Manchester City are the opposite of Arsenal.
Not in money spent, but in their style of play.
As I’ve always said, Arsene Wenger is a choreographer, not a tactician.
A choreographer rehearses fluid movement by young, supple bodies to create a collective display.
By contrast, Roberto Mancini is a tactician.
A tactician seeks to block, to stifle, to mark men and space, to squeeze, to limit the options of his opponent, to win by not conceding a goal, to win by not losing.
Wenger\’s short-passing game is the football of joining, while Mancini’s game is more like a game of not joining, a game that leaves new man Dzeko isolated on the left.
The Italian’s style is more structured, more disciplined, more architectural.
In Mancini\’s City, De Jong is a static bulldog. He\’s tied to a stake with a chain round his neck and he’s there to bite anybody who comes within ten yards. De Jong has some important qualities but joining the attack isn’t one of them.
As long as he’s there, City are playing with nine men. Aston Villa\’s holding midfielder can\’t do the job because Hamburg\’s holding midfielder is already doing it, and Yaya Toure has to sprint forward all the time, with the ball and without the ball. And as Wenger points out, Yaya can\’t run for 90, never could.
Tacticians nullify and Arsenal CAN be nullified, made to look one-dimensional.
Think about those Ronald Koeman games, how Ajax got a 1-1 at Highbury and a 0-0 in Amsterdam.
And remember who scored their goal at Highbury? (If you don\’t know, I’ll tell you at the bottom of the page.)
Last year scores of ANR readers wrote and said : Song, what are you doing? Get back, protect the back four !
And I agreed with that for while. But then I twigged what was going on and said : If Song is up there, it\’s because Wenger wants him up there.
Song joining in has worked. Why has it worked?
Because the team has a new player, a midfield player who is very astute, who moves automatically to the right place, a player whose speed of thought speeds up the attack, and, I think, speeds up Fabregas.
Jack Wilshere has changed the Arsenal team, made it better and faster. He\’s turned out to be the missing link.
Jack\’s uncanny positional sense, his ability to automatically move to the right position, has consolidated Arsenal\’s midfield, and is allowing Fabregas to become a Catalan Kenny Dalglish, a stocky, brainy attacker who feeds his strikers but also scores himself.
Song joins Fabregas, Jack joins Fabregas, they link with the striker, and each other, and usually have options wide as well.
Bottom line, there\’s not much that\’s new in football, because it\’s a simple game with three principles of play : possession, support and penetration.
What Arsenal do is quite rarified, specialised and refined.
It\’s a collective style that works most of the time because most of their games can be won outnumbering their opponents, by movement to support the ball, movement alongside the ball, movement wide of the ball, in front of the ball, and behind the ball.
A zippy, athletic team playing a short-passing game can lose the ball high up the field but can win it back because they have five players close to where they lost it.
Bossed by a negative coach who has won three Serie A titles, Manchester City sometimes have more players watching the game than playing it.
That\’s why they are Arsenal\’s opposite. Having said that, I reckon Man City will improve next season and win more games than they’re winning now. But they could still be below Arsenal unless they\’re able to keep a clean sheet in almost every game.
In the mid-Eighties, Howard Kendall\’s Everton won two league titles on clean sheets, as Brian Clough had done before him. Kendall built a compact, athletic 4-4-2 with two Welshmen, Neville Southall and Kevin Ratcliffe, as rocks of a superb defence that was very well protected by Kevin Sheedy and Trevor Steven, two effective wide midfielders. Would that template work thirty years later? I wonder.
NOTE : The Ajax midfielder who scored the goal was a young Nigel de Jong.
Ajax lost an early goal to Wiltord, levelled quickly, and outplayed Arsenal with a team containing seven players of 21 or under.
That night in February 2003 was when David Dein and Wenger looked at each other. They didn\’t need to say it because they were both thinking the same thing.
The teams and benches were rather interesting :
ARSENAL: Seaman, Lauren, Campbell, Cygan, Cole, Wiltord, Gilberto, Vieira, Pires, Bergkamp, Henry. Subs: Taylor, Jeffers, Parlour, van Bronckhorst, Edu, Kanu, Stepanovs.
AJAX : Lobont, Trabelsi, Chivu, Pasanen, Van Damme, Pienaar, Galasek, De Jong, Maxwell, Van der Meyde, Ibrahimovic. Subs: Didulica, Bergdolmo, Witschge, Sneijder, Yakubu, Boukhari, Seedorf.
I\’ve updated the Reviews page with a music link to a great band.
Enjoy your weekend !