Saturday round-up: Saka and Merse, modern football, existential Pep

Morning all.

Let’s have a quick Saturday round-up, because while obviously the focus is tomorrow’s Carabao Cup final, and Mikel Arteta held his press conference yesterday, it’s too soon to preview that game. There’s no point in me weighing in today on the David Raya/Kepa debate, although if you’ve listened the preview podcast on Patreon you’ll know what I think at this point. For the rest, it’ll have to wait till Sunday!

As with any cup final, there are media duties to perform, and on Sky Sports Bukayo Saka sits down with Paul Merson, and although he was on the bench for the FA Cup win in 2020, this will be his first final involvement from the start with us, and it’s something he’s excited about:

I’ve been involved in some finals, but I didn’t play for Arsenal. This is going to be my first and, like you said, it’s come through the academy and to be in this position now, I’m very excited at the prospect of winning at Wembley on the weekend and celebrating that with the fans.

There was a question about Arsenal’s style, and I liked how Merson framed it:

The 1-0 to the Arsenal song cAme from our era. And my medal says winner on the back.

Exactly! And on what remains of this season, and how driven the players are, Saka said:

We finished second three times in a row, everyone knows that. But yeah, for us, I just feel this year we have such a strong belief that we can do it. We have the quality, we have a great squad. I think that mix is what’s making me believe. But obviously, at the same time, we haven’t achieved anything yet.

You know, we’re close, but we haven’t done it yet. So we’re just staying humble, staying grounded. We’re letting people speak and just taking it game by game starting Sunday.

I know his season hasn’t been quite at the level we’ve come to expect, because of the high standards he set himself, but I don’t think some of the criticism I’ve seen levelled at him over the last week or so is particularly fair. That said, Sunday would be a tremendous time for him to deliver what we know he’s capable of in terms of goals and assists, so fingers crossed.

You can watch the full interview below:

Link for app

Meanwhile, here’s an interesting take from Adam Clery on the somewhat interminable discourse around modern football being crap in comparison to the ‘good old days’:

Link for app

I think there’s more than a grain of truth to this, and it’s something I’ve referenced before. The idea of the Invincibles was that we blew everyone away by playing scintillating football. In fact, most of the time the games were actually ‘won in the tunnel’ as the opposition looked at the likes of Thierry Henry, Dennis Bergkamp, Patrick Vieira etc, and just crapped their pants with fear and handed us the three points as we performed balletic moves up and down the pitch to score the most beautiful goals anyone has ever seen before or since.

The reality of the Invincibles was that we drew 12 games that season, won 11 more by a single goal margin, and had to work our arses off to do what we did. When we clicked there was nobody like us, there’s no doubting that, but lots of games were hard work, and not particularly entertaining. But the way that season ended up paints the picture that goes down in the history books, which is one of incredible achievement and success, so those more prosaic elements get overlooked (and quite rightly too!).

The point about how much football there is is another aspect that makes a lot of sense. It’s not quite a case of familiarity breeding contempt, but there is now no escape. The media landscape has shifted, if the game’s not on TV it’s easy to find a HD stream so everyone can see everything all the time. Then there’s the increased schedule of European games, internationals, pre-season tournaments, football clubs becoming relentless purveyors of merchandise and hashtag content, and there is no escape.

Footballers used to be able to go away on their summer holidays, drink some pints, eat some fish and chips, come back a bit tubbier then work off the excess in pre-season. There was a time when football fans would turn their attention to other sports in the summer to get their fix. All of a sudden I’m very interested in Wimbledon or test cricket because there is no football. Now there is never no football. There is always football. All the football. I think that has an impact. Over-saturation of anything is never good, and it’s very hard to escape the sense that’s where we are with things right now.

Finally, and I know he’s hard to take sometimes, but I quite enjoyed Pep Guardiola in his press conference yesterday. There were questions about some kind of ‘conflict’ between him and Mikel Arteta which he dismissed, seeing them for the kind of typical headline making stuff that could populate the back pages if he fell into that trap. That was then followed up by thinly veiled criticism that Arsenal use the ‘dark arts’, with the journalist in question looking for him to respond to that.

Again, he wouldn’t fall into the trap, told the bloke if he wanted to know about that to go to London and ask Arteta himself, before rightly pointing out it’s the job of the officials to manage that during a game. Then, as someone else tried to get a question in, it all went a bit existential as Guardiola said:

Look at what’s happened around the world right now. We are becoming an incredible chaos and nobody moves one finger. So the world is going to collapse and still we are here talking about dark arts from one team to another team. There are more important things than that.

There’s having your question batted away by a manager who doesn’t want to give you your column inches for tomorrow’s paper, and then there’s that!

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Right, I’m gonna leave it there for now. If you need something to listen to today, the aforementioned preview podcast is on Patreon right now, with discussion of being back in a final at Wembley, team selection decisions, and lots more. If you want to sign up it costs just $6 per month (+ sales tax if that applies in your country), and if you do sign up, please do it via the Patreon website because if you do it through the iOS app, Apple – with trillions in the bank already – somehow feel the need to apply a 30% surcharge. The greed of these unconscionably rich corporations knows no bounds.

Enjoy your Saturday folks, back here tomorrow for the preview blog, and then the long-wait for kick-off. Until then.