In what was a stunning 20 minutes we scored 3 against a lineup that features more stars than almost any club in Europe. It was a stunning display from our players who pinged the ball around faster and more accurately that any side I’ve seen play. Make no mistake we ripped them to shreds, it wasn’t a case of our opponents not being good enough but rather a result born out of our performance rather than theirs.
Arseblog described it as a declaration of a title challenge, Walcott and Cazorla said after the game that it is something we must do every week and Coquelin has echoed these sentiments in his mid-week media rounds.
In his MOTD appearance Ian Wright was asked towards the end of the post-match whether or not he thought whether the Arsenal performance merited a title challenge and something to the effect of whether this year would be different. His response, bathed in classic Wright wit was that every year Arsenal announce a challenge. The other commentators chuckled but thinking about our one-off performances in the past it’s not hard to see that perhaps it wasn’t laced in the irony his co-commentators thought it was.
If you look to last year we had the late charge which involved 2 crucial must-win matches for Chelsea to keep us away from getting a sniff. Our announcement that year came in the dispatching of City, winning playing counter-attacking football with the Coquelin and Cazorla bossing their midfield. The year before anything that Aaron Ramsey did seemed to be a statement that we had a world-class player who could take us there, but our challenge collapsed when he suffered a recurring injury that robbed us of the dynamic goal scoring midfielder who seemed to be pushing us in every game but the big ones.
The year before we scared the pants of a Bayern team who went on to win the Champions League.
After the Bayern game the wave of optimism that swept around the club enabled us to be, similarly to last year the best club in England in that second part of the season. We’ve beaten top level opposition and it’s spurred a run but we ultimately failed to keep the consistency the next year.
Don’t get me wrong this squad is much, much deeper than those of the barren years. The question that remains for me is does Arsene’s style of play work against the clubs which sit back.
When I think of Arsene’s key words to describe his footballing philosophy I think of the trust that he puts in his players. I honestly don’t believe that he cares whether they play attacking or defensive football. I think it’s up to them. He guides them on technique and trains the players to want to win which invites their attacking play but he trusts them to communicate on the pitch and position themselves in a way to follow the feeling of the game. They just have more fun running forwards than backwards.
That is what brings us the sublime moments like the opening 20 minutes on Sunday (nope I’m still not over it) but it is also what breeds the absolutely daft goals we concede. As the players age they learn and I think Arsene looks for a balance in mentality and attributes rather than guiding them and disciplining the players on where to stand.
There is a constant criticism of Arsene stating that he doesn’t do “tactics”. The Tactics statement is incorrect because he still needs to balance the attributes, that is tactics on one level. What people mean though is that he doesn’t yell at his players to stand in a certain spot to stop a goal. That’s true he doesn’t, he never has and he never will because to create the team that he wants they all need to be almost telepathic with each other.
That doesn’t come from him describing what to do when, it comes from the players understanding the game and more so understanding one another. The next steps for the team is to understand each other all year round and whether or not they will develop the diversity of dialogue they require to be able to communicate on how to break down the West Hams and Olympiacosses as well as the Manchester United’s and the Manchester Cities remains to be seen.
We’ve done all the teams at least once before. Can we do them over again this year on a sustained run to lift the league title. Let’s hope so.
the Reasonable Gooner 