 was another example, as was Patrick Vieira’s imperious stride through the Tottenham defence to slide in the opener at White Hart Lane in 2004. The main man throughout the middle part of Wenger’s time in charge was Thierry Henry, the personification of intelligent counter-attacking. In the same way Johan Cruyff typified Dutch total football, and Xavi Hernandez is the main man in Barcelona’s tiki-taka, Henry was a counter-attacking virtuoso.

At some point, possibly linked to Henry’s departure, a predominantly counter-attacking approach seemed to be ditched, and Arsenal became ball hoarders. The likes of Alexander Hleb, Tomas Rosicky, Samir Nasri and Andrei Arshavin arrived, all looking to come inside from wide positions and pass their way through the opposition defence. Too often moves were slow and too easy to defend against, with a narrow opposition playing deep and narrow, making it impossible for Arsenal to use pace over or through the defence. During this time, Arsenal were allowed to play pretty, but fruitless, football and get away with it, perhaps under Wenger’s ‘art’ comfort blanket. Ironically, that type of football was perfect for the opposition to counter-attack themselves, with Manchester United doing this particularly successfully at the Emirates. Cristiano Ronaldo’s goal in 2009 and Wayne Rooney’s in 2010 on the break were superb footballing goals. Arsenal seem to have lost the ability to score like that. Hleb, an unquestionably talented footballer, epitomised the approach. Despite his promise he never became a truly effective player in the final third, and his rate of goals and assists was derisory compared to Robert Pires or Freddie Ljungberg. He often dribbled for 40 yards, before turning back and playing a simple ball when the killer pass was on. He, Rosicky and Arshavin now seem much less direct than when they arrived at the club. Strangely, imagine a pitch from above, and their movements are probably identical to that of Pires and Ljungberg – start on the flanks, cut inside to the centre. But those two did so when the rest of the side played at speed, and they broke past the defence. These days the wide players drift to the centre obviously, rather than turn up there unannounced.

It all just seems too slow, and Arsenal fans’ continued, admirable patience with Theo Walcott is surely not just because he seems like a nice young chap, but because he offers that raw pace and a chance to break quickly. His assist for Emmanuel Adebayor at Anfield in 2008 was old school Arsenal, and he has done similar on a few occasions since. The criticism he receives in some quarters is extremely harsh, but even if you do believe that he has ‘no footballing brain’, so be it. Arsenal have had plenty of players with good football brains; having one with pure pace is a welcome relief.

The summer of 2011 might turn out to be a move back to the directness of early Wenger. With two passers, Cesc Fabregas and Samir Nasri, departing the club and Gervinho coming in, it points to more of a ‘vertical’ game when in possession, something Arsenal desperately need. There are plenty of other variables, but Wenger’s trophies have come when Arsenal were more counter-attack-based and slightly less possession-orientated, although a combination of both is always ideal.

Conclusion

All this is intended as a critique rather than a criticism of Wenger. As mentioned previously, his achievement in shifting the goalposts of what constitutes ‘success’ is remarkable. That said, in the grand scheme of things, seven trophies in 15 years seems low for such a wonderful manager who will certainly go down as a club legend – especially in an era when trophies are won almost exclusively by the top four, of which Arsenal have remained a part of since Wenger’s arrival. The truth is that ‘tactics’ are a way to get around not being the better team on paper. Arsenal have only won trophies when they’ve been the best team – the one exception being the 2005 FA Cup final. The title should have been won in 2003 and the Champions League seemed Arsenal’s before the exit to Chelsea in 2004. The UEFA Cup final defeat in 2000 to an inferior Galatasaray still rankles, whilst the FA Cup of 2001 and Carling Cup of 2011 were lost late on, but again, to weaker sides. That is five separate extra trophies should have won based on pure talent, but other sides maximised their resources and overcame Wenger’s side. We are left to conclude then that Wenger is a great legacy builder, an astute economist, a revolutionary physiologist, an intelligent communicator, a good man manager and an admirable footballing philosopher – but probably not a great tactician.

***

Michael Cox writes tactics blog Zonal Marking, as well as weekly columns for the Guardian, ESPN and FourFourTwo.com

13 – OUR PRIVATE GARDEN - Tim Bostelle

Charlton – 18.03.2006

You see your first live Arsenal match when you are 35 years old.

Maybe circumstances in life contrived to prevent you from going; illness, that time you lost your job right before you were going to make the trip, your ex-wife refusing you the luxury, it was always something. Maybe you’re one of those people who always loved Arsenal but lived somewhere far away and you happen to suffer a Bergkamp-like hatred of flying. Or maybe you’re one of those people who publicly talk about how much they loathe sports but secretly always rooted for Arsenal and finally decided to make the plunge. Whatever it is, you find yourself at Highbury on 18 March 2006, nursing a St. Patrick’s Day-sized hangover, and an hour early for Arsenal v. Charlton.

You wander around in the belly of Highbury wondering what you can get from the vendors that will cure this hangover. The burgers on Avenell road have piqued your appetite as they fill the air with the smell of grilled onions and charred meat but you pass them by as possibly unsanitary. Instead, you choose the sanitized offerings inside Highbury herself and get a flat, iceless, Coke and something that is advertised as a pie. As you sip the Coke and poke at the pie, you decide that diarrhea from a burger on Avenell road might be preferable to this.

The West Lower concourse is, well, minimalist is a nice way of putting it. After a few minutes of looking at some posters and a few videos on the retrofitted televisions you decide that you might as well find your seat. You start the climb from the concourse to the stands and it strikes you how well worn the stairs are here. Deep grooves have been left from the millions of footsteps that tread this path before. And just as you start to imagine the first family that made this same walk back in 1913, you see over the top of the last stair and the most beautiful green field you have ever seen fills your eyes.

It’s impossible to stop from letting out a gasp. The sky is perfectly blue. The stands are perfectly red, the art deco buildings perfectly off-white. There’s the Herbert Chapman Arsenal symbol. The clock. Your mind races from one object to the other. But it’s the pitch that draws you back. When God created the colour green he did so by planting a field in Highbury and a stadium must have sprung up around that, with Archibald Leitch declaring, “Here would be a fine place to play football.”

Why had you waited so long for this? Forgetting the lethargy from your hangover, now you greedily rush toward the pitch. Row after row fades behind you until you find your seat. It’s perfect: slightly off centre, close to the pitch, with no obstructions. The minutes now fly by as you stand there drinking in the history all around you.

A Pires goal snaps you out of your stupor in the 13th minute. The crowd erupts as Henry takes a pass from Hleb, plays a give-and-go with Adebayor and slots it across for Bobby to put away easily. “One-nil to the Arsenal,” sweeps through the crowd and you join in, sheepishly, not wanting to be found out as the interloper. Adebayor gets the second after a poor defensive clearance sets him free on goal and Hleb puts away the third after half-time to round off the day. This is love. Your friends who don’t watch football won’t understand. Your friends who do watch football, but have never been to see a game, won’t understand. This is suddenly one of the top experiences in your life. Better than your first kiss (that was two teenagers blindly groping in the basement). Better than your first love (because Arsenal hadn’t broken your heart yet). You walk out into the sunshine knowing that Arsenal will always be there for you. If you yell at Arsenal she wont leave you. If you treat Arsenal badly she won’t cheat on you with another. Win or lose, Arsenal will never break your heart.

Sunderland – 21.02.2009

Every relationship reaches a point where you can finish each other’s sentences. Maybe it’s the familiarity of the rhythm of her speech or maybe there is some collective unconscious that two people share after years of being together. Whatever the cause, you are now at this point in your love affair with Arsenal. The stories that you share with Arsenal feel nearly as well worn as those Highbury steps that first led you down this path. “The Emirates had to be built,” you hear yourself saying, “in order to compete with the financial powers of Chelsea.” Adrian sips his beer and nods approvingly at this. “Besides which,” you continue, “Arsenal generate more in gate receipts than almost any other team in the world, the loans are at an incredibly manageable rate and it won’t be long now before Highbury is rebuilt and the club recover the money from that investment.”