Amidst the unexpected goal feast in Eindhoven on Tuesday night, Arsenal’s seventh goal was probably the most extraordinary of the lot. In the words of Mikel Arteta, ‘Calafiori makes a run as a nine and scores with his right foot.’ Not only was Calafiori making a run, ‘as a nine’, he starts his run from the right side. Crucially, Arteta added, ‘this is the team I want to see.’ Calafiori was not going rogue in his manager’s eyes.
Needless to say, this isn’t really normal for a left-back. It is clear that during this period of injury enforced attacking austerity, Arteta has clearly identified the full-backs as a key area to help make up for the shortfall further forwards. Against West Ham, Arteta experimented with dropping Thomas Partey back between Saliba and Gabriel, with Jurrien Timber and Calafiori pushed on as wing-backs.
It did not work it is fair to say. In fact, West Ham scored their winning goal by exploiting the gap left by Calafiori in the left-back position (there were a few other authors of that particular mishap too). A few days later against Forest, Arsenal did not repeat that experiment but tweaked it by using Riccardo Calafiori as the joker in the pack. Here is his heatmap from that game.
Calafiori had the best chance Arsenal produced in that game, curling a right footed shot off the inside of the post. However, and this has become a theme for Arsenal left-backs of late, Arteta took the decision to remove him at half-time after an early yellow card. Myles Lewis-Skelly has had two red cards in the last month (one subsequently revoked) and had to be replaced by Calafiori before half-time in Eindhoven after being lucky to escape another.
That’s two red cards and two early substitutions due to yellow cards in the left-back position in recent weeks. With much of their attacking talent still not out of their hospital gowns, the full-back areas have become so key in recent weeks because that is where Arsenal are healthiest. Ben White, Jurrien Timber, Myles Lewis-Skelly, Riccardo Calafiori, Kieran Tierney and Oleksandr Zinchenko are all starting quality full-backs. Arteta has even been able to spare Zinchenko for the midfield effort with Mikel Merino needed upfront.
However, even absent the current injury crisis, for all the talk of Arteta’s penchant for structure and his love of defenders, his taste in left-backs has always been pretty outlandish. While the right-backs look a bit more ‘short back and sides’ in footballing terms, the left-backs are very ‘fur coat and aviator shades.’
It is part of the reason that Kieran Tierney has never really found a home under Arteta’s premiership, other than the very outset of the manager’s reign when he played as a wide centre-half in a back three. Then it was Ainsley Maitland-Niles, operating at left wing-back who was asked to zigzag hither and thither all over the field. Even Bukayo Saka had a prolonged crack at the position in Arteta’s early months.
Tierney has just been too conventional for Arteta’s tastes in the position. In the summer of 2022, Arsenal pursued Lisandro Martinez, whose spell at Manchester United has shown him to be something of a loose cannon to say the least. When he opted for the career suicide of a move to Old Trafford, Arteta brought in Oleksandr Zinchenko.
Zinchenko briefly revolutionised the way that Arsenal play by inverting into midfield and sitting alongside Thomas Partey at the base, popping up pretty much everywhere on the pitch except left-back. After a while, teams cottoned on to the space he was vacating as well as his own defensive frailties in one-on-one situations.
After a disastrous performance by Zinchenko at home to Aston Villa last April, Arteta lost patience and even his tolerance for high jinx from left-back was exhausted. Like all good rock stars, Zinchenko burned twice as bright but for half as long in this Arsenal team. Last season proved to be a little bit too ‘Be Here Now’ for the manager’s tastes with too much unnecessary riffing and over production.
We have seen some fairly rock ‘n’ roll behaviour from Takehiro Tomiyasu from his stints at left-back too. Remember, if you will, him popping up at centre-forward to help lay on the winning goal for Gabriel Martinelli against Manchester City in October 2023. Or his strike against Everton on the final day of last season, which was very much a centre-forward style goal scored in open play.
Far from being deterred by Zinchenko’s descent into inverted left-back excess, Arteta’s tastes in the position have not become more conservative. He was ready to spend large on the next pretty young thing in Riccardo Calafiori, a man who not only looks like he could have been in Zoolander, but a defender even more willing to go ‘off road’ than Zinchenko.
Not satisfied with this continued thirst for crazy at left-back, the manager decided to remould the most talented midfielder in the Arsenal academy into a left-back. This was truly Bob Dylan ‘going electric’ at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival territory. In the meantime, Kieran Tierney and his tucked in shirt will return to Celtic this summer.
With the focus on structure and standards elsewhere in the system, why does Arteta ask for his left-backs to be so flamboyant? There is clearly risk and reward baked into this equation. Lewis-Skelly scored against City, Calafiori scored against PSV, while both players have been hooked early in games recently for dicing with red card situations.
Good teams do tend to be lopsided in their approach. Arsenal have less need for chaos on the right side with Odegaard and Saka stationed over there and either Timber or White can do a more traditional full-back job. Every team needs a bit of chaos and I imagine Arteta’s reasoning is that it’s more difficult for opponents to deal with a madcap full-back.
Because who do you assign to patrol a zig zagging left-back? It is difficult to do without destroying your own structure. The issue with Zinchenko, I guess, was that his movements (largely into left central midfield) were too predictable and later became too ill-judged. Manchester City and Pep Guardiola have shown a similar trajectory with their left-backs.
If Zinchenko was our João Cancelo, then Calafiori would appear to be our Gvardiol, who has scored nine Premier League goals in just over a year for Manchester City. Gvardiol’s runs have proved difficult for opponents to track simply because man-marking a left-back doesn’t seem to be a good use of a defending team’s resources and would surely just open up space for a player in the City attack.
Whatever the rime and reason for it, Arteta, a manager sometimes accused of some rather trad-con football (personally, I reject that criticism but plenty of people have levelled it), has an appetite for danger when it comes to his left-backs. Calafiori, with his untamed locks, seems to be the latest incarnation and Arsenal’s agent of chaos.
