By Dan Ferguson
Watford sub Troy Deeney joined a small crop of current players to openly suggest that Arsenal’s current problems come from a lack of heart.
Arsenal lacks heart! “But they were brave and measured in the Chelsea game, and you didn’t complain much in September did you?”
Oh come on! Really? Are we still going to argue that regular blips are OK, even against woeful teams like Stoke? At least Watford are managed by someone with a brain.
Watford? Arsenal’s lack of commitment to see the football pump the back of the net, is beyond the most capable of psychologists.
If you have a player plagued with an awful record of scoring, relentless bad games, cannot save a thing etc, just wait to play Arsenal and you are sure to get the monkey off your back.
Deeney couldn’t wait to play us, and he wasn’t even picked!
He pointed out rightly that there is a lack. He put it down to character. I’m not so sure. I think it is down to playing so-called instinctive football from the gut. That’s all well and good when it works, but as things stand our player’s guts have shit for brains.
Next up Red Star Belgrade. If we win it usually wouldn’t hurt the confidence, but with Arsenal’s famed lack of consideration for how the opposition sets up, prepares, and their strengths/weaknesses, I could see Arsenal spending more time evaluating what went well against Red Star with 9 of the 11 not starting against Everton.
So in the words of Gianluca Vialli, “we tried to win and they tried to win, they scored, we didn’t. We were ok, they were good”. Oh such simplicity.
So, on Sunday we play Everton, who are far worse than Arsenal. They have spent a fortune and are useless. Clueless and desperate at times.
They have been so bad this season that Koeman could have gone before Shakespeare at Leicester, but they stuck with him because he is usually a decent manager, and he has a fantastic record against Wenger. That can turn your season.
So will Arsenal even prepare for the Everton game? How do you prepare to face a side who have been awful in every position bar keeper? Especially when you are ultimately incredibly vulnerable yourselves?
Wenger will trust his bottlers to come good, and rather than give players a bollocking, he will encourage them to play with confidence, express themselves, and remember why he picked them. Which is fine if they had guts full of good football bacteria.
So I think the most likely result will be a draw, at a push we lose.
A win to me seems unlikely because our problems are no longer with the home fans, or away fans. It is within the team, who fairly often look gormless, disjointed and arrogant in equal measure against weaker opposition. We might win, but we lacked obvious desire against Watford and that’s a horrid place to be.
Last season I wrote a piece about more often than not.
More often than not we will win games. More often than not we will score. More often than not we will compete in games. But those margins are shrinking each season with Wenger at the helm. More often than not is a rubbish way to behave in an industry framed solely around aspiration. We have recalibrated our aspirations to reflect a desire to be the decent team among a rabble of unreliable rubbish. Great.
Maybe the future is a slug-fest against the lesser-equipped teams, as the star players leave and the remaining ones learn to fight harder in the more parochial mini-league that exists for teams lying 6th-12th.
Maybe that could be fun? Maybe we learn to graft our way out of that predicament? Maybe the value of both scoring and protecting a goal will once again be paramount, and we once again become a difficult unit.
But the reality of real progress cannot begin to show fruit for another 3 or 4 years. But that’s for another post.
In the short term, form means little, confidence is brittle, injuries are starting to stack, and we still have little in the way of a plan which the team digest and execute effectively and consistently.
So, as you were.
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Red Star Belgrade 0 Arsenal 1