Monthly Archives: February 2012

Columnists
February 23, 2012 posted by Tim Stillman

What difference does it make?

What difference does it make?

Another week, another disappointment. I undertook this column the week before the Carling Cup Final last February and it’s kind of felt like I’ve been firefighting an overwhelming tide of negativity ever since. That’s not necessarily because I have felt positive about what we have witnessed over the last twelve months per se. As far as I am concerned, being determinedly positive or relentlessly negative as a default position evidences jaundiced thinking. That informs my total disdain for these little camps Arsenal fans appear to have entrenched themselves into.

Whether it’s blind support of the manager or furious contempt, it’s pathetic. The members of each of these silly cults proffer their chosen point of view as hills from which they stand. But really they’re caves in which they hide. Maybe that sounds arrogant and dismissive. It probably is. I am at about half past give a shit at this stage. But I sense that something has changed this week, with the confirmation that our silverware hunt (not so much a ‘hunt’ really as a mournful look under the sofa cushions) is over for another year.

There is a palpable sense, not of mutiny or anger, but of resignation or, dare I say it, boredom. In the coming weeks, we will be told that 4th place is the Holy Grail and the most important target of our season. Certainly, if one is to look at the AST’s financial analysis of the club you can see why too. Maybe I’m spoiled. Maybe I’m just bored. I don’t know, but the chase for 4th isn’t one that fills me with a great deal of excitement.

Whilst I think most supporters fully understand the contextual rewards of qualifying for the Champions League, the game is also about glory and nothing about Arsenal has felt particularly glorious over the last few years, as the Groundhog Day unravelling of the season comes to pass every spring. Arsenal have, in essence, become the materially very wealthy, but emotionally undernourished child that ends up in therapy. I am wracked with guilt bemoaning my 40 inch television screen and plush furnishings, but it feels like a long time since I played with my friends in the garden and scaled fences and scraped my knees.

This perhaps explains why I pithily refuse to regard finishing outside the top 4 as a doomsday scenario at the moment. I think Tim Clark at Arse2Mouse really hit upon something with this piece. I can’t buy the Champions League myth as much as I used to. We’re told the additional revenue is our lifeblood. Yet we don’t ever seem to plough that revenue into the team. We’re told we need that carrot to attract star players. Yet we don’t shop for established names anyway. (Not criticising that per se, it’s still a useful transfer policy when we actually action it).

Every summer a few more star players peel away, so it’s clearly not enough of a beacon for retention of our best players. The more I deliberate, the more I think the Europa League might not be such a bad thing for Arsenal. Frankly, our chances of winning the Champions League are negligible. We would have a good shot at winning the Europa League. A good Europa League run would produce a number of benefits. The chief of which, thinking slightly parochially, would be to inject some excitement back into following Arsenal for the supporters.

As it stands, we make up the numbers. They’re well heeled numbers, with all mod cons and a constant supply of Ferrero Rocher, but I guess it’s become dry standing at the back of Earl’s Court when I fancy getting in the moshpit at the Electric Ballroom. I don’t fear a huge exodus in the event of failure to qualify for the Champions League. With the exception of van Persie, I don’t honestly believe there would be a huge clamour for our players anyway. Perhaps I’m oversimplifying, but maybe without the guarantee of that revenue, we will be forced to make efficiencies on the £130m wage bill – which might not be apocalyptic in its consequences either.

Winning is a habit and I guess a good Europa League run could help the club reconnect with its raison d’etre. We’re a very well run business for sure, but we seem to have lost the purpose of being well run – to facilitate our ability to compete. It feels rather like we’re happy to stand still. It’s not short term gratification I am after. At least I don’t think it is. I’m just not as convinced as I used to be that 4th place is the Yellow Brick Road. That said, if we secure 4th on the last day of the season, I don’t doubt that I’ll be very happy about it. Fickle bunch, us football fans.

I accept that, in my current mood, I am probably being incredibly wide eyed and naïve about the real consequences of finishing outside of the top 4. Especially if we spend more than one season outside of it. With sponsorship deals to be renegotiated in 2014, the reality of that scenario may see us struggle to come close to competing for years. Maybe I’ve become a bit jaded of talking about Arsenal as a business.

I know we are one and I realise the importance of being a good one too. But somewhere I feel the club has lost the balance. At this moment in time, I find it hard to separate whether I want the club to wake up from its slumber, or for them to wake me from mine. I probably won’t find out until May whether this blog is a call to arms or a self piteous whine. I’m sure you will have your own impressions. I mean, I think Radiohead have written some of the most haunting, achingly beautiful music ever committed to record. Some people think they’re just a bunch of miserablist jizz bags. Different strokes for different folks.

One thing I do know that will lift me out of my Thom Yorke-esque howl and into a Jagger style strut would be a victory over Tottenham this weekend. I think, at least in part, some of the angst over our sludge of a season has been exacerbated by the fact that Tottenham have done very well. So much so that many have completely abandoned the idea that St. Totteringham’s Day will have a place in the calendar in 2012. Anything less than a victory on Sunday will virtually confirm the passing of that annual holiday.

A ten point (or more) cushion with twelve games left would mean that even Tottenham’s famed pant filling tendencies wouldn’t be enough for us to overhaul them. You have to give them their dues; I really believed they were going to run out of steam after Christmas. However, even if they do finish in the Champions League places at our expense this year, I don’t believe it will yield any long term shift in power. The guts of the Spurs squad is either advanced in years (Friedel, Gallas, Parker, King, Saha, Nelsen) or borrowed (Adebayor).

Harry is and always has been a short term manager and they will have a rebuilding job to do at the same time that they will attempt to erect a new stadium. But in the much shorter term, it’s crucial that they are sent home on Sunday with bruised pride and tanned behinds. Those cocks have been crowing a little too loud for a little too long and vengeance is owed. To get within seven points and to defeat them may just put that little bit of bowel clenching doubt into them and reinvigorate our own season with a bit of purpose for the run in.

I was tempted to entitle this column Every Day Is Like Sunday. But if this Sunday can be taken up with beating Spurs, I’ll take that every day of the week. So long as beating Spurs doesn’t become the focal point of our campaign again for a long time. Until next week. LD.

Follow me on Twitter @LittleDutchVA

Arseblog, the arsenal blog
February 23, 2012 posted by arseblog

As we start to look towards Sunday …

As we start to look towards Sunday …

Welcome to Thursday. The North London derby takes place on Sunday and much of the focus should now turn to that.

Of course there isn’t much in the way of news because after Milan and Sunderland we’ve gone into lock-down mode on the media side of things. The only snippet we got was poor old Bacary Sagna being rolled out to do the ‘We’ll keep fighting, do it for the fans’ line which was previously the domain of Johan Djourou. Every time we had a bad result, he was the guy who did it. I think it has broken his mind.

At this point I think they should simply replace that player interview with a video of an angry goose in an Arsenal shirt let loose on a high street, honking and hissing at passers-by. Subtitle it, by all means, but I would rather see the escapades of a wild animal than listen to another one of those interviews. The more obvious solution is for the team to, you know, win some games and shit, but maybe the goose thing would provide decent back up.

We don’t have any real team news ahead of Sunday yet but Marouane Chamakh has got a bad toe, apparently, which is what forced him off after half an hour of the reserve game. One can only assume he kicked something in frustration. Possibly a ball. It’s been so long his feet might have become a soft as lady’s hands after using mild green Fairy liquid whilst doing the dishes. And if his toe isn’t up to Norwich reserves I doubt it’s going to be ready for Sp*rs at home.

And while many first team players short of match sharpness played in midweek, there was no sign of one player who really could have done with the run out, Kieran Gibbs. He played an hour in Milan, missed the game against Sunderland while it might be a case they’re working on him behind the scenes to get him ready for Sunday you have to think that playing for the reserves would have been ideal if he’d been fit enough to do so. It’s not nice to see any young player’s career blighted by injury, especially a lad who has grown up with us and come through the ranks, but we need a left back who can play left back every week, not just now and again as a special treat.

No doubt we’ll get a clearer picture of the state of the squad over the next day or two. If Gibbs is out there’s no Coquelin to fill in, and there are doubts about Koscielny’s knee, so Vermaelen at left-back and a central pairing of Song and Djourou is not going to calm anybody’s nerves before a game we really have to win.

The Sun reports that Arsenal and Sp*rs are set to issue a joint statement about abuse directed towards Emmanuel Adebayor. No doubt the Sp*rs bit reads:

We were under the mistaken impression for many seasons that his father was a scrubber of large, grey, trunky mammals, and let him know this quite vociferously, but now that he plays for us we realise this is not the case and in fact we actually love him for his qualities as a player and a man and not simply because of the fickle nature of football fans.

Clearly, and obviously, any kind of chanting which references race is to be deplored. Racism has reared its ugly, buck-toothed, captain of England head too often this season, but as far as I know there’s no such thing as cuntism which means that people are quite entitled to let a cunt know he’s a cunt and Adebayor, let’s face it, is a cunt. Anyway, it’s all part of the pantomime, you can’t have heroes without villains and attempts to sanitise the game to that extent will, rightly, fall of deaf ears.

And at a time when so much anger is turned inwards, at our own players, at the manager, at the board, at anyone who peeps a head above the parapet, the return of Adebayor is a timely reminder that when it comes right down to it we’ve got to stand together against the opposition, not each other. Yes, there’s a place for debate and discussion, heated or otherwise, but come 1pm Sunday it Us against Them and the Them are the biggest bunch of Satan’s bastards that ever did live.

It’s worth bearing in mind – and if I see Alex Song hugging Adebayor at any stage that’s me and him finished. Go round his house and hug him if you want, just not on the pitch, in the tunnel or anywhere else on derby day. Unless we’ve won, then he can frenchie him in the centre-circle for all I care.

In other news Rangers FC, currently in administration, sold the 16 shares they’ve held in the club for decades to Alisher Usmanov’s Red and White Securities. Craig Whyte then apparently tried to pocket the cash himself. What is it they say about birds of a feather? Still, it continues the Uzbek’s drive to gobble up as many shares as he possibly can, the current state of play being:

No of shares percentage
STAN KROENKE 41,579 66.82%
RED and WHITE SECURITIES LTD* 18,437 29.63%

With just 3.55% of the shares held beyond our two billionaire friends the cold war over Arsenal’s ownership continues. Maybe when the Emirates sponsorship runs out we can rename the ground Gorky Park.

Beyond that not much going on. There’s some talk of Zenit St Petersburg wanting Andrei Arshavin on loan but I can’t see that happening. At a time when all you have to do is look sternly at an Arsenal player for him to go down injured and miss a few weeks, the last thing we need to do is weaken our squad further. I suspect this is just talk from their side and we have no intention of letting him go anywhere until the season is over.

Right, that’s that. More tomorrow with an Arsecast. Till then.

Arseblog, the arsenal blog
February 22, 2012 posted by arseblog

Stick or twist + RVP’s contract is non-issue for now

Stick or twist + RVP’s contract is non-issue for now

Good morning,

last night I dreamt I was making a movie in New York, funded by mafia money, and it would have all been fine if it wasn’t for the fact that David Thewlis was an inveterate lush. I can never go to New York again lest someone who sounds like Joe Mantegna comes after me for the $76 they gave me to make the film. Oh well.

Last night Arsenal’s reserves played Norwich at Carrow Road, and the team contained quite a few first team players. Andrei Arshavin, Yossi Benayoun and Marouane Chamakh all started – as did Ju Young Park but it’s hard to call him a first team player. Chamakh went off injured after about half an hour, but Park scored, Arshavin scored two, Benayoun scored and Benik Afobe, making his return after months out with a dicky groin (hah) also got on the scoresheet in a 5-0 win. Also involved last night was Carl Jenkinson who played 45 minutes, making his comeback from a stress fracture of his back.

Clearly the manager had an eye on keeping players who have spent a lot of time on the bench sharp for Sunday’s North London derby. Whether it means he’s thinking of some serious rotation and using these players we don’t know but giving them a run-out is, I guess, better than them sitting stewing on the bench. Neither Arshavin or Benayoun were used on Saturday against Sunderland when perhaps they might have been, and it was hardly a surprise to see the Israeli speak about his unhappiness on Twitter:

I guess the manager has got to decide does he stick with the players who disappointed against Milan and Sunderland, or players he doesn’t seem to trust a great deal. Is he willing to make those kinds of changes for a game that he’s got to win or, at the very least, not lose in a way that feels like a loss. For example, a late equaliser by Sp*rs is a crushing blow, a late one for us a sign of spirit and character. The result is the same but people’s perception of it is going to be a factor this weekend, like it or not.

Whether what happened at Carrow Road last night will change his mind in any way remains to be seen but you can’t ask more than for players to go out and score goals, show what they’re capable of, and both Arshavin and Benayoun have done that. We might get a better indication of their chances later in the week but it’s a case of damned if you do and damned if you don’t in some ways. Stick with the others and it’s conservatism, play guys who have been on the bench most of the season and what can you expect from guys who have been on the bench all season (mostly for a reason too). Anyway, more on the weekend’s game in the days ahead.

Elsewhere, there’s a lot of talk about Robin van Persie’s contract, with people trying to out-exclusive each other with information already in the public domain. The latest is that Arsenal are going to put the foot down and insist that van Persie sees out his contract at least, with some suggestion the skipper is  more open to a new deal than he has been. Or something.

The cynic in me thinks that this kind of news emerging at a time when fans are … erm … shall we say ‘mildly crotchety’ … is something of PR bluff. That said, it is a situation I can see happening. It seems much quite likely to me that we’d hold Robin to his contract and let him leave on a Bosman should he so desire a year later. At that point he’d be 30 and could, if fit and healthy, have his pick of clubs and a nice fat package to go with it. Of course, depending on where we are, he might want to stay.

People draw parallels between his situation and that of Samir Nasri but I don’t think they’re the same. Nasri was younger, more mercenary, more driven to leave and, frankly, uncommitted to anything except getting as much money for himself as possible. It’s easy to say you’re leaving for footballing reasons but tarting yourself from club to club doesn’t give you much of a leg to stand on, in that regard.

Anyway, for me this is an non-issue until the summer anyway. While I think one particular player in the same contractual situation as Robin has a huge cheek to wait and see what happens this season before committing to the club, I can understand it better for van Persie. But like players before him who have left when perhaps they didn’t really want to, maybe the best way of keeping him is investing in the squad and bringing in quality players who increase our chances of winning things.

A top four finish is not just vital for the club’s finances but vital for our team. For player retention, for attracting new players and for allowing those we do have to continue playing at the highest level of club football, something which is important for their development as well. I would suggest all van Persie contract stories are best ignored until the summer, we know nothing’s going to happen until then, and if there’s one place beyond the stock markets where speculation is king, it’s football.

As an aside though – there’s a very interesting piece about van Persie and his contract on Goonerboy. He looks at the final contract dished out to Thierry Henry at a similar stage of his career and wonders if the van Persie situation might be similar. Whether you agree or not it’s a good read.

And that’s that for this morning. As expected it’s been pretty quiet this week, no doubt there’s plenty of taking stock going on and, you would hope, a lot of hard work to get the team focused before Sunday.

Till tomorrow.

Arseblog, the arsenal blog
February 21, 2012 posted by arseblog

An interesting question and an obvious solution

An interesting question and an obvious solution

Morning, the week of introspection continues and we’ll start this morning with a fantastic piece from Michael Cox (of Zonal Marking), who asks the obvious, but until yesterday, un-uttered question – What are Arsenal good at?

Using Sunderland’s  last two games against us he highlights how they modified their approach to render Arsenal pretty much ineffectual in the FA Cup tie. It also ties in nicely with another couple of observations made recently. On the Arsecast last Friday Philippe Auclair bemoaned the fact that our passing, so crisp and pacy in the past, lacked the speed to make it effective. Michael Cox points out that we move to the ball too slowly to wide areas, allowing defences to get men behind the ball and deny us the space we want to exploit.

We know we struggle when teams sit back, ‘park the bus’ if you will, and obviously Arsene Wenger saw that and tried to bring in something of a Plan B with Marouane Chamakh. A target man who was good in the air and held the ball up well with his back to goal seemed like the ideal purchase at the time, but I doubt anybody could have foreseen the transformation when our Moroccan butterfly decided to become a caterpillar again.

His continued deployment of Nicklas Bendtner, another player who despite his flaws was most effective through the middle and capable of an aerial and physical threat, on the right hand side of a forward three was always confusing. I know he had van Persie down the middle but when did we ever see him do what he did on Saturday, putting another ‘striker’ on and dropping Robin slightly deeper? It was always Bendtner throwing in crosses he should have been trying to get on the end of.

The other issue we have when teams play like that against us is our tendency to concede from the oppositions few chances on goal. If our conversion rate is high then theirs is remarkably low. Amy Lawrence pointed out that Arsenal are a team set up to play counter-attacking football but who fall prey to counter-attacks time and time again.

In his piece in So Paddy Got Up, which looks at Wenger’s tactical approach throughout his Arsenal career, Michael talks about how the signing of Gervinho, combined with Walcott, Oxlade-Chamberlain and the departures of Fabregas and Nasri suggested a more ‘vertical’ game in possession But he’s also right to point out the fact that players like Arshavin, Hleb, Rosicky and Nasri became much less direct under Wenger, ‘ball hoarders’, he calls them. And how often have we bemoaned the backwards pass when a shot was on, allowing the opposition more time to get back and regroup?

If you look at the Invincibles side – and we have to take on board this was a once in a lifetime side that we were so lucky to have enjoyed – it seemed to have everything. Pace, power, speed of thought, lightning on the counter and built on a decent, if not outstanding, defensive platform. Yet this team that swept all before them in the Premier League struggled in Europe. Perhaps this was why Wenger decided to modify things, and it’s a curiosity that some of our most effective European campaigns have dovetailed with the lack of domestic success.

Now, Arsenal are a team that have defensive issues, whose midfield lacks the creativity to pick tight defences apart and to move the ball quickly enough when we do counter, and two first choice wingers whose decision making in the final third is, for the most part, pretty poor. But for one of the best strikers in the world right now, it’s hard to see where the goals would come from on a consistent basis.

So what’s the solution? I know Arsene references ‘internal’ solutions all the time but some of them are there. A consistent back four would be a good start. I don’t see too much wrong with Szczesny – Sagna – Koscielny – Vermaelen/Mertesacker + left back, whoever that might be. Ensuring we’ve got a left back fit enough to start most games would be a real fillip.

Jack Wilshere’s absence this season has been keenly felt. I know a player’s quality increases exponentially with the amount of time he’s out injured, but his tigerish drive has certainly been a big miss. And up front, well, this where we’ve all had our say in recent times, where we all wanted him to buy in January yet the cheque-book remained closed aside from the few glorious weeks we got to spoon with Thierry again.

Yet now there’s little point of talking about what we should have done in January. There is nothing we can do now to augment the squad. What we have, we hold, and maybe the solution can be found from the article and the two games at the Stadium of Light. Is there any particular reason why Arsenal couldn’t do what Sunderland did? Not so much in terms of parking the bus, because I don’t think we have the defensive confidence to do that, but in terms of pressing other teams?

When we’ve seen Arsenal do this – and the 3-1 at home to Chelsea last season comes to mind almost immediately – it appears obvious that it ought to the blueprint for the way we should play. Contrast it to the way we played in Milan, stand-offish and passive to the point where it almost looked a deliberate ploy to allow them so much time on the ball, and it’s hard to understand why there isn’t more focus on what we do when we don’t have the ball.

Clearly Arsene’s focus is on how we play our own game. It has always been this way, there are no dossiers on the opposition, but it seems we lack a consistent approach when it comes to opposition possession. Do we actively try and win it back? Do we put pressure on them in midfield? At times it seems we’re content to let them play until such time as they give it back to us, when maybe we should be more proactive.

It takes a lot of work and you need to be very fit to play a pressing game but these are professional athletes with the best facilities in the world at their disposal. People often point to the way Barcelona play but surely it’s not an unrealistic expectation for them to be able to work as hard as Sunderland did in both games against us – and let’s not forget that while we might have had heavy legs last Saturday, so did they the week before after 120 minutes in the FA Cup.

In the absence of a transfer window, without the ability to bring in new players, then the only option we have left is to work harder on the pitch and try and exploit the strengths we do have. There’s little point chucking on Walcott as a central striker against a team who are sitting deep, and while lack of options may be an issue, perhaps we need to use the squad more efficiently.

What’s slightly ironic is the fact that this new ‘vertical’ approach would be far more effective with somebody who had the passing ability of Fabregas in midfield, again maybe Wilshere is the missing component here, but again we can only work with what we have. And if what we have is somewhat lacking in quality then it can be made up with application.

—

In other news the AST met last night to provide some analysis of Arsenal’s upcoming financial results. The profit is expected to be in the region of £40m but seems to come mostly from player trading, without that we’re breaking even. Which is still a lot better than many other clubs. For me the key point is the efficiency of the wage bill and the obvious financial impact lack of Champions League football would have next season. None of this information should be of any great surprise to anyone and we’re not treading new ground in any way.

On the other hand, I do have to wonder why the statement asked questions that the AST, who surely know the club as well as anyone, can have no realistic expectation of being answered. Regardless of who’s in charge, be it Kroenke, Usmanov or anyone else, the inner workings of how and why certain decisions are made won’t be for public consumption, and perhaps by focusing on things they cannot influence or have explained it takes away from the issues they can. Day to day – but crucial – ones like ticket prices, for example.

Right, that’s yer lot. Till tomorrow.