From : Adetayo
Date: Fri, Apr 25, 2008
Subject: Senderos
Mr Palmer,
You are one hell of a writer/football analyst, but pray why do you think Senderos might become a different player under the circumstances you prescribe? Is there something wrong with the training regime at Arsenal? Please let me know.
From: Michael Simmonds
Date: Fri, Apr 25, 2008
Subject: Senderos
Myles,
As always really interesting post today. I’m fascinated by your comment :
The Independent says Senderos could be sold. In the right team, with a different training regime and a different dressing room, Senderos might become a good centreback. He has qualities. He has potential. He is 23 and still young enough to make it.
As a season ticket holder I’ve been to every home game this season so have seen quite a lot of Phillippe Senderos. I’ve thought for a long time that he had the potential to be a fantastic defender and a potential future captain of the team and at times he really lives up to this. He has been outstanding in some games – sure he makes some mistakes but so did Tony Adams at his age (and later)- but seemed to be way out his depth against Liverpool again (he was brilliant at Anfield last year though).
It would be really interesting to know why you think the training regime and ‘the dressing room’ works against him.
Presumably the training regime is against him because, as you’ve argued before, Arsene Wenger doesn’t coach defence and has resisted your calls to employ a defensive minded coach? But what do mean that the dressing room is against him? There seemed to be real stability and unity in defence while Toure was away. Do you think that Senderos has no chance of making it now?
Keep up the blogging. It’s always a great read.
Myles replies : Senderos might make it at Arsenal, even now. He has had some great games this season, as I’ve noted here at times. But dropping him to bring back Toure wrecked his fragile confidence. Most punters think he has a mistake in him but I reckon he would be more reliable in a defence that was drilled and knows exactly what to do with every ball coming in from every angle.
However, I would never compare an Arsenal player to Tony Adams, any more than I would compare one to Vieira or Bergkamp. You will not see their like again. Tony’s ability to lead was rare. His ability to lead and see the whole game, not just his job, and to organise, to give shape to people around him, was something really, really special. He could mark his man, and also, simultaneously, dictate where he game would be played, so that it suited Arsenal and not the opposing team. Tony was incredible at that and the team trusted him. That was why Arsenal were able to take on and beat technically superior teams like Liverpool and Parma.
Cashley Cole says in his book that when Martin Keown tried to talk to Senderos he walked away from him and I doubt if Cole would report that incident if it had not happened. If Senderos refused the advice of somebody who has been there and done it, somebody who has played for 20 seasons and won 43 England caps, then he is tosser. The dolt who walks away from Keown’s advice is the dolt who loses you a Champions League quarter-final at Anfield, then bursts into tears in the changing room, and gets on the phone to his parents in Switzerland. Did Steve Bould phone his Mum & Dad if he scored an own-goal? Does John Terry cry when Chelsea lose?
All I was saying (to myself) was that is Senderos speaks five languages and might be happier in the Bundesliga, where football is slower and his team might have a defence that is better organised. He might be surrounded by older men who knew how to score first and how to hold onto a lead for more than three minutes. That would build his self-esteem and allow him to develop his career. If he is luckier with injuries than he has been so far, Senderos could play till he is 35.
In essence, the training regime at Arsenal is based on enjoyment. It is scientific and highly specialised and it aims to rehearse fluent pass-and-move football at high speed. As Adebayor said, every morning I come in, it’s attacking football.
When Arsenal are winning titles, as in 1998 and 2002 and 2004, the training regime is fine. It’s fabulous. It doesn’t matter that you can’t defend set-pieces, that you ignore fundamentals of the game that have been there since 1888, like corners, heading and free-kicks.
Arsene’s stated aim is to put on a training session every day that his players enjoy. He wants them to recapture the joi de vivre they had when they first played the game as teenagers, and express themselves collectively as well as individually. He believes in maintaining the stability and harmony in his group. He never shouts at them and will not let anyone else shout at them and he doesn’t want his players to shout at each other. You probably read what Almunia said : The boss wants easy-going players with character. He doesn’t like confrontations.
So Arsene protects them and indefatigably talks them up in the media and he even said last week, “I’m trying to protect them for next season.”
He pampers his millionaire athletes in his utopian sporting campus behind radio-controlled gates, and they travel to games in a bus with black windows, and after the match they can leave the Emirates in an SUV with black windows and never have to see a punter or sign an autograph or hear a word that might contradict the boss. They are in a bubble at Colney and in another bubble at The Emirates. And, of course, playing in a super-stadium, where the crowd is further away from the pitch, they cannot hear what is shouted at them, which is very little anyway.
Unlike, say, Graham Rix. One day at Highbury, before I became a football journalist, we were standing in what later became the Junior Gunners, and Arsenal were warming up and the very skinny Graham Rix was fifteen yards from us, kicking balls from near the touchline.
A fan shouted, “Rix, where’s your body?”
Rix could hear this clearly but he put his hand up to his ear to signal that he could not quite hear what the fan had shouted. So the guy again shouted, “Rix, where’s your body?”
It was a bit rude, a bit silly. But it was not that insulting, just a bit of fun – and Rixie had heard worse many times.
You don’t get that now, so footballers can be very vain and precious. Football is not interactive any more. There are far fewer people shouting insults like, “Get off the field, you’re having a nightmare!”
All that banter was common when football was a popular entertainment. In that era, players and supporters were living in the same world. It’s now a mass entertainment.
But it’s ten to midnight and I’m too wasted to write a sociology essay tonight. See : The Way We Live Now, Richard Hoggart (1995), Chapter Four : Angles on Popular and Mass Culture.
Hoggart says : Mass culture is partial, mass culture selects and concentrates.
Myles says : Sky Sports is mass culture, not popular culture. Sky is hype and stars and superstars, global icons. Endorsement contracts : Tiger Woods shaves his chin with Gillette, Roger Federer shaves his chin with Gillette, Thierry Henry shaves his head and chin with Gillette. And Sky’s hype created half of the consumers who “support” Arsenal now.
For example, 2,000 fans had tickets for Arsenal v Reading but didn’t turn up. They are not real fans. When Arsenal was popular culture in the Seventies, those 2,000 fans would still have turned up even though the team could not win anything this season.
But a mass culture crowd, who consume a product that has been commodified by a revolution in communications technology, gets cheesed off more quickly, is less loyal, less involved, less forgiving, much quicker to moan and whinge and slag the team off.