Tag: Arsenal (page 1 of 1)

I am of course an Arsenal supporter, but I don’t like what the club is turning into: a whining machine. Mikel Arteta’s ceaseless complaints about unfair treatment — which sound exactly the same when he has a strong case and when he doesn’t have a leg to stand on — have now become the default position for the players and for the fanbase. The result has been twofold.

First, it has tended to make what had been a dynamic and exciting young side extremely unlikeable. Nobody likes whiners, and Arsenal never stop whining. I love Arsenal with a kind of helpless love, but I don’t like this side. They’ve become obnoxious.

Second, the moaning about unfair treatment has deflected the players’ attention from their own behavior. By making it a habit to blame everybody except themselves, they have lost the discipline and focus needed to succeed against top competition. William Saliba is a great defender, but his brain-dead red card against Bournemouth not only cost his team that match but may well be catastrophic for the upcoming test against Liverpool. And I truly believe that he would not have had that lapse in concentration if his manager (over the past few weeks especially) had spent less time complaining and more time teaching accountability.

You could scarcely have a more obvious red-card offense than Saliba’s against Bournemouth, but of course a large chunk of the fanbase is baying for the ref’s blood. As I say, the moaning and whining have become habitual now, a matter of reflex. Arteta has finally woken up enough to say that these red cards — three in eight matches! — need to be “eradicated,” but will he be able to change his own habits of finger-pointing? After all, Arsenal have been plagued with red cards since Arteta took over — five more than any other Premier League side in that period — and he seems not to have asked himself any hard questions. Now his strategy for dealing with the constant indiscipline is to ignore it and hope it will go away.

Time will tell, and the season is still young, but the Premier League is an unforgiving one, and it seems to me highly unlikely that Arsenal can overcome both Man City and Liverpool. The title may already have slipped from Arsenal’s grasp, and if so, it’s not the refs’ fault. It’s Arsenal’s fault, and primarily Mikel Arteta’s.

UPDATE: More evidence for my thesis. 

This side is not a contender for the league title — not even close. At this point I’m not confident that they can hold on to a Champions League place: they’re far behind Man City and Liverpool, noticeably behind Aston Villa, and probably behind Spurs (though Spurs’ lack of depth could haunt them in the months to come). 

Because Arsenal are so toothless in attack, the temptation will be to think that they have to sign a striker in the January transfer window. But (a) they will almost certainly have to overpay dramatically for anyone worth having; (b) strikers rarely settle immediately into a new side — they need time to get adjusted to new teammates and a new style of play; and (c) there’s not a game-changing striker available. Succumbing to this temptation would lead to heartache — but I fear that that’s what the club will do. 

It’s true that Arsenal don’t have a top goal-scorer, but that’s not their primary problem. After all, they had a fine season last year while spreading the goals around quite widely. Their primary problem is this: Arteta has wildly over-reacted to the way that last season ended. Last season’s side was a high-energy, high-risk, excitable, even manic show. Every time they won a game they shouted and leaped into one another’s arms, and the game’s self-appointed Celebration Police tut-tutted and said, in unison, “They act like they won the league.” 

It seems obvious that the club’s leadership decided that this emotional intensity caused the team to run out of gas late last season. So they — or maybe it’s just Arteta — decided to take a different approach this season. 

The first move in this direction was eminently sensible and has been quite successful: signing Declan Rice means that the team now has a physically commanding and highly intelligent defensive midfielder to play in front of the two excellent centerbacks, which means that Arsenal are very difficult to score against. 

The second move was to replace the most excitable member of last year’s side, the keeper Aaron Ramsdale, with the calmer and somewhat more technical David Raya. This decision, I think, has been as bad as the signing of Rice has been good. It’s not that Raya has performed poorly; he hasn’t. He’s been about as good as Ramsdale, though not noticeably better as distribution (which is supposed to be his big advantage). The problem is that Raya is a pretty quiet and undemonstrative guy, while Ramsdale was the emotional leader of last year’s side. He was the spark plug that ignited the fuel, and without him the team seems to be playing mechanically and joylessly. (The other really fiery player from last year’s side, Granit Xhaka, now plays in the Bundesliga. The club might do better to bring Xhaka back than sign an overpriced striker.) 

In Sunday’s mostly listless — after the first ten minutes anyway — performance against Liverpool, the crowd at the Emirates was virtually silent. Watching on TV, you could hear everything said on the pitch and sideline through most of the match. At one point Martin Odegaard — a fine captain, about whom I have nothing bad to say — tried to rouse the crowd, but they responded halfheartedly. This was, to put it mildly, not a problem last year. If the team is excited and energetic the crowd will be too; if not, not. 

The player who has suffered most from this new emphasis on restraint and discipline has been Gabriel Martinelli — who is a shadow of his last year’s self. But I think everyone’s less intense this year, and other teams are just outworking them.  

When the team has had energy this season, it’s been negative energy, generated by Mikel Arteta’s constant whining about officiating. Indeed, I suspect that Arteta’s complaining has hurt the team’s spirit as much as the tamping down of enthusiasm. 

Can Arteta make the necessary adjustments both to his tactics and his mood? Can he reignite the fire from last season and become a more positive figure, keeping in mind that he still has a very young side, with many players who are highly influenced by his example? Maybe; he seems to be an exceptionally stubborn person, but I think the organization as a whole is strong and that there’s a good opportunity here at the brief winter break to part with some bad habits. I think we just have to hope that he learns from experience and admits his mistakes. I wish I had a better answer than that. 

As an Arsenal supporter who believes that Arsenal did indeed get robbed on that Newcastle goal, I am not a fan of this statement. For several reasons:

1. That was just one goal, and focusing on the refereeing mistakes that led to it shifts attention from the Gunners’ manifest ineptness in attack. Arteta should be more concerned about his and his players’ shortcomings than about those of the refs.
2. This statement won’t do what the club wants it to do, and indeed will probably be counterproductive. Do Arsenal really believe that the refs, and the Premier League and the F.A. more generally, can be shamed and bullied into doing better? My guess is that the side will get worse treatment for the rest of the season thanks to Arteta’s whining and bitching and the club’s endorsement of it. 
3. This sets a really bad example for the players, who will be learning from their club’s leadership how to act when things go wrong for them: Don’t own your shortcomings, but blame blame blame, and do it in your loudest voice. 
4. A much better approach would be to seek collective action: talk to other clubs who are, or ought to be, angry about the shocking incompetence of the VAR system, and try to lead collective action — and lead it behind the scenes. That might not be as emotionally gratifying, but it would be infinitely more effective. 

This whole situation is very sad, because Arsenal have the most attractive young side in the league. They could easily be making fans, but instead they seem to be determined to make enemies. And if you were a transfer target, is this a club you’d want to play for? Last year the answer would have been a big Yes; now I suspect it’s leaning more and more towards No. Instead of a place of joy and excitement, it’s starting to feel like the Bruno Fernandes of clubs: talented but incessantly  and frustratingly bitchy. 

An exceptionally promising era in the club’s history just may be giving way to something much darker, and that is wholly the fault of the team leadership’s emotional immaturity and incontinence. It’s time for Arteta & Co. to shut their mouths and get better.

I started telling people what a terrific writer Brian Phillips is back in 2008, when he wasn’t yet even a gleam in Bill Simmons’s eye, and since then I’ve written for his old site The Run of Play, we’ve eaten lunch together in Harvard Square, and once we joined forces to confront an enraged lunatic photographer on Flickr. When you’ve been through the wars like that, it forms a bond, you know? So I’m as proud as a slightly obnoxious big brother to learn that he’s a fantastic podcaster too. 

I have enjoyed this whole series, but now that we’re at Dennis Bergkamp … well. My feelings about Dennis Bergkamp are strong. Watch the YouTube clips Brian has lined up there, and you’ll see why. 

I’m going to make one point about that goal against Argentina — the ostensible subject of Brian’s episode — and then a more general point. Brian describes the goal well: the long, long pass from Frank de Boer; Bergkamp’s leaping first touch that kills the ball; the subtle pullback from the right side of his body to the left that sends Roberto Ayala flying. But then there’s the shot itself. Bergkamp can’t take the time to shape his body to take a proper shot, with either foot; all he has time for is a toepoke, a quick insouciant flick of the ball that looks a little like a dancer doing the can-can. And yet the ball just arrows into the roof of the net. The first touch and the pullback came from masterful technical skill; that shot from sheer imagination. 

Thus my more general point: As Brian hints, Bergkamp’s distinctive style of play was simply made for YouTube, because all of Bergkamp’s greatest plays leave you saying, Wait … what? What did I just see? Let me rewind that. 

Consider the two examples Brian gives near the end of that post (which transcribes the episode). On that assist to Freddie Ljungberg vs. Juventus the commentator doesn’t even mention the pass, because I don’t think he has any idea what has just happened. And to be fair, it’s almost impossible to see on a first viewing. You have to run it back and look again, because it’s that imagination again, that Bergkampian sublime. If you’re commenting on the match you just end up saying “Terrific goal from Ljungberg!” or the like — because the actual finish is something that happened in the world of space-time as we know it. The pass, by contrast, happens somewhere else. 

The famous Newcastle goal is even weirder. I’ve seen it a hundred times, and every time I see it I say, “Wait … what?” What precisely did he just do? Also, how did he ever think of that? “Ah, when the ball gets to me I’ll just flick it to my right and behind me, while simultaneously pivoting to my left, so that the ball and I will meet in an enveloping pincer movement that will leave the defender and keeper helpless!” As Brian says: Ladies and gentlemen, Dennis Bergkamp! 

But I want to look at one more, this one: 

Again, the perfect first touch, followed by a little private game of keepy-uppy, and then the clinical finish. But what I love most about this is the reaction of the defender, who had been right there, who had been in perfect position, who had done his job … and yet look at what happened. As the ball goes into the net his hands fly up to his head: “Wait … what??” 

More than twenty years ago Malcolm Gladwell published a fascinating essay about two different modes of failure in sports: panicking and choking. “Panic … is the opposite of choking. Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little. Choking is about loss of instinct. Panic is reversion to instinct. They may look the same, but they are worlds apart.” Over the past decade, Arsenal have become masters of both modes of failure. When a player flies into a late tackle or drags down an attacker, he’s panicking (hello Xhaka, hello Rob Holding), but what happened to the side yesterday was a unanimous collective choke: when they needed a solid performance, everyone became paralyzed. 

Arsenal are like the Ship of Theseus: All the players change, all the front office people change, nothing is what it was a decade ago … except the panicking and choking. Those endure. It’s a mystery to me, but if you’re going to be an Arsenal supporter you have to learn to live with it, because it’s hard to imagine it changing — it’s part of the DNA of the club now. 

I’d prefer to be a supporter of any other kind of club, but it’s difficult (I’m inclined to say impossible) to choose these things. You end up emotionally attached to a team for reasons unknown and probably unknowable. So I would drop Arsenal in a second if I could, and turn, not to a better club, but a less neurotic one. But I don’t think I can. 

Well, the North London Derby will be kicking off in a few minutes, and my nerves are tingling. I won’t be watching the match — I’m gonna practice meditation or something. But I have some thoughts. 

I don’t expect Arsenal to win — Spurs are playing at home and they need the points more than Arsenal do — but that doesn’t mean anything because I never expect Arsenal to win. My son asks me before every Arsenal match how I think it’ll go, and I always explain, patiently and rationally, why they can’t possibly take all three points.  

It may therefore come as no surprise that I would’ve been absolutely shocked at the beginning of the season — and even more after the first three matches of the season — to learn that the Gunners would be in the top four in May. But then everyone else would’ve been shocked also.

So, whatever happens from here on out, the lads have been great, and they deserve plaudits.

You might therefore expect that I am fully supportive of the decision to extend Arteta’s contract. In fact I am not —I am seriously doubtful about the decision. The achievements of this year are mainly due to the excellent construction of the squad, which has enabled a degree of success even in the face of many injuries. And that’s down to the front office. They’re the ones who deserve the same applause we give the players. (That said, with European football coming next season, they need to do some major reinforcement work in the offseason.)

Arteta, I think, has been the weak link. The problem is that he’s very poor at one aspect of the manager’s job: making in-game adjustments. He’s good at general strategy — though there he has a lot of help from the front office — and good at setting up his tactics for any given match. But when things go wrong (and in soccer you must expect that things will regularly go wrong) he seems befuddled. Several of Arsenal’s losses could have become wins if Arteta had acted more swiftly, decisively, and intelligently to make changes, whether in formation or personnel or both. But making the necessary adjustments just doesn’t seem to be in his skill set.

But I’m only doubtful that his contract should have been extended, not certain that it shouldn’t have. He may get better; and there aren’t many clearly superior candidates out there. (Though that Emery guy at Villarreal — he’s impressive! I wonder if he could be talked into moving to London….) And in any case the deal is done. But while I always worry about Arsenal, a good deal of that worry centers on whether Arteta will be able to handle the demands of a tough match. Arteta is my second-biggest concern; the first, as always, is whether Xhaka will decide that he needs to get himself sent off.  

UPDATE: For “Xhaka” read “Holding.” Arteta’s complete inability to teach his players on-pitch discipline — very few of their many red cards in recent years have been undeserved — is another mark against him. 

I am experiencing the worst thing that an Arsenal supporter can experience: Hope.

This reflection by Tim Stillman articulates a lot of what I, as an often unwilling but helpless Arsenal supporter, have been feeling lately. The petro-plutocrat takeover of Newcastle United adds to the list of clubs that Arsenal will simply not have the financial resources to compete with, and in a weird sort of way that’s a relief. It has been some time since Arsenal could plausibly contend for the Premier League title, but we fans have hoped for a return to the Champions League. Now, as Stillman notes, “What is the ceiling of this project? ‘If things go really well this season, we could finish 5th!’ It’s difficult to get excited about that but, unless there is a change in owners or a change in owner MO at Arsenal, qualifying for the Europa League is what success looks like for Arsenal.” Yep. For the foreseeable future Arsenal will simply be a mid-table side – and it’s strangely nice not to have to think about any higher aspirations. 

Those circumstances can improve in one way only: If Stan Kroenke sells the club to some massively rich owner or consortium. (Stillman writes of a change in the Kroenke MO but I don’t consider that even a possibility.) And as frustrated as I have been by the Arsenal ownership, new ownership is probably the one thing that would end my Arsenal fandom – because in the current environment it’s hard to imagine any sufficiently wealthy ownership that doesn’t have the problem that Newcastle’s new owners have: deep entanglement with massive corruption. I prefer mediocrity to that. 

I think peace often arises from clarity. So let’s be clear about a few things:

1. Arsenal are a mid-table side. For the foreseeable future, they won’t be relegated but they won’t be in the Champions League either. The absolute height of their ambition will be to make the Europa League every now and then.
2. Arsenal are a mid-table side because they have mid-table quality players.
3. Arsenal have mid-table quality players in part because they have made some massively stupid purchases, but in larger part because their ownership is not willing to invest the money needed to compete with Champions League-level clubs.
4. It is possible that that will change, that some plutocrat or collective of plutocrats will see a London club with a distinguished history as an attractive investment and will convince the Kroenkes to sell, but unless and until that happens none of the above points will change.

Therefore, fellow Arsenal supporters: Be pleased when your team makes the top half of the table. Be ecstatic when they make the Europa League. And don’t expect, or even hope, for anything more.

Granit Xhaka is nothing like the player Arsenal supporters thought he was, or could become, when the club signed him in 2016. The idea then was that he would provide steel in deep midfield, a combination of defensive strength and playmaking from a deep position — something Arsenal haven’t had since the departure of the great Patrick Vieira. It turns out that Xhaka has one skill and one skill only: he can make a good long pass, usually diagonally, when he has plenty of time on the ball. He can’t dribble, he can’t make runs into the box, he can’t shoot except for the occasional long-range blast. On defense he is both slow and positionally unaware, which means that he is always a booking waiting to happen. 

But Xhaka is not the problem. The problem is a manager who makes Xhaka perhaps one of the most constant figures in the teams he selects (along with Leno and Auba). Week after week Emery sets Xhaka up for failure and week after week Xhaka experiences precisely what Emery has set him up for. 

Torreira can’t make the long passes that Xhaka makes, but in every other respect bar none he is a far superior footballer, and it’s simply stupid to sit him in favor of Xhaka. Maitland-Niles, for all his struggles at fullback, would be better than Xhaka as a holding midfielder. Dani Ceballos could actually make plays from the deep-lying position, though I would prefer to see him farther up the pitch. Emery could pick names out of a hat and do better than he has been doing. 

The one trait that we have consistently seen from Emery since he took over Arsenal is this: he makes personnel decisions without reference to what works on the pitch. We started seeing that last year when Arsenal were far more dangerous with Auba and Lacazette on the pitch together, but Emery wants to play a single striker, so they rarely paired up. This year we have seen the team utterly lacking in midfield creativity and playmaking, yet Özil has been completely sidelined and Ceballos plays only occasionally. (I know the problems with Özil, but the team is offensively moribund. Scrappy set-piece goes from your center backs are not a recipe for Premier League success.) Emery is holding desperately to some model of football that he cannot implement nor even articulate. He is stubborn in his commitment to an indescribable will-o-the-wisp. 

Every day I check my RSS feed hoping to learn that he’s been sacked. Every day I am disappointed. There’s no reason to give up on this season — Arsenal are a very talented squad, by far the most talented in recent years — but many of the more gifted players are riding the pine. If Emery doesn’t go soon, supporters will need to write off another season. And that simply shouldn’t be necessary. 

Mesut Özil creates an impossible situation for his manager. He can go for long periods — and by “long periods” I mean several weeks — in a kind of fog, trotting aimlessly up and down the pitch, rarely seeking the ball when the Gunners are in possession and rarely presuming to interfere when the other team is on the attack. But then, even in the midst of one of those funks, he can do what he did today: make the inch-perfect cross — or through-ball, or reverse pass, or surprising incisive run — that creates the goal that wins the match.

You just never know what you’re going to get from Özil. Wenger has to be greatly tempted to sit his ass on the bench for a couple of games … but, especially with Santi Cazorla out, he really doesn’t have anyone else who has that level of creativity. Heck, there aren’t ten players in the world with Özil’s level of creativity. (Creativity in this case being the imagination to see a possibility on the pitch and the technique to make that possibility happen.)

And then Wenger has to be thinking, Maybe, just maybe, I can find the key that will turn his motor on once and for all. Indeed, earlier this year it looked like he had found that key, as Özil went on a kind of scoring spree, producing a series of skillful and beautiful goals. But now he has lapsed back into his fog — and the fear now has to be that he will never come out of it.

All in all, and I have to say that I’ve gone back and forth on this point, I don’t think he’s worth the money he will command when his contract is up; whereas I do think Alexis is worth the money he will command. So I say: sign Alexis, let Özil go, use that money to buy two or three players, at least one of whom has a chance of replacing the aging Santi.