We’re back on the Premier League saddle today as we travel to Swansea, a tricky place at the best of times and after the midweek capitulation you do have to wonder how confidence will be affected.
On the one hand it might consolidate the team as they emerge determined not to make the same mistakes as they did on Tuesday night; on the other we could find ourselves brittle and unsure should anything vaguely similar happen.
In terms of the team we have Aaron Ramsey and Jack Wilshere fit and as this is an away game I suspect we might see both of them in a midfield anchored by Mathieu Flamini. That would mean somebody further up the pitch would have to miss out – your guess as to whether it’s Santi Cazorla or Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain is as good as mine.
The Spaniard is having a curious season. Always busy, always looking for the ball, he’s popping up in the right positions time and time again. Unfortunately he’s finishing like a man injected with a serum made from the juices of Julio Baptista, Kaba Diawara and Geoff Thomas at Wembley.
The Ox, meanwhile, looks like a player who has responded to the example set by Alexis Sanchez, providing cut and thrust and, as we saw on Tuesday, some end product with a fine goal. If it were me I’d keep him in the side ahead of Santi for today, but trying to second guess Arsene Wenger is a difficult job.
I don’t see any changes to our back four which means the players in front of them are going to have to do more to help protect them. It means the midfield not over-committing when we have the ball and we’re aware the manager has already suggested to Aaron Ramsey that this is an area which he’s got to improve in. With Wilshere alongside him – and we know how often Wenger has tried to play the two of them together this season – you’d like to think we’ll be more solid in there today.
What’s interesting is that the forward players, Alexis and Welbeck in particular, are two of the hardest-working players we’ve had at the club in a long time. Since he joined I can recall countless occasions when Welbeck has chased back and sprinted after opponents, often making a tackle or an interception in our half, and nobody needs to be reminded what kind of a shift the Chilean puts in.
If he loses it himself he’ll chase the length of the pitch to make up for it, and even if play breaks down through no fault of his he’s almost always switched on enough, and conscientious enough, to do his defensive duty. It suggests that if the team’s defensive ethos is to change, then it’s the midfield that have to do more, so it’ll be interesting to see how we do in that regard today.
The last time we played Swansea a Flamini own goal in the 90th minute saw us draw 2-2, the second game in a period when we took just 2 points from a possible 12 and our title challenge fell to pieces. We did beat them at their place last season though, Gnabry and Ramsey getting the goals in a 2-1 win.
As for today, it’s just impossible to know what version of this Arsenal might turn up. The belief built by the two clean sheets in a row has likely been dented by Tuesday, but then the positive there was we got ourselves 3-0 up with some decent attacking play. I literally have no idea what’s going to happen today, how we’ll play or anything else.
The Arsenal lucky dip goes on.
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In other news, Arsene Wenger has hit back at criticism of him as ‘tactically clueless’ from Paul Merson as ‘farcical’. He’s quoted in the Telegraph:
These debates that I hear are a joke, a farce. People who have managed altogether zero games, they teach everybody how you should behave. It’s a farce. Honestly, I cannot even be upset about it.
And on Merson:
I managed him. I tried. I’m not interested in Paul Merson.
Some might suggest that losing a 3-0 lead is also a farce, but I think what the manager is responding to is the extreme nature of criticism these days. As he spells out here when talking about his own post-match criticism:
I rectified their mistakes. It’s not exactly the same. I don’t tell them: ‘You’re an absolute idiot’. I ask them ‘What should you have done there?’ That’s the difference between newspapers and people.
Now, I can’t defend losing that lead, or the fact we have as many defenders as one-armed cartoon man has fingers, but there is, as we know, a tendency for analysis these days to be as explosive as possible. It’s the easiest thing in the world to lash out and call somebody a name or go mental, but too few look to explain or understand what’s just happened.
There was a snippet from an interview with Robin van Persie this week who spoke about the stick he’d received from Robbie Savage due to this poor form. He said:
I once asked him why he was so harsh in his judgments. He told me it had to do with the competition in the media landscape, between television stations. He admitted to sometimes judging harder than is reasonable but also that he has a mortgage to pay.
That’s the culture we live in: the need to stand out and create headlines as a pundit far outweighs the need for intelligence or original thought. Personally, I’d much rather sit and listen to somebody explain why something happened than just lose the plot over the fact that it did, but those people are few and far between on television and radio.
The broadcasters and media want soundbites and flashpoints, simple as that. It’s why some columnists and presenters are little more than highly paid trolls, because they create a reaction – unfortunately it’s exactly what they want so the cycle perpetuates. Nonsense is spouted, folk get outraged and try to counter the nonsense but it is like pissing in the wind, and by wind I mean hurricane.
So while I won’t defend the horror-show that saw us throw that lead away on Tuesday night, nor the state of our squad or the decisions taken which let this happen, I’d much rather hear measured, intelligent, and perhaps constructive, criticism than the shrill bleating we’re so used to these days.
That said, if Arsene Wenger’s skin is that thin right now that he feels it necessary to respond to an attack like that, it suggests there’s an element of the truth hurting. The best way to react is to sort our your team’s problems, and hopefully we’ll see that today.
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Until then.
