Arsenal nicks a stealthy win: when good makes good bad [ARS 3-1 AVL]

When good makes good bad

POSITIVES, NEEDS and HOPES

Let’s pretend you are reading this and you don’t know who won. You know it was 3-1, but you don’t know who to. Let us be honest here, you wouldn’t confidently be able to say. It would be 50/50. Exactly 50/50. Why? Because that’s who we are so far this season. Totally unpredictable. Yesterday was thrilling, start to finish. That adjective is a thousand miles from many others that we’ve used this season though. I know sports and teams are inconsistent and unpredictable but we swing far wider than most others. How can we be thrilling and comfortably look like genuine Top 4 contenders, even arguably better than Utd, and cough up such naff as we have so often this season? It’s not the performance that is Top 4 standard. Not at all. It’s the level, the football and talent in the team looks that good. But just sometimes.

So, what changed yesterday?

What happened looked to me like we focused midweek on how to take away every Villa avenue and took the focus away from our passing patterns. It looked like we trusted our attacking talent to just ‘play’ with the heavenly instruction to be direct on counter attacks and just worked solely on defending.

That sounds a little nuts though, right? A performance that was so front footed and rarely troubling to us. Watch it again. We constantly nicked it from Villa. Like Stealthy McStealthStealth, the Stealthiest robber in StealthVille. You can’t stop teams having the ball, but the best is to win it back quickly and often. The best teams ALL do this. Think City, think Liverpool. Think old Barca. Think you playing your little brother and sister in the back garden.

Villa are good. Player for player it’s not too big of a stretch to say that they are equal to Arsenal nowadays. We were clever though. Every team has bad days. We focused on making sure one of Villa’s bad days was on us. None of Brighton, Burnley, Brentford and Palace were brilliant going forward. They just denied Arsenal very effectively.

I’m convinced that this is what happened as in my 31 years of attempting to coach successfully the best games I’ve coached are always those where the Stealth chap shows up. Always. To be honest, I wasn’t sure we would ever see an Arteta team turn their desire to steal into successful robberies as I have never seen such direct attacking as yesterday. I didn’t think he believed in it. Bizarrely.

It’s actually rare in football that a great display comes from a focus on attacking. Don’t be fooled by this image and think we necessarily focused on attacking. I think we focused on winning 1st, 2nd balls and performing robberies.

Be reminded that your attackers are good and play for your club because they are capable of doing their job with minimal instruction. Be reminded that to be good you sometimes have to focus on making them bad.

POSITIVES: 

• If you were allowed to design a centre back he would likely look just like Gabriel. Big, powerful, strong, full of desire and belief. Great leadership potential with pace and ability to break lines with his passing. There isn’t much that Gabriel doesn’t have. Think on that. He hasn’t perfected it yet but there are few CB’s in Europe with as high a ceiling as Gabriel. Oh, and he was ruddy brilliant yesterday.
• The key to Arsenal starting to create more clear cut chances has been the willingness to counter attack at speed. I cannot emphasis enough how important this is and honestly, hugely frustrating that we’ve waited so long to implement this. ESR was brilliant and his main brilliance is when he’s encouraged to accelerate play.
• As was his partner. Benjamin I believe is what we are supposed to call him. He is quietly having a string of top level performances both with the ball and defending his goal. Absolutely loved his 50 yard run too. That causes such confusion because nobody prepares for that and with so much detail going into preparation in denying opponents, this can almost make defenders heads malfunction. As long as someone covers him, we should do this more as I don’t see anyone much in the league (bar Maguire, to be fair) that can do this. Take every advantage.
• I hadn’t noticed that ESR was brilliant. Again. That’s probably why though. It’s becoming normal for him to affect games at both ends. Southgate can only continue picking Sancho over him for so long. The huge difference is that when ESR isn’t playing well on the ball he always offers you a high level off the ball.
• A round of applause again for the recruitment. I was thrilled that Sambi was trusted and he was a candidate for MOTM. Twice he deceived the entire Villa midfield with no look turns and passes. These moments are the difference makers and turn horsehsoe football into penetrative football. I have been calling for Tavares for a while even just to put pressure on Tierney. You have to ask yourself which of those two has the higher ceiling? Interesting. Tierney is consistent and experienced but Nuno has more power and certainly more drive to be direct.

• It looked like we had been told to pressure the referee after not doing so vs Palace. If Watkins had done that in the 50th minute, he’s gone. I hate that we have to do this but without it the refs feel like they have an excuse to not give it. Refs respond to pressure even though they’d never admit it.
• Lacazette is a conundrum. It’s hard to play him as the lone striker as he doesn’t offer you a top 4 teams worth of goals. If you’ve got Salah and Mane next to you then you can be Firmino and still play every week. Perhaps Lacazette’s bad luck is that we don’t have 3-40 goals around him. He always contributes though which Auba can’t always say. Might be too late for him to become a 20 goal a season player. It’s important to remember that contracts aren’t rewards. Some clubs make that mistake but they shouldn’t be a reward. They should be solely based on what a player is projected to do during that contract.
• Saka was good. No doubt. What I loved was that he was 7/10 and has been often this season but others are stepping up. The team looked like they weren’t reliant. It looked like all of them saw the importance of their personal contribution.
• Boy, Ramsdale exudes confidence. It’s everything about him from his willingness to use his kicking technique where other keepers would be fearful of being countered on. His domination of his space and desire to keep clean sheets might be a charade but I don’t think so. I think he’s the real deal and the fact that many fans have become willing to swallow their pride and admit they were wrong shows how good he has been.
• Finally, two full backs who can switch play with their weak foot and are willing to pass short and even dribble with it.
• I’ve been waiting for Odegaard to use his penetrative pass to split the defenders as well as the midfielders. Unfortunately, Auba was as surprised as I was.
• Three corner kicks worked yesterday. Hallelujah for the water boy locking our set piece coach in the closet!

Did you notice that our first careless mistake was on the 70th minute. As I mentioned last week, these are how most goals are scored in modern football. Sambi delaying his pass and White not following Watkins were the only two in the game. Again, it’s not simply attacking that creates goals and. becomes the important focus, it’s defending, and we didn’t offer them hardly anything.

NEEDS: 

• I can’t complain about the way we started the game. This seems to be a positive pattern and I love it. The players seemed so hyped that they were rash in front of goal.
• We are still struggling to pass in stride. Crazy story but I took my team skeet shooting and then to play footgolf to work on weight of pass and meeting a moving target. A fun day and much learned. It’s amazing how a little creativity can activate the same and translate from sport to sport.

HOPES: 

• Perhaps the key to the game was more than the focus on individual defending but also team defending. The defence played higher, the block was compact and this gave us such a great base to win the ball as our distances were so good that the players could step in with confidence. This gave us the chance to control the game. Slow it down, speed it up but retain possession without mistakes.
• Tierney’s injury isn’t good but I’m very much looking forward to seeing Tavares in a run of games. His power is frightening. Both Nuno and Tomi will draw fouls in important areas if they continue bursting forward with such power.
• I’d love for us to develop the thread ball into our repertoire. When we are at the top of the box we either shift it out wide and attack 2 v 1 or shoot (which is a pleasant addition). I’d love for us to slide Auba in much like Odegaard tried.
• Just a heads up…. Liverpool have Salah but so do Arsenal and he’s on a rich vein of form in the U-23’s. We may see the attacking midfielder sometime in the season.

FINAL THOUGHT:

If I was Arteta I’d get the players in today and have them stretch, get a massage and then look at clips of the Palace game and then the Villa game. They need to see the massive difference in performance. Perhaps this was on the coach and if so then he needs to sit down and analyze. Either way, in four days we have gone from ‘highly disappointing’ to ‘highly impressive’. A game of ‘spot the difference’ needs to happen so this rollercoaster pattern stops. If we lose or draw games let’s do it whilst playing with a compact block. With a focus on winning our duels and direct counter attacking. Let’s lose by trying to win and not trying not to lose.

Arsenal need to show us that they have learned and wish to not go back.

I’m at a conference and not in a place to do my podcast unfortunately but very grateful for those that always read my blog!

Mike McDonald

Former Highbury regular. Moved to TN, USA in ’99. Married with 3 kids. Coached in UK and US for 27 years.
Mike McDonald Soccer Academy in Morristown TN, Olympic Development coach, Regional Premier League Champion.