A Champions League Special - Back With A Bang

You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!

Alan Watts once said “there are no mistakes in the Universe”. He meant that everything is as it should be, so just go with the flow and let the Tao wash over you. It’s funny how a game of football can offer as much insight. Arsenal played like a snowdrop unfolding on an early spring morning, both astounding and perfectly normal at the same time. An incredible demonstration and yet somehow as it should be: a rush of supreme calm, an explosion of joyous peace. Remember that feeling as a kid when the sun rose over a beautiful day, all that potential, all that bubbling adventure waiting to unravel? Here we come new day, get ready!

Source - Arsenal.com

Our first game back in the Champions League for 7 years (7 YEARS!) and we played like we were defending champions. Arsenal were flowing against PSV, effortlessly reading each others darting runs and space-creating hesitations, an apparent simplicity of play belying a deep complexity, an exhibition of togetherness. Red and white on perfect green. The shapes, the triangles, the runs, the pleasure.

For years now I’ve been watching football on screens. Last season was the first game I managed to attend in person for years and years, so I’ve grown accustomed to the screen format. The studios built in strange mimicry of the bridge on the Starship Enterprise. All that aluminium and blue neon and boardroom desks. Ex-footballers dressed-up like fledgling bankers with their pained expressions of longing for a life just lost mixed with impertinent cockiness and boredom. The montages of previous games, goals, misses and interviews. The ridiculous narratives cooked up and served as insights and the swooping camera angles.

There’s a warm reassurance to familiarity, something so relaxing about fulfilled expectations (even if it’s a terrible pseudo-corporate setting constantly generating nonsense and shallowness). But although the format is always the same, the uncertainty lies on the pitch. We never know. Anything can happen and that’s the beauty of the game. That fine distinction, as Arteta recently mentioned, between probability and possibility. We can predict the games on feelings, on recent data, or by ingesting a cupful of the tsunami of opinion constantly blasting toward us. But we never really know. Again, that’s another beauty of the game.

Did you really expect such fluency and maturity against PSV, a team that hadn’t lost a game since the Dutch Tulip Bubble and had managed to steal points off us last season? I’m usually optimistic about our chances but I wasn’t expecting such eloquence of movement and composure. We’re always talking about the group, the bond between this team of comrades. It’s just amazing when we see it in realtime, when the team of individuals become a unified flow, like a cacophony becoming a symphony.

Screen grab from Youtube

So let’s think about the individuals for a moment. Because that’s the thing with Arteta’s game management, it’s always more than the sum of its parts. There are “units” working within “units” where individuals can shine but the unit is the light from which they emanate. These units made up of the front three, the midfield, the defence, the left side, the right side, are all interchangeable to some degree as players flit in and of positions and share roles. How can we separate the goals scorers from the flow of play that brought them to a scoring opportunity?

Every individual played brilliantly, with conviction and belief. Every player trusted themselves and their team mates to do what they knew they could. There was no shivering of tension in the back of the mind, no ghosts whispering in ears, there was only that silent certainty that a millions hours of practice and togetherness can create. So much so that it seems churlish to mentions names. This was a team display in the truest sense of the word. This was the collective and the power of “Us”.

One of the (many) reasons I love football is it reminds me that the individual is something of an illusion. No one invented the world into which they were born. No one invented the language they speak or historical period into which they emerged. We are an amalgamation of what went before. We are all mirror neurons reflecting sophisticated human behaviour and thought processes that surround us like a kaleidoscope of shared togetherness, dissolving the imaginary walls that separate us.

Photo by Hanson Lu on Unsplash

Who could you separate from the team for special comment? I’ll say Trossard rose to the occasion beautifully. Ødegaard was sublime. Saka? Oh man. Saka! Jesus displayed that mixture of tenacity and skill that has caused every other player to believe in themselves just a bit more. Rice was imperious, calm, everywhere. And calmness? Gabriel and Saliba play like they’re meditating. White was his usual brilliant self, so good he goes unnoticed almost, like the foundation to a building, take it away and everything fails but leave it there and all is as it should be. Zinchenko still a Knight in shining armour but somehow riding into battle with a foresight of victory. And Havertz (almost like he’s engaged in on-pitch therapy), revealed (again) his smarts and quality, always in the right place, always making the right runs. When the levee breaks for Havertz there’s going to be a goal flood in Arsenal Town.

It was wonderful to see the subs too. That long lost friend Emile Smith-Rowe rocking up out of nowhere (where the hell have you been dude? ) to interchange fluidly with The Bournemouth Kid Nelson, desperately buzzing about on the left, (and the right and the middle). Jorginho, like an uncle calming down the sugar-rushed party and Tomi perfectly defending Sir Zinny’s land. Vieira getting better and better every time we see him. And Raya. I don’t know what to say because I feel for Arron, but Raya is incredibly reassuring. I’m not sure what I’m seeing sometimes, why I’m immediately calmed by his play, but whatever Arteta sees in him I can’t articulate, but I understand.

So all in all, a return to the Champions League that no one could have dreamt. A genuinely supreme performance.

I’ll be back next week at the usual time, and I hope you didn’t mind this special Arsenal Wonderland Extra appearing unexpectedly on your doorstep but hey, what else could I do but crow a little about last nights beautiful display.

Have a wonderful weekend fellow Gunners!