Nine Jimmy Rimmers – Arsenal and Football

Arsene Wenger was angry with the referee after the game and it’s true that Lee Probert was poor.  But he wasn’t to blame.  We started well with a barrage of attacking play but faded as the game went on.

Yesterday I wondered how much Arsene Wenger would change the team, given that this was the third game in seven days.  The answer was to make just one change from Saturday with Gervinho starting instead of Arshavin.  You have to wonder if that was enough with players flagging as the game went on.  Useless hindsight I guess but some fresher legs might have carried us further.

I’m not saying there was a lack of effort, the likes of Ramsey, Arteta and Koscielny ran all night.  Koscielny narrowly lost out to Coquelin in our match poll.  But as the second half went on we lost the sharpness and passes were failing all over the place.  We were being pegged back even before Djourou got his second yellow.

I don’t think you can blame the referee for the red card.  He didn’t give out a lot of cards and he could have done it on a challenge a few minutes before the one that finally sealed Djourou’s fate.

The lack of fullbacks is definitely hurting us though. Coquelin had a good game but he isn’t the real thing.  He’s a right-sided central midfielder and it shows. Djourou is ok defending, but again, he isn’t a fullback.

The result is first that slower fullbacks means playing deeper and second that we are not moving the ball out down the sides of the pitch.

In the first half, Ramsey and Van Persie were compensating for the first problem by working hard to close down Fulham players high up the pitch and slow their attacks. But as time went on their energy fell and Fulham had more time and space to pick their way forward.

The lack of real fullbacks means we are feeding nearly everything through the middle.  Even the attacks that used Gervinho and Walcott were going via Arteta and Ramsey first.  This made life easier for Dembele and Murphy who were breaking up a big percentage of them.  It meant that their fullbacks could tuck in a bit, which makes threading a through ball even tighter.

Hopefully we can find some fullback cover.  At the moment we are I reckon we are one defensive injury away from undoing our recent progress.

Danny Murphy‘s contrbituon to the tackling debate was welcome because he was the first player to break ranks and say something is wrong with the game in England.

The problem is that by saying that some managers tell their players to go out and hurt opponents, he gave some of them a way of getting off the hook.  The managers in question just get all indignant and say: ‘I would never tell my players to go out and break someone’s leg’.  It allows Mick McCarthy to make a joke about the whole issue – storm in a teacup, yes?  No!

What the game needs is an end to recklessly dangerous tackles, whether they are meant maliciously or not.  Take Jack Wilshere‘s red card tackle yesterday.  He didn’t say to himself, ‘I’ve lost the ball so I’m going to break the leg of the Birmingham player who has it now’.  He was frustrated because his first touch was poor and stupidly lunged in with a reckless tackle.

It wasn’t high speed, rigid-legged or really high, but it was reckless and wrong.  So he rightly got a red card.  Because that sort of tackle can cause injury and is nothing to do with a skillful game.  Willshere will hopefully learn the lesson.

We need two clear principles to be accepted across English football.

The first is that players are individually responsible and they have to cut out reckless tackles that are just a substitute for a mistake, a lack of pace or skill.  When they don’t, they should get a red card.

The second is that managers need to accept that the way to compete with an opposing team made up of much more talented players is pace, organization and concentration.  Just like West Brom when they came to Arsenal.  And that by telling their players to be physical, they are giving them license to be reckless.

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