Zinchenko - Portrait Of An Footballing Artist

Re-thinking the role of the footballer

After the last week’s launch, posting this Zinchenko piece feels like the real beginning of Arsenal Wonderland, which I can’t believe is actually alive and kicking. A special debt of gratitude to all the fellow commentators from The Athletic who joined during the week. Please feel free to comment if you’ve got any suggestions, ideas or just anything you want to say :)

I wrote this last week after a long walk through a forest with the dog. Sometimes, in the deep quiet where all you can hear is the slushy snow underfoot, and the drumming of territorial woodpeckers who’ve misread this unseasonably warm weather for the onset of spring, sometimes there’s peace enough to fall into a meditative contemplation. On this walk I started thinking about (of all things) how Zinchenko is a kind of footballing maverick, and I fell into pondering on change and possibilities and how beautifully life weaves it all together.

When I got home I was still in that frame of mind, so apologies for the somewhat lyrical approach, but hey, it is what it is :)

I love a free spirit. I love a person who dares to break from tradition and question the norm. A inquisitive soul who’ll unshackle themselves from the tyranny of convention and ask “How else might this be?” There’s true genius in even posing the question let alone rethinking, rearranging and rebuilding a whole new form. But don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean in some thoughtless so-called entrepreneurial disruptive smash-it-up way, done purely in the raving pursuit of profit. No, I mean the people who truly embrace the idea that there’s an almost unimaginable variety of ways to express ourselves as human beings, the people who genuinely understand doctrine as chains and dare to forge a new path and open new territory.

Of course, on some level, these people are something of a myth. Everyone stands on the shoulders of those who came before. Joyce didn’t invent the novel but his profound experimentation twisted it into a new form. Banksy didn’t invent street art but his political and social commentary rewired its impact and his refusal to bask in the consequent fame reframed celebrity. And Oleksandr Zinchenko didn’t invent football, he just unchained himself from the tyranny of expectation and rethought the role of the footballer’s role.

Watching Oleksandr Zinchenko playing football is like watching the dawning of a new era. Just as we moved from the Bronze to the Iron Age, Zinchenko kicked Football from the Rigid to the Fluid Age. Where footballers were once predictably playing on well trodden paths in their rehearsed roles, Zinchenko roams around with revolutionary freedom and liberating deviance. Sure, a Zidane or a Ronaldinho could break the established order by playing with astonishing individual flair, but in typical fashion, Zinchenko took one look at the Book Of Football Positions, sat down and took out his pen. You’d better keep your eyes on him or you’ll be left in the Old Era and miss a real-life maverick rewriting football history.

By innovating the role of the role, Zinchenko managed to smuggle a whole new playing style through the Nothing To Declare Channel because nobody even thought to check his bags stuffed with a never-before-seen aqueous genius. Zinchenko just doesn’t care for lines of demarcation. He threw his map out the window, he’s oblivious to borders, he defies the anchors of positional logic and instead freestyles through games with incomprehensibly smart fluidity. It’s almost incredible he bothers to stay on the pitch at all!

The only thing you can be sure of with Oleksandr Zinchenko is that eventually he’ll be pulling a bunch of skinny-kid bodybuilder poses and screaming full spittle at the crowd because moments earlier he’s accelerated out of nowhere, performed some close-up sleight of foot magic and Hey-Presto, Arsenal are a goal up and heading for victory.

And even then, in full caveman celebration mode, he’ll crash through conventions and madly embrace a bunch of fist-clenching fans behind the security barrier. “Come to me my fellow band of brothers!” Yep, there’s definitely something of the chivalric knight about Sir Oleksandr who plays every match as if it were perpetually St Crispin’s Day. I can see him raging through games with a fearless fury and then, when the battle is won and his team mates cruise out of The Emirates in their blinging SUVs, Zinny will be galloping through the gates on his wild-eyed trusty steed screaming “From this day on shall we happy few, we band of Arsenal brothers be remembered for eternity!”

The guy is a natural born winner and his confidence and determination are contagious. You can see the rest of the squad becoming infected with his belief and boldness and sharing his conviction that if you just envisage hard enough the material world will align to your demands and the Premiership will be yours.

Arteta is a savvy operator, he understands that players are human beings driven not by statistics or money or their media manufactured facades, but by their emotional architecture, by their hearts (for more on that read my post Mikel Arteta - A Line In The Sand) so when Mikel brought Zinchenko to Arsenal he was buying a player that suited his plans not just on the pitch, but off it too. He was buying The Ultimate Ukrainian Self-Belief Potion and now everyone is drinking it by the bucket load.

But for all his apparently chaos agent style, for all his smashing of the established order and for all his Battle of Agincourt urging, Zinny’s not breaking all the rules, he’s not gone completely rogue. He’s playing like this with Arteta’s blessing and under Arteta’s tutelage. Which in itself is fascinating because remember the early days when people claimed Arteta was playing too conservatively, like a manager stuck in a plan? That picking a consistent (and best) eleven meant that Arteta was risk averse? Well, explain Zinchenko then, because there’s a player to bring any rule-bound manager out in a glacially cold sweat.

Zinchenko is perfect for Arteta because the perfect Arteta player sits in the centre of the classic Venn diagram of three circles. They need physical brilliance, emotional maturity and mental sharpness. To play for Mikel you need to be a highly tuned athlete with Zen-like mind control and the craftiness of a fox on the hunt. A lot of players have two out of three (which ain't bad) but Zinny hit’s the jackpot. He’s reads games like a chess player, predicting scenarios, running through possibilities, calmly scouring the pitch for opportunities. He’s out-leaping towering opponents like he’s graduated from the salmon school of jumping and he’s gliding and darting around the pitch like a great white searching for opportunities where no one thought to look. Whenever he’s got the ball his teammates are all systems go because, like footballing Whac-A-Mole, you never know who’s next in line for a pinged pass or a narrow one-two.

The way Zinchenko plays almost makes me think that Arteta is accidentally revealing an unbeknownst self-destructive side to his personality. It’s like Arteta has spent so much time thinking about and creating the most meticulous and impenetrable team of immaculately coached players, and then in a delirious moment of insane contrarianism he throws a spinning spanner into his perfect engineering. “Yeah, do whatever you want mate, run about anywhere, whatever!” It almost makes me think that, but not quite, because Zinchenko isn’t a spanner in the works, he’s the spanner that makes it work.

It’s fascinating to watch Arteta’s experimentation in real time, to see him choose new pieces and construct the footballing work of art that is Arsenal these days. Yes, sometimes he get’s it wrong, he steps back and needs to look again. Sometimes he realises that he needs to rebalance the whole thing, so he rights his wrongs and sure enough the whole team makes more sense, becomes more special, more extraordinary. And sometimes he gets it right first time and when he steps back we see something we’ve never seen before and we think, wow, will ya look at that! Zinchenko, with his supernatural capacity to appear everywhere at all times, seems to somehow improve the balance of the whole team.

Ok, maybe I’ve gone too far with this Portrait Of An Footballing Artist, maybe the Joycean desire to struggle against the restrictions life imposes has influenced my thinking about Zinchenko and encouraged me to break rules myself, maybe I’ve overdone the hurricane of metaphors (I should have just called him an interesting left back and been done with it), maybe I’m hopping over the football writing guardrails comparing footballers to artistic and literary maverick’s, but isn’t that the beauty of a player like Zinchenko? That his playing style reveals the unpredictability and fluidity of the world both inside and outside of football? Just when you thought something was immovable and anchored forever in place, suddenly and without warning, everything changes and new possibilities open up?

This season has been a succession of confounding assumptions and rising expectations, from Eddie’s transformation from not-so-certain-sub to boom, boom, Nketiah's in the room, and from Arsenal casting aside their lingering imposter syndrome to rightfully sitting atop the Premiership, this has been one hell of a double take of a season and I’ve loved every minute of it

So, if Arsenal can throw off the shackles and free themselves to become the team to fear, wring the neck of every self-fulfilling prophesy thrown at them and play like they’ve always been that team, then hey, let’s all do the same and never accept anything less!

So, that’s what you get for spending too long in a forest with a dog and a bunch of woodpeckers! Next week’s post will be firmly back on the pitch ;)

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