Happy Tuesday folks.
I’m sitting here this morning wishing I could write something that has the answers. You know the ones I mean. Not how did we get here; not the meaning of life; not ‘how can the universe be infinite?’; not why are Maroon5 still around; nothing as trivial as that.
But – what do we do now and how do Arsenal get ‘good’ again? My mind goes back to last week ahead of the Sporting game when Mikel Arteta spoke about how we needed to find our identity again. In the context of this season and the two games we’d just played beforehand, it was relatively easy to think this meant exerting a bit more control. Which, I think, is what we got.
Martin Odegaard returned to the team and we had 55% possession with a 92% pass success rate as opposed to 38% possession with 78% success rate in the Carabao Cup final against Man City. It wasn’t a perfect performance, it required a late goal that kinda came out of nowhere to win it, but you could see how that might align with what the manager was thinking.
And yet, I find it hard to really understand how this could truly be the identity the manager wants from this team. I realise that anything that isn’t sharp criticism at this moment in time might not resonate with people, and I just want to be very clear, this isn’t about making any kind of excuse for him or the team. As I said yesterday, this is a pivotal week for him and for this ‘project’, but I just can’t really believe this is the way he wants us to play week in, week out.
Yes, he wants control. He wants the 300,000 passes as Tim elucidated in his column last week. He wants his side to give nothing away defensively. And, when you hear him talk about the game, he consistently focuses on the moments when we could and should hurt the opposition from an attacking perspective. In that 300,000 passes quote, he says:
When they have the right moment to come at us, then we can attack them.
He doesn’t want sterile domination, which is how that level of possession was often categorised. He wants to use it as a tool to crack the opposition open. And yet, we’re a long way from being that team right now. Like anything, I think it’s multi-factored. We can talk about injuries and missing players, accumulated fatigue over the course of the season, lack of confidence, a cautious mindset that has permeated through the side over the course of this campaign, the pressure of the title race, and so many others.
Perhaps the most obvious one for me is this counter-intuitive safety-first approach that I highlighted on the blog and that we talked about in the Arsecast Extra. We seem deathly afraid of giving the ball away in midfield and in the opposition half so we recycle possession in ways which neuters us as an attacking force, yet we’re so willing give the ball back to our goalkeeper to ask him to play the riskiest passes in the riskiest area of the pitch. It makes no sense.
I agreed with James on the podcast yesterday when he said the football we play isn’t a lot of fun. Ultimately, if you’re winning, it doesn’t matter. Right now though, that football is both no fun and not terribly effective. That’s an unfortunate combination. What makes it so hard for me to reconcile is that every bit of our progress under Arteta was built on being brave on the ball. When we had it at the back, it was about control in tight areas, but then getting it forward and pouncing on a team who were then in transition.
Some of that, I will accept, might well be down to how the opposition set up against us these days, but I think we can all see that the bravery on the ball is not what it was either. Again, this isn’t to excuse anything, because through his training, the recruitment and his tactics, this is Arteta’s responsibility. I just can’t reconcile what we’re seeing right now with what might be considered the ‘final form’ of the team he built to get us to the point where we’re consistent title challengers. Yes, he was always more defensively minded than Arsene Wenger, for example, but in 2023-24 we scored a lot of goals, 18 more than the Invicibles did in 2003-04. We attacked well, often, and with efficiency.
Maybe I’m overthinking it. Maybe the answer is more obvious. Whatever you think of Martin Odegaard, the fact our de facto chief creative player has played the equivalent minutes of just 12 Premier League games this season is a problem. The lack of output from Gabriel Martinelli is an issue, just 1 goal in the league all season. Leandro Trossard hasn’t scored in the league since December. Bukayo Saka has been below his best, and his replacement, Noni Madueke, has struggled to fill that gap. Kai Havertz missed the first half of the season and looks like a player for whom a year out has been quite damaging.
Up top, Viktor Gyokeres – despite being the leading scorer, and fair play to him for that – has not been the kind of transformative addition people had hoped the striker signing would be. It’s been too much about how he has to adapt to us or we have to adapt to him, and while we appear to have found some middle ground, he’s not a player that gives me any confidence when he’s on the pitch, and I don’t think he’s really a fit for how we envision the way we want this team to play.
It’s quite funny to think that the last forward signing who really added something to our attack in a significant way was Gabriel Jesus when he signed from Man City in the summer of 2022. And that lasted just a few months before the knee injury at the World Cup put a halt to that and he’s never been the same since. I think you could probably make a case that Oleksandr Zinchenko could, in his first season, be categorised as a player who made us better in attack in that purple patch when his roaming left-back role was so effective in our build-up. But, in short, our attacking recruitment has been an issue generally, so when you lack that elite talent at the top end of the pitch, perhaps it’s natural to gradually become more reliant on players further back.
All the way back to the goalkeeper. And here we are. Which is a bit of pickle, because with just a few weeks left of the season, I don’t quite know what we do to fix it. Or if we should even try. If the players look crippled with anxiety already, how do you turn that around? Maybe we have to lean further into the defensive side of our game, which is inherently risky, but I don’t think there’s a magic button we can hit to make this team play the way we did at our fluent best the season before last.
We grind. And if we grind and win, no problem. Grind and lose, and defeat is exacerbated by how you play. It’s too easy to say ‘I wouldn’t mind losing if we at least had a go’. Losing is crap however it happens, and I remember fine well the frustration of being a team that was defensively shambolic who got away with it sufficiently to win enough games, but when it came to the crunch we were easy fodder for the best sides. That wasn’t any fun either, but right now it feels we’ve gone a bit too far the other way. Can we correct the course?
I dunno. I don’t have the answers. I wish I did. Sometimes I sit here in the morning and write as a way to just get stuff out of my head. And now it’s out of my head and onto this page, and you’ve just read it so it’s in your head now. If it wasn’t already. A problem shared, and all that.
Let’s hope the manager finds a solution. Or, at the very least, enough wins between now and the end of the season to make this priority number one in the summer.
Have a good one folks.
