What’s new at Arsenal ?
A new message : We can’t be bullied any more.
“It is a different Arsenal now,” said Arsene Wenger on Friday. “They are not going to let other teams kick them off the pitch.”
As usual, Arsene is talking in the media to his own players. He’s not talking to Mark Hughes or the Blackburn players or the Arsenal fans.
He is talking to his own team.
That is one of the pieces I never got round to writing last season or the season before. How Arsene uses TV and press to talk to his own players. He knows they all watch, they all see what he says, they all hear about what he says, they all talk about what he says.
But in 11 years nobody has ever pointed out that Arsene Wenger talks to his players through the TV screen. So I’m pointing that out now. He doesn’t care about the media. He only cares about how his team plays, and the mood and stability of his squad, and winning every game.
Arsene also said, “Teams reflect the character of their managers and yes, of course, Blackburn have the aggression of Mark Hughes. But we are not worrying about that. We will worry about how we play not how they play.”
That is a comment AW has made countless times
Arsene is a control-freak who can’t control what team the other manager picks and he can’t control how they play and he doesn’t want to waste two of his precious training sessions practicing how to nullify an opposing player who, on the day, might not play.
So he says : Let’s concentrate on how we want to play, let’s get an early passing rhythm, let’s be as fluid as possible in the first 20 minutes, and, when we go away, let’s not sit back too much and wait to see what the other team is gonna do.
He will be telling Clichy : You’re quicker than Bentley, so get forward, keep him turning and chasing you, he will hate that. And if he’s 50 yards from our goal, he can’t hurt us. If he’s 25 yards from our goal, he can.
Wingers hate fullbacks who do that. Darren Anderton used to tell me he hated playing against Blackburn when they were flying because Graham Le Saux was always racing down the left side and Darren was always tearing after him, running towards his own goal. He didn’t want to spend the whole game running towards his own goal. He wanted to be attacking the other end.
But if Blackburn were playing well, and Le Saux was bombing forward, Darren was having a nightmare. He was fast and had long legs and stamina, so it was always a good battle. However, it was exhausting for him and quite annoying. You don’t have to be a sports scientist to know that, for a winger, running towards your own goal is more tiring than running the other way.
Will David Bentley have the appetite to chase Gael Clichy for 90 minutes?
With hatchet-men like Savage and Mokoena in central midfield, and Bentley and Morten Gamst Pedersen able to swing the play from side to side, and also score, this game will be very close indeed.
Before today there have been 17 Premiership games and 14 have been won by one goal and I’m taking Arsenal to beat Blackburn by one goal.
Why ? Because Arsenal’s strikers are superior. Roque Santa Cruz has skill without pace and Jason Robert has pace without skill. Matt Derbyshire will be dangerous if he comes on.
So I’m expecting Arsenal to win 2-1. If they lose 2-1, they should sign Anelka.
I don’t care what Anelka did eight years ago. That’s ancient history, like Julius Caeser, World War 1 and Elvis’s first Sun session.