Something’s gotta give/writing for Goonerville
Seldom in the field of Gooner football has so little been achieved by those with so much to the dismay of so many. OK, so long as we limit ourselves to the Wenger years, truly it was sooo much worse before.
I digress. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that we have a team with as greater talent as a whole than any other team. But we still lose to recently promoted teams at home. Doesn’t compute. Is it down to Arsène’s stubbornness in not buying, or playing kids or, or, well fill in your own summation.
To my mind it may have something to do with the way Arsène sees the world. Or at least how he sees the way to winning at football. I was thinking that the Barcodes got their tactics right on Sunday and how with all the sparkling array of talent at our disposal, we managed so little of consequence. It would be easy to revert to calling for Fabianski’s head after one high-profile error in a reasonable run of form. But that would be ignoring the other ten players on the pitch. Yes it was an error, but it wasn’t the whole match. Frankly we didn’t deserve the points.
Take your minds back to what Cesc said about the difference between how Spain prepare versus how Arsenal do. With Spain they looked at the opposition, highlighted their strengths and weaknesses and put together a game-plan with that in mind. That is not done at Arsenal, they just practice playing Wengerball and one assumes expect it to all work out on the night.
It sometimes does, and everybody raves. Sometimes, like the last game it doesn’t and we end up with complete bewilderment. Is this some of the problem? To be able to play the Arsenal way we have to have a team which can think on it’s feet and come up with an alternative if it’s not working. If our more creative players aren’t up for it, or are prevented from playing, then that’s not going to happen. Teams have learnt that if they pack midfield, press us and we’re not moving the ball around as we can, they only have to have one good chance and take it to put us under pressure.
Which brings us neatly to the second potential issue. If the way we play is based on knowing we can out-pass anyone on our day, there has to be an inherent danger of expecting to win, rather than trying to win. If the problem is in the players’ minds then why do we continually fall prey to not learning the lessons. It’s not like we haven’t had experience before.
Why have we not learnt? It honestly beats me, but if it hasn’t gone in by now, surely we have to try something different. Even the ‘mental strength’ we had to come back and win from conceding first seems to have deserted us. On a weekend when the mancs get an injury time winner, we really didn’t look likely to save a point let alone win three. It seems that the psychology at Arsenal is wrong at the moment, it needs to change so that every game is seen as three points to be won. Just turning up has never been an option, and now any team in the league can look at our results and think they have a chance. We need to make teams scared to play us again. It’s going to take a lot of hard work.
On a separate note, it’s been increasingly difficult to find time to post, so if you think you have something sensible to say, get in touch and I’ll consider posting it for you. I’d rather expletives were deleted before you send them or simply not used, cos there’s a good chance they will be before publication.
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