From Family Barbecue to Goal Fest
Relationships that grow in confined spaces!
The dog and I had veered off-track. We found ourselves lost in another world, full of crows and lakes and stories of life, where not a word was uttered of football. We roamed a world of poetic contemplations of life and love and what it is to be human.
We love that wild and tumbling landscape and we will return there again and again. But now we have found our way back to the Wonderland of Arsenal. And we’re glad to be here because we’ve missed this place of passion and togetherness. And we’ve missed you, dear Wonderlanders. You’re welcome to join us there or not. Because we have now returned. Hello :)
There’s such a peculiar relationship between expectation and reality, like magnets pushing against each other, they never really meet, so we fill the gap with desire and hope. What we want to see and what we actually see have a tenuous link for sure. The saying “I’ll believe it when I’ll see it”, should be reversed to “I’ll see it when I believe it”, because you can only really can see something when you allow yourself to believe it first.
And this is exactly what happening to Arsenal at the moment. It’s not so much that we’re watching a team maturing and growing, although of course we are, but we’re also watching the wider football world struggling to come to terms with thinking about Arsenal in a different way.
Last season, apparently, we were a swashbuckling team of inexperienced hopefuls, led by a hungry, young manager, punching above our weight, driven forward by the power of emotion (pumping four star emotion into a two star engine), but we failed to get over the line because Man City has a magical football wizard as a manager and oil money will alway win in the end. End of!
(Yeah. I know. The tedium of the Arsenal Zombie Narrative never fails to retell beautiful complexity into a simple set of stupidities).
This year, apparently, we’re a team struggling with oft-cited (never measured) second-album syndrome, we’re lacking a proper striker, not quite able to come to terms with a change from swashbuckling emotional immaturity to dead-eyed control monsters. Then, we went to Dubai (oh how the oil money gets in there somehow) and for some inexplicable reason a family barbecue transformed us into a high-energy, confident, goal-machine that doesn’t need a striker after all.
(Yep, here we go again).
But strangely, deep in every ludicrous media narrative lies a teeny tiny kernel of truth. As the Celebration Police struggle to remix their narrative to adjust to Arsenal’s aprés-Dubai goal-fest, it does appear that Arsenal are in fact returning to a flowing football precisely because the team has begun to play with control and flair.
But it’s more than that too (of course). This season Arsenal has, without doubt, evolved the defence into a better and stronger unit, has laid more emphasis on set-pieces, is trying to dominate possession and quickly regain possession through strong pressing, and we’ve definitely improved in terms of shape on and off the ball. Plus, so far this season we’ve not been risking the whole pirate ship on every swashbuckling attack.
But, I’m wondering if maybe were also witnessing something else happening, something almost beautifu, and something less obvious to the footballs’s self-appointed party-poopers.
Remember last season when everyone was baffled by Zinchenko’s poltergeist ability to pop-up anywhere on the pitch with an unpredictability and fluidity? Remembers when he rewrote the rule book on Being A Left-Back? Well, it turns out Zinchenko was just the beginning of the evolution within the Artetaverse.
What I believe, to use a favourite Wengerism, is that Arteta is merging two footballing philosophies. He hasn’t abandoned Positional Football which has always served him well, especially because he’s a disciple of Pep the Magical Footballing Wizard for whom PF is a religion. But he does seem to be introducing a kind of Relational Football within a Positional template. What? Ok, ok here’s what I mean…
Arteta has divided the pitch up into areas and spaces (typical of the Positional Football philosophy), but within those areas and spaces he’s encouraged a flowing interchangeable movement of players depending on the relationship each player has to each other, to the ball and top the opposing team (typical of the Relational Football philosophy). So you end up with small storms of ever-changing Zinny-style movement where players perpetually interchange positions and flow around the pitch. But these small tornadoes of player movement are (mostly) limited to areas and spaces in which they are permitted to play like this.
It’s a also a complex evolution from last season and it’s beautiful to watch. We’ve now got eddies and flows and currents of players relationally swooshing about within their positional riverbanks, which creates confusion in the opposition as to who to mark and who’s responsible for what role. In fact, who’d have guessed the away-kit was actually a soothsayers map of the way Arsenal would play this season!
This sort of evolution takes time to master. So, instead of just assuming Arteta its conservative and resistant to change, we could say that he’s managed the change brilliantly. Players like Havertz (or even Trossard even though he hot the ground running) have slowly become more and more integral to the first team as they learn and mature into the role. And players such as ESR need time to be reintegrated in the first team because it’s harder to break into a more fluid and dynamic team.
And of course it means that the ex-pros who steal a living by moaning on and on about “hoofing it” and “over celebrating” fail completely to see an avant-garde style that wasn’t even dreamt up when they were “taking no prisoners” before eating their orange segments at half time.
Now, I want to inject some humility here. I could be wrong (I often am wrong). I might be seeing what I’m believing rather than believing what I’m seeing, but I think that Arteta has dissected and portioned the pitch in such a way that he’s managed to introduce a Relational Footballing philosophy into a Positional Footballing landscape.
Have I gone mad? Has writing Jonathan Foster’s The Crow (go on, check it out) finally driven me over the edge? Has watching 21 goals since Arsenal returned from that sun-drenched Family Barbecue blown my mind? Or has the football’s most obsessed and passionate coach actually found a way for the football’s billionaires to compete with football’s trillionaires? (Oh god how depressing that sounds).
(By the way, a future article here on AW will address the demotion of we humans to mere extensions of the digital world. Is it any wonder that emotion is being described as a peculiar and messy extra that should be reduced to a minimum when we live in a world stuffed through the lens of statistics and data? Much as I want to drivel on about the under-skilled analysis of our football commentators, they are in fact are merely reflecting a tradegy of our times. Anyway, more on that in a future article).
But for the time being, let’s hope Arteta really is driving a new evolution of footballing thinking and Porto get the same treatment as Liverpool (Liverpool!), West Ham and Burnley. Bish Bash Bosh, Goodnight.
So there you go fellow Gooners. Thanks so much for reading this week’s Arsenal Wonderland and have a wonderfully positionally relational goal-fest of a week, dear readers.
Have a good week yourself, you magical wanderer!