Before last Saturday I didn’t think Arsenal could win the title.
But now I’m wondering if they will be champions, and thinking about 1998 and 2002 and 2004, other title-winning teams. And I’m wondering about possession, support and penetration, the three principles of play.
Coaches vary according to how much emphasis they give to each of those principles, but each coach can also vary from season to season, depending on what players he has at his disposal.
In 1998, for instance, Arsenal had a lot of penetration. They passed the ball forward, not sideways, and they passed it forward faster than any other team after they sold Paul Merson, a dribbling passer, so that Bergkamp, the king of two-touch, could have a bigger role. They could win the ball, give it to Vieira to Bergkamp to Anelka or Overmars and…bang! And that was often bang!bang! or even bang!bang!bang! They could kill teams off with a 20-minute purple patch where they had six shots and scored three goals.
In 2006 -2007, when Fabregas, Rosicky and Hleb were playing and Arsenal weren’t winning, I said : He always signs the same type of player, it was dynamic when it was a team of halfbacks but it’s now a team of inside forwards, they play in front of defences too much, three inside forwards means too many short passes.
But now, in 2008, it’s a different ball-game because possession, support and, especially, belief are making it all work.
What’s changed since 2006-2007? Well, the style of play has evolved because Arsene has built on his inside forwards, developed the team around them, and made the team more aggressive while keeping their fluent passing.
Different season, different captain, different tone being set, top of the table, 14 Premiership games played, 11 won, 3 drawn – and it’s “Let’s see how far we can go.” The seven important words that I pinpointed two weeks ago : Let’s see how far we can go.
In this formula, every player has pace, and every player has belief, and their collective morale might be even stronger than it was in the Invincibles in 2004, even though the players have less experience.
Villa Park showed us that Arsenal now have a style which is not based on pace and penetration. It’s based on possession and belief and patience. The belief is important because the players think they can score late if they don’t score early. If they concede first, they think they can score two goals.
Against Aston Villa, Arsenal jumped through a new hoop. They played well without Fabregas and showed that they can come from behind away from home and hold onto a lead when the pressure is on.
As Agbonlahor said before the game, the whole of Arsenal’s back four are quick. Clichy and Sagna win the ball by quickness. So you can’t out-pass Arsenal and you can’t outrun them either. Yes, you can rattle them, as Villa did, by kicking Hleb out of the game, which Carew did in brutal fashion.
Arsenal became pinned in their own half but kept competing even after Hleb went off and, most crucially, they closed out the game by defending effectively right to the final whistle.
For that reason, I don’t think Arsenal will lose consecutive games this season.
That is a big thing to say in the first week of December, a risky thing to say, especially if you have been warned by your readers not to make rash predictions, after having confidently claimed that Arsenal would win at Anfield.
Being a bit old-fashioned, and believing that a cliche is just a truth we are tired of hearing, I’m taking each game as it comes. More than in any season ever, I’m taking each game as it comes. Winning titles is a marathon, an exercise in accumulation, a test of your stamina over ten months, where you inevitably have some ups and downs, where you need a bit of luck, where you have to overcome losing key players to injury.
This team isn’t bombproof but its multi-pass style has become more coherent, more efficient, than it was last year. The team that once scored from three passes, or five, or seven, was making over 15 passes last season. And too many passes produced too many draws and too many missed chances and some flak. But now the multi-pass style works. It works very well. And its strength, its efficiency, derives, I think, from that fact that the multi-pass style has been allowed to grow and evolve in an organic, natural way, like some healthy, fast-growing animal. The manager saw something happening in training, felt it in the dressing room, and he trusted that and went with it, and boldly removed obstacles to its evolution, obstacles that included Henry, Lehmann and Gilberto.
In other words, he created a winning team out of what he had, adding only Sagna to the mix, and trusted that the age-balance in his team was OK, partly because he put a serious senior player in charge as his captain: Gallas has a character more intense than that of the Brazilian whose armband he was given. That intensity suits the way that Arsenal now play, and the age of those who have created that a way of playing that’s very energetic but also, paradoxically, very patient.
Clearly, Sagna adds a lot to the multi-pass style because he is a much more consistent continuity player than Eboue. He hits various crosses, most of them accurate.While others grab headlines, Sagna remains the unsung hero of this team.
Can Arsenal win at Newcastle? Yes. Middlesbrough? Yes, if they don’t pick up more injuries at Newcastle.
At Villa, Flamini made a bad pass and Gardner scored and then Flamini made it 1-1 from a move of 10 passes and then Adebayor made it 2-1 from a move of 17 passes.
The sequence for Arsenal’s second goal started with a throw by Sagna in his own half and the ball went infield and came back and Sagna passed it to Shaun Maloney and then won it back immediately and it was passed down the field gently, almost academically, until Sagna crossed for Adebayor to send a power header past Scott Carson from 10 yards.
So, all in all, Saturday’s game at Aston Villa was a serious test and a big win.
If you win the title, those are the games you look back on : We went 1-0 down and 2-1 up but in the second half we had to scrap and ride our luck when Carew’s header hit the bar but we won and went five points clear with a game in hand, even though we knew Man United would beat Fulham on the Monday night.
Score : Man Utd 2 Fulham 0