After a few false starts at writing this review when I just found no inspiration in recalling a match that while watching I had felt mostly a sense of ennui and pointlessness, which was only relieved by a few moments of errors that were so bizarre that the outrage was rather easily drained away by the force of the absurd, I ended up deciding to write about certain aspects of this match in specific – and football in general – that left the strongest impression. And I am talking not about Leno’s uncharacteristic howler here; but about unquestionably the most inexplicable VAR-based decision that at least I have noticed in the Premier League, where each matchday until now has contrived to outwit the previous weekend’s taste of the bizarre. I am also talking about something less inexplicable and bizarre than the variability of the VAR, though significantly more relevant for the Arsenal’s league standings in the seasons to come, namely our home form.
Speaking of Leno’s embarrassing own goal – all goalkeepers have a moment or two like that in a season and given the number of times Leno has saved our skin and his overall consistency and ability to bounce back from mistakes I don’t feel any need to add to questions and criticisms about him. However, in a game where our lack of nous and precision in the opposition’s final third – especially when that opposition was committed to a completely counter-attacking tactics and defended both men and space in numbers, creating low blocks and packed central areas – was so frustrating to watch, a mistake like that made the telling difference. For the first time ever, Everton won an away league match at Emirates, won an away league match at Arsenal after 24 years, completed a league double against Arsenal first time after 1985-86 season, and consigned us to our first ever Friday loss at Premier League. Most damningly, we have failed to score in eight home league games this season whereas in the four previous seasons combined we had failed to score at home only four times. That extraordinary statistic encapsulates our terrible home in a nutshell, and that home form is the key reason behind our simply unacceptable league position. I am sure Mikel and the team understands fully that this cannot simply go on.
In a match where two mid-table teams played out a mostly joyless, cagey game – though not without immense physical effort and tactical discipline, which in this case simply exacerbated the stultifying feeling of watching them play — where our efforts were undermined completely by our lack of imagination and freedom in playing, and laid bare the well-known limitations of the current Arsenal squad – especially with a few key offensive outlets missing through injury and illness — as well as, and it gives me no pleasure in writing this, the limitations of our current young manager who is finding it hard to balance orchestration and individuality.
Coming at the end of a scandalous week in European football where things ended by becoming no worse than they already were, and who knows there may now even be some impetus in bringing in much necessary changes to the world of football governance and finances, this felt to me the right moment to discuss two changes I think many of us here would like to see going forward: a complete review and redesign of how VAR is being applied in English football, and less controversially a significant shift away from how Arsenal have become almost addicted to playing a limited, cautious game at home.
Statistically speaking we dominated nearly a full-strength Everton with almost all of their key players in the starting line-up: possession, shots, shots on target, corners. From the very beginning Everton made their intention clear with players like James Rodriguez and Richarlison dropping deeper to help out defending attacks and always have two players man marking on any of the three key creative forces in the Arsenal line-up — Saka, ESR and Pépé – whenever they have the ball. Their idea was to initiate quick transition and once Arsenal have ball near our own goal press our famously self-sabotaging defense into making mistakes. This was Ancelotti playing more of the classical Italian catenaccio and less of the free-flowing Arrigo Sacchi – or for that matter, free-flowing Ancelotti – style football. They were convinced that we won’t be able to do much against an organized defense dropping so deep, and even if they might have not quite expected that it will be an unforced mistake of that implausibility which will give them the goal, they were proven right on our ability to find unique new ways of conceding.
This has been a theme all season. Whenever teams have come to Emirates with this time-worn blueprint we have served up performances and results of this exact type. Eight home games without scoring a goal! That’s astoundingly un-Arsenal, especially for many of us who have started following Arsenal at different points of the Arsène Wenger era. Our away form has been comparatively better this season, especially when the opposition teams have approached their games with an intent to take the initiative. There have been home matches too – especially after ESR and then later Ødegaard joined Saka in pulling the strings in the second half of the season — when a relatively open affair had seen us play passages of fast, precise, inventive football to give us a few enjoyable wins. But by now it has become quite concerning – especially coming after home draws of 1-1 against Fulham and Sparta Prague – that irrespective of the quality of the opposition, if they are willing to stick to this “defend deep in low blocks and force them to make a mistake or two” diligently we are almost always guaranteed to throw away three points.
There are of course some well-understood limitations right at the heart of our team: we do not have anyone who is consistently capable of seeing and executing defense-splitting passes from the deep, and who can initiate a fast transition through quick release to the wings. Against Everton, time and again Saka or Pépé will be perfectly placed to be released by a through ball when we had recovered possession in our own half and Everton had committed some of their players forward, but our “designated” passers will rotate the ball to patiently build up a move instead of seeing that angle and threading a pass through. I have nothing against rotating possession and patient build-up play, switching flanks and moving players around to create overloads and hence goalscoring opportunities, and grinding teams down by the speed of moving the ball around in constantly shifting triangles. Especially if you have the kinds of teams that Arteta’s coaching mentor always had at his disposal in Barcelona/Bayern/Man City with supreme technical players at every position. But that cannot be the only approach when teams are sitting deep, safe in their knowledge that they have already practiced against each variations of these over choreographed moves and they are not up against superior technical players at every position.
One of Arsène’s key footballing philosophy was to teach the team a kind of meta-tactics: strategies to individually and collectively find solutions to problems on the pitch, improving their football intelligence and most importantly trusting their abilities to innovate such solutions. It can be argued that towards the end of his managerial tenure he might have drifted too far into that philosophy almost as an ideal, eschewing the pragmatism of additionally preparing the team for the strengths and weaknesses of the opposition, but Mikel may want to think a little bit more about his Arsenal manager to keep his focus away from the manic obsessive Guardiola choreography: a little more jazz and a little less ballet.
In a match like this Saka and Pépé should have felt free to take the initiatives to switch flanks a few times, Xhaka and Ceballos not always hanging out at each other’s doorstep but maybe Partey coming in to the left and Ceballos joining Chambers on the right, Xhaka who has a decent left foot taking a corner while ESR (a midfielder with underrated defensive awareness) drops back to protect against counterattacks. Something unpredictable, maybe even a little bit of chaos in the opposition’s final third, a little less concerned about the mistakes they might make but more intent on enjoying their football.
Just to be clear, this is not an argument to replace Mikel. I think he is a manager of great potential; he is learning in the job and since he has taken over at Arsenal he has delivered a couple of trophies, and has made some noticeable improvements to few individuals and brought in a degree of tactical consistency and organization to our game which went completely missing in the final months of his Basque predecessor. He is also managing through tumultuous times in the world where clubs and individuals have been impacted in ways that one cannot really rely on past wisdoms to address. I completely support him and quietly confident that if the club hierarchy provides him with the right backing in the next couple of transfer windows, we will see Arsenal reemerge as a force in the premier league within a few seasons. Provided, provided, he himself learns to grow and reinvent himself, and maybe starts moving away from the cageyness of his approaches especially in home games. Let that hair down a little bit Mikel, it’s just football! This should be fun.
Whereas my innate optimism in well-meaning people makes me hope that Mikel will turn this wretched run of home form around, and we will start to make noticeable progress in league next season and this season he will find a way to help the team win the Europa league, such optimism doesn’t come naturally where VAR is concerned. Or rather, where VAR as it is being practiced in English football is concerned.
The disallowed penalty after a noticeable clip on Dani made him lose balance in the Everton penalty box – 100% foul and penalty as was correctly given by the referee — was bizarre not only in its conclusion but also how that conclusion was arrived at. VAR was supposed to be used to overturn noticeable and obvious errors made by referees and keep the game fair by removing as many poor on-field decisions as possible. The nanometer offside that was awarded against Pépé in the “build up” of the play where Dani was fouled completely subverts that principle: there was no noticeable error by the match officials in awarding the decision. The “offside” itself was irrelevant in the context as it happened probably 15 seconds before Dani was fouled and the ball had been rotated a few times by then. Finally, that “offside” was not a noticeable or obvious error. No matter how many lines they tried to draw to demonstrate the “proof” was completely inconclusive to suggest that the officials on the ground made any noticeable error.
This has been happening all throughout the season. Arsenal fans can feel particularly peeved by the number of strange VAR decisions we have been at the wrong end of. Before anyone dismisses that as a typical fan paranoia, I would like to see a distribution of VAR decisions for-and-against each club at the end of the season. Numbers don’t lie and there have been seasons past where post-season statistical analysis had underlined that Arsenal had received the highest numbers of wrong decisions.
But leaving aside the Arsenal-tinted grievances, just the sheer chaos, confusion and draining of the basic joy of football that VAR has brought into the English game has generated a very strong negative reaction. It simply doesn’t have to be so. Technology has been applied with excellent outcome in sports like Tennis or Cricket – especially in Cricket where umpiring decisions in the pre-technology days often used to stir up as much a drama as the proceedings between the twenty-two yards – and even in football there are other leagues where VAR is being used in a less dramatic and more consistent fashion. If the current trend of VAR in PL goes on fans – and one can feel even the players too as some of the most joyous moments of their careers are being ruined by the sheer arbitrariness of the decisions – will start to lose interest in the league. As with all technologies, the problem is not with the technology, but how it is being implemented and how inconsistently the rules surrounding its usage are being enforced. This simply cannot go on. After this season is over the English football’s governing body should work on simplifying and standardizing the VAR-based review process to make for a consistent experience where the focus should be on eradicating obviously poor decisions in a consistent and explicable manner, and not on scrutinizing every pivotal moment to the last dying millimeter of relevance only to come up with just another layer of subjective decision overriding the referee’s (sometimes moody) whistle.
Remember, pray, the 3rd of May…
Celebrate the true values and traditions of the Arsenal with Goonerholics Forever’s 1970-71 Double Anniversary Events.
Gorgeous George was always likely to pop up in the box! Did he touch the ball?
