Trossard And Our Wildest Dreams
Football-enlightenment smashed to a million pieces
We were drifting through the forest, the dog and I, soaking in the bluish moss and smouldering rust of the great pines glowing in the rays of the morning sun.
There were deer tracks, and the occasional fox, hare and badger, and sometimes, with the birds and squirrels chirping and barking their warnings as we passed, we saw the heart-shaped tracks of a bull moose that had sauntered through the pines like an unseen spirit.
Through the waking morning came a healing light. A certain fragrance. A deep animistic feeling that beckoned from the future. I felt it in my heart and in my bones and I saw the dog felt it too as he checked his nosing and looked out across the sloping forest toward the lake. The unmistakable promise of long warm days like oncoming sobriety in a world of waste.
Could I trust this feeling now that the ancient seasonal rhythms are so newly broken? How could I foretell the coming days with all these rogue patterns overlapping the old? And I thought about the futility of prophesy and how we hesitate to accept the inevitability of an unfolding universe. So when we got back I wrote this. Enjoy.
Part 1 - The Keeper Of The Balance
I like to imagine I can overcome my impulse to anticipate the future and instead just wait in tranquil patience for life to unfold itself before me. Just breathe and be still. What will be will be. But then, as if awakening from a trance, I’ll find myself merrily lost in various day-dreams, my mind running its own multiplex of blockbusters featuring revenges and triumphs and what-might-have-beens and fabulous one-liners delivered with casual nonchalance.
After our draw at Anfield I caught myself hacking my way through reason and sense, burning my sanity bridges and seeking out the nearest crossroads to make a deal, any deal, to make sure Arsenal still win the league. Wrenched as I was by momentary if-only’s and torn asunder by flashes of the finger-of-blame, I had been flinging “Keep calm and play your game” at the team whilst paying no heed whatsoever to these wise words myself. Arsenal took a deserving point from a ground where the home team were forced to conjure up their old mojo just to get a draw and I was reduced to thrashing about in the netherworld of metaphysical mental gymnastics.
I guess Siddhartha was on the money when he said “desire and craving pleasure can never be satisfied and will only bring suffering”. Fast forward 2500 years and here I am lost in fantasies with my supposed football-enlightenment smashed to a million pieces around me. And this isn’t the first time I’ve struggled to resign myself to the truth that my hopes and desires are not instrumental to the unfolding of events.
Remember The Mudryk Affair. Remember those dark days when we peered into Google’s crystal ball and graduated to Expert Scout Status by scrolling through a few YouTubes? Remember knowing, just knowing that all we needed to solve our shortcomings was that human-sized Haaland replicant Mudryk? If we’d only cough up the equivalent of an island nation’s GDP then balance would be restored?
Transfer window after transfer window we’re tempted to ignite a bonfire of the senses with clubs, agents and the media stoking up an inferno of wild-eyed craving, where some new kid on the block is dangled at 100 million quid and bronze medal Ballon D'or players like Jorginho are announced as bankrupt. And window after window we succumb to the drama of it all as we inflame a dangerous mixture of craving and certainty, convinced that the future is there to be controlled.
I've got a simmering theory that we humans, whether we come dressed as football fans, gamblers or even as the builders of Stonehenge, we all share a common tendency. We all experience a fundamental feeling that there exists a "Keeper Of The Balance" (KOtB). Call it Lady Luck or The Gods or The Universe or whatever you please, “tis a rose by any other name”.
On the one hand, we know that predicting the future using nothing more than fear, hope and that sliver of “reality” we see is a fools errand. But on the other hand, we just know there's an intrinsic fairness and justice to things because we’re driven by an innate socially conditioned intuition that wrongs will be righted.
Whether we’re dragging those mighty bluestones from Wales to Wiltshire, or wearing the same socks at every Emirates game, we’re driven by a deep intuition that by doing so we can stack the odds in our favour because somewhere, somehow, something is keeping a tab on what’s going on and balancing things out when they go awry.
Add this to our propensity to run probability scenarios and we end up screening our own internal multiplex of soothsaying blockbusters. But, much like actual Hollywood, the human mind is cavalier with fact and attentive to drama. We’re all emotionally invested in nothing more than day-dreams based on nothing more than smoke and mirrors.
Part 2 - In Our Wildest Dreams
Back in the January transfer window Arsenal were enamoured with Mudryk, the player himself was flirting ferociously and making social media eyes at every opportunity and it seemed as if a “date” was set. But, as we all know, instead of the Ukrainian Romeo we ended up with the boy next door. Sure, Trossard was a tidy little player and he had premiership experience, but he wasn’t the unstoppable dribbling goal Casanova that had entranced Premier League scouts and fans alike.
So in the end Arsenal and Trossard got hitched and in retrospect it’s easy enough to imagine a KOtB working its magic because who knew that being so dramatically spurned by Mudryk would spark the beginning of something so beautiful!
Trossard has been an incredible addition. It’s as if someone entered “classic, tricky, typical Arsenal player, DNA, Carzola’s lovechild” into a ChatGPT Human Printer and out popped the little Belgium. So far he’s won the March player of the month (in a team including two possible players of the season). In a mere 11 games he’s assisted more times than EVERYONE else in every Premier League team (bar Saka and De Bruyne), and he’s already broken the assist record in the first half (which had stood since the Premier League began). Arsenal haven’t lost a game when he’s started and his footballing fairy dust has made everyone around him sparkle, including giving Martinelli his wings back. And he’s done it all whilst simultaneously looking like a player bursting with energy and like he really really needs a good night’s sleep.
In cartoons and comics there’s a motif. When a punch-up breaks out there’s fists and feet protruding from a cloud of dust. I’m reminded of this every time I see Trossard bamboozling a melee of hulking defenders who’ve encircled him, as he flits about with his absurd close control, darting amongst them, seeming to take advantage of some wormhole in the fabric of spacetime that’s catapulted him out of their vicinity, casually doing keepie-uppies with a nonchalant expression as he makes his escape, unscathed and unruffled.
There’s something of the comic book about Trossard with his face like an old aged child, his Benjamin Button boyish expression, oscillating between a secret smile and a look of dread. Something about his snowboarder arms constantly adjusting as he races about full-speed, so light on his feet, as if a trained dancer suddenly Freaky-Fridayed into a footballer’s life.
But, to cast Trossard as cartoonish would be to underestimate him. Just like believing there’s some sort of a KOtB at work in the background of the universe, it would be to make an elemental mistake, because attributing agency to the wrong source means never really understanding what’s happening around you. Trossard isn’t symbolic of luck or divine intervention, he’s the product of years of hard work that’s cultivated a very human creative flair.
Trossard has intelligence and calmness wrapped around more positional flexibility than the Karma Sutra. His fluidity of movement draws in the opposition whilst his in-game intelligence and perpetual scanning frees up team-mates to spin new patterns on the move. When opposition teams study Arsenal’s tactics and flows of game-state management, intelligent players like Trossard can act both without thought (see Arsenal And The Flow) and by intelligently divining what’s happening in real time in order to counter the counter.
Like Zinchenko, Saka, Ödegaard and Jesus, Trossard adds to Arsenal’s plasticity, creating a chaotic whirl of unpredictability, their movement distorting the opposition’s ability to project probability scenarios and respond accordingly. Instead of playing on the front foot and proactively positioning themselves, hapless opponents are constantly catching up in an ever-changing environment.
In short, Trossard might not have been discovered through magical foresight, but once on the pitch we all discovered the meaning of love at first sight.
Part 3 - Walking Backwards Into The Future
I love how the misery of the Mudryk Affair reshaped itself into a Trossard Romance. I love how it crushed my ridiculous expectations and reminded me just how entertaining life can be when I stop being so driven by an insane mix of fear, desire and assumption.
And what of our draw at Anfield? I love the rush of humility as my certainty was dismantled and I’m once again reminded to pay attention to what’s happening around me rather than blundering about projecting my desires onto the future. We’ve got a brilliant young team that’s progressing beautifully. They took a point where once we’d have already capitulated on the bus to the stadium and they, oh so nearly took all three. This team is screaming at us all, “pay attention to now, not to tomorrow!”
I’m quietly astonished that a football team can remind me that I’m only ever walking backwards into the future. That there’s no such thing as “reality”, there’s only an endless array of human narratives projected onto a canvas we’ve called the future. It’s so refreshing when our fragile fantasies are proved so flimsy as the universe intervenes, demolishes the smoke and mirrors and laughs in the face of foregone conclusions.
Who can predict the unfolding of life’s patterns? And more to the point, who can honestly say they would want to? Eight games to go fellow football travellers. Eight incredible blockbusters waiting to unravel themselves and there’s absolutely nothing we fans can do to stack the odds in our favour. All we can do is wait in glorious anticipation and witness the mayhem unfold as we exit each moment, unscathed and unruffled.
So, there you go! Have an unpredictable week Gunners, take a few deep breathes and let’s just wait and see what happens next. Maybe consider supporting Arsenal Wonderland by clicking the button below as we all whoosh backwards into the future without moving at all.
This team is screaming at us all, “pay attention to now, not to tomorrow!” - how very true! Great piece as always, Jonathan. We go again on Sunday! UTA