Nine Jimmy Rimmers – Arsenal and Football

With all the changes in personnel, there is fresh debate on what would be the most effective formation.  Many believe that Arsenal’s switch to 4-3-3 was solely designed to fit a team around the massive talent of Cesc Fabregas.  But that now Cesc is gone should we revert to good old 4-4-2!

Actually the debate has been around a while, even before the departure of Fabregas.  Playing a loan striker makes it very difficult to maintain the form of a second striker, blunting the attack when that second striker is called into action.

The debate has been given fresh impetus this week by the comments of Robin Van Persie that he enjoys the free role that he has in the Dutch team.  Some pundits point to the four goals Van Persie scored during the 11:0 demolition of San Marino as an example of what Arsenal are missing. Given San Marino’s record in international football I don’t see that this proves anything.

Equally unconvincing is any blog post contrasting Arsenal’s tactics with experience of a tactic tried out playing FIFA Football on a games console!

But despite these two rather spurious arguments, the debate is a real one.  Robin Van Persie does tend to drop deep, linking with the midfield.  Sometimes this means that we don’t have a player further forward in the box and some chances get wasted.

But is a return to 4-4-2 the answer?  If you look at how most successful club and international teams are playing, it isn’t 4-4-2.  Most are playing with one or even two holding midfielders and a lone striker.

The most successful formation at the last World Cup was two holding players and a fairly fluid group of four in front of them.  This is how Manchester City are set out now, with De Jong and Yaya Toure providing a tough shield and turning regained possession into forward movement.

It isn’t actually too far off what Arsenal had when the centre of it’s midfield was patrolled by Petit/Gilberto and Viera.

The challenge of playing this way, and incorporating two strikers, is that in the fast moving Premier League you will need attacking players athletic enough to roam all over the pitch to give you the width when you want it.

Using the Arsenal squad this way you could play something like this (injuries allowing of course):

_______ Walcott _______
_______ Van Persie ______
__ Gervinho ______ Arteta _
_____ Song ___ Wilshere __
Santos _ Verm _ Mert _ Sagna
________ Szczesny _______

What do you think?

If that’s too defensive for you, and expecting too much running from Arteta, how about:

_______ Walcott _______
_______ Van Persie ______
Gervinho __ Arteta _ Ox Cham
_________ Song _________
Santos _ Verm _ Mert _ Sagna
________ Szczesny _______

Either way you’ve got five contesting the midfield when possession is changing and that is where games are won and lost.  I  think that playing four across the middle against Chelsea, City and other top teams would see us being taken apart.

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Please note. The author has no idea whether these formations will help you win at FIFA Football.

There are plenty of names doing the rounds, Jadson, Mata, Hazard, Martin etc.

But looking at these options I was struck by how small some of these guys are and, indeed, how small some of our midfielders last season were. So I started looking up heights….

OK, so I’m just a bit of an empiricist at heart (if that’s at all logical) who was at a loose end so here it is! (High anorak content)

Take The Invincibles – we played 4-4-2 that season so two central midfielders.

First choice pair Viera (1.93m) 43 starts and Gilberto (1.85m) 40 starts. Average height weighted for games played 1.89m.

Second choice pair Edu (1.89m) 28 starts and Parlour (1.83m) 27 starts. Average height weighted for games played 1.86m.

Last season – we played 4-3-3 so not exactly like for like.

First choice threesome Wilshere (1.73m) 44 starts, Song (1.84m) 39 starts and Fabregas (1.75m) 29 starts. Average height weighted for games played 1.77m. I discounted Nasri and Rosicky because they mostly played out wide, though neither is particularly tall.

So there we have it, last season’s central midfield 10cm shorter than the first and second choice Invincibles.

Denilson played 20 games too and he is only 1.78m.

Does this prove anything? Maybe. But maybe not! Still, kept me occupied for a while anyway.

Well Arsene started it I suppose, promising a busy summer!  Did I miss anyone out of the Sunday paper rumour fest?

The stuff in all this that is most likely for real is that a deal is there soon for Gervinho and a deal for Samba is being contemplated by Arsenal and Blackburn.  Blackburn’s Chairman reveals that Samba ‘has an ambition to play for Arsenal’ and that they might reluctantly have to go a long with it.

You can understand that reluctance when they’ve already lost Jones.  I mean, it would be like us losing Fabregas and Nasri in the same window wouldn’t it?

If these two deals (or a different central defender) do come through soon it will settle nerves around the place as a firm signal from Arsene Wenger that he really does intend more change than normal this summer.

I’m not going to write a deep analysis of how Eto’o and Barton could work well in the same team, though I suppose stranger things have happened.  Inside I’m torn between the prospect of having to think positively about Joey Barton and the images of Arsenal heads dropping against bottom-half opposition!  I’m going to lock that all away in a dark corner for now as 90% of this transfer stuff is rubbish anyway.

Perhaps the sane thing to do is ignore all the Sunday papers in June and follow the example of of Arsenal blog ‘A Cultured Left Foot’ – which today spurns transfer speculation for an appreciation of Anders Limpar.  For more recent fans, he was sort of Andrey Arshavin in an earlier life.  Anyway it’s well worth a look.

Great memories, that dreadful ‘rag-doll’ away strip.  That game against Coventry with Limpar’s hat-trick – even Perry Groves scored, but mind you the Coventry captain got Arsenal’s first with a bullet header past his own keeper!  Brian Moore (?) described it as one of Arsenal’s most spectacular goals of the season!

Yesterday I blogged about Arsenal up front, now let’s look at the midfield. This really comes in two parts – one is about Arsenal going forward and that story is largely about whether Fabregas it staying or going; the other is about providing the first line of defence.

Lets I think that Arsenal need a new Remi Garde or Gilles Grimandi. They were not the most technically gifted players Arsenal ever had, or the most youthful, and a persistent knee injury limited Garde to just 30 appearances. But they had an important job to do and they stuck to it. Their task was to ensure that what Arsenal had, they held. When you saw Garde or Grimandi on the touchline waiting to come on you knew that Arsene had said to Pat, ‘this is as good as we’re going to get today, let’s make sure we hold on to it’.

I don’t think we have enough players like that today. The only defensive midfielder we have is Alex Song and there have been occasions this season when he hasn’t stuck to the task. Don’t get me wrong, this is not an anti-Song piece, I’m still a big fan, but we need more. There are games, or stages of games, where he needs help or needs to be replaced with fresher legs. At the moment, the replacement options are Denilson and Diaby.

I always thought Denilson was a promising player, but his development seems to have stalled and he isn’t the real deal as a defensive player. He doesn’t look too bad in Champions League games against middling opposition, but he struggles to make an impact in the intensity of the Premiership.

Abou Diaby promises to be a Patrick Viera type, who can play from box to box. Sometimes it’s true, but not often enough. The rest of the time he goes missing or dawdles on the ball until he gets mugged.

It may be that Frimpong can play this role in the future. He was being talked up by the club pre-season last year before his cruciate ligament injury sidelined him. But even when he is fit again he is just young. A bit of maturity can be an advantage for this sort of player who needs the discipline to be single-minded when you’re one nil up at Old Trafford with eight minutes to go!

Is Scot Parker that kind of player? He could well be and in the West Ham fire sale he could be the right man at the right price.

Alternatively, a budget-busting move for a new central defender could mean the option of Djourou or Koscielny doubling up as cover for both midfield and defence.

Attacking midfielders tomorrow. Have a nice day now.

Except for those taking comfort in blaming the referee, I guess most fans first reaction was to heap it all on Emmanuel Eboue.

I was certainly stunned by him conceding a daft penalty and I had a bit of a post-match rant myself.  Lucas was heading away from goal with only seconds to go before the whistle and Eboue was well-placed between him and the goal if he tried to turn.  Whatever you think Lucas was up to, there was no need to risk making contact.

The irony is that Eboue actually had one of his better games up until that point.  Yes he still got caught out of position, leaving some big gaps for Meireles, but he was more effective than usual and more determined than some of his team-mates.

More of a problem was the fact that it took us ninety-eight minutes to score despite dominating the possession through-out.  And that was on the back of two previous goal-less home draws.

Kenny Dalglish is no fool and had correctly analysed the videos.  Stick two diligent defensive midfielders (Spearing and Lucus) in the middle and tell your fullbacks to stay in a tight formation with the central defenders to form a tight barrier on the edge of the box.  Don’t worry if that means Arsenal get down the sides because when they do get crosses in there generally isn’t anyone running into the box to do anything with them.

What will happen next (as in the whole of the next ninety minutes) is that Arsenal’s talented midfielders will grind down their enthusiasm and their very souls against this wall of six disciplined defenders until their passing becomes more and more ambitious and less and less effective.  Give Arsenal’s midfield space to play and they will up the pace, stretch the game and kill you dead.  Take away the space and they won’t know what to do.

Arsenal were quite good at the back yesterday, despite opting for Diaby over the more consistent Song.  Koscielny plays better alongside Djourou than he does alongside Squillaci.  Presumably because he can focus more on his own play.  Rather like Viera playing better alongside Gilberto.

Clichy, with good help from Nasri, kept Kuyt under control.  Eboue was better than usual until his gaffe.

Szczesny kept his concentration up to be good when needed.  His distribution still needs work as he put Clichy and Djourou in difficult positions during the game, but he’s convincing me at the moment that a new keeper isn’t the priority.

The problem is that we don’t score enough goals.

There’s quite a bit around the blogs today about how Arsenal should stop all this tippey-tappey football.  But I don’t think that’s quite the point.  The only problem with the way we attack is that it’s the only way we attack.  We’ve been sussed!

Eboue (we’re a forgiving lot!) and Djourou lead the man of the match poll.  Add your vote here.

OK, I know I’m slow on this one and you’ve probably already seen it, but it’s a great video so I’m not going to miss out. All the big highs and some of the lows of being an Arsenal fan right back to my earliest memories.

Cesc, Nasri, Sol, Viera, Edu, Michael Thomas, Tony Adams, Highbury, Charlie George, Frank McLintock, Bob Wilson…. fantastic!

C’mon Arsenal!

If you’re interested in where the sound track comes from it’s Al Pacino in ‘Any Given Saturday and you can see the original here.

So how are we feeling today? Nervous, excited, confident?

On the up side, we are top of the league and United are probably the weakest they have been in a few years. On the downside we haven’t been playing brilliantly either and are still vulnerable at the back.

Defence

A lot of Arsenal bloggers and media pundits are debating who amongst our central defenders is to blame for this and you can find advocates of every permutation of Squillaci, Koscielny and Djourou. I think Djourou is a good player – as good as the other two. The worry seems to be about his vulnerability to injury.

I think that there are two defensive problems.

The first is that we need our central defenders to get used to playing together. The clash of heads between Squillaci and Koscielny illustrates that perfectly. Wenger appears to believe that, in Vermaelen’s absence, Squillaci and Koscielny are the best two. If so they need to start as often as possible.

The second problem, which I think more serious, is that we don’t defend as a team. Too often, when we lose the ball, the midfield doesn’t track back and a huge space opens up between midfield and defence. The other team runs into this space and one of the back four gets drawn forward to close down. This is a better option than backing off like Liverpool did with Andy Carroll yesterday, but it pulls the back four out of shape. If the defender who has come out gets by-passed by a pass or beaten the next defender is forced to choose between two forwards. And we concede.

Wilshere and Song, or Denilson if he plays, need to sort this out. And the two wide players need to help out the fullbacks. Song and Wilshere are both capable of being box-to-box players. But if they both do it at once against good, pacey opponents we will lose two many goals.

Patrick Viera had his best games alongside Gilberto, because they both understood each others role and moved accordingly.

Nasri/Walcott

Should Walcott start? This is an important part of the jigsaw because it determines whether Nasri plays wide or in the middle. I’m assuming that Fabregas isn’t going to start. Personally I would start Walcott and have Nasri controlling things in the middle.

Van Persie/Chamakh

We’ve only really seen them together once, against Partizan Belgrade, and it wasn’t great. I think it’s one or the other – Van Persie if he’s 100%, otherwise Chamakh.

So my choice would be -

__________ Fabianski _________
Sagna _ Squillaci _ Djourou _ Clichy
_______ Song ___ Wilshere _____
Walcott ____ Nasri ____ Arshavin
_________ Van Persie __________

But I think that Koscielny will play ahead of Djourou.

What do you think?

Back in the summer I argued that what was needed in the transfer market and on the pitch was a big dose of pragmatism. I hoped that we wouldn’t be buying any teenage superstars of tomorrow, that we needed a bit more maturity and grit mixed in with the style we already had a plenty.

So I was happy with Wenger’s three summer buys.  Chamakh, Squillaci and Koscielny will probably never feature in the any list of all-time greats but they are, particularly the two defenders, helping to even up the style/substance balance in the Arsenal team.

The last two games have also seen a more pragmatic approach on the pitch as well.  The players are refusing to get pushed around as much as before.  Whilst this is sending the media into overdrive against us – they can’t or won’t make a distinction between reckless and determined tackling – I don’t mind Arsenal picking up a few more cards this season.  Viera and Bergkamp picked up cards – and trophies.

Arsene Wenger’s half-time swap of Denilson for Wilshere on Sunday was a well judged decision too. It wasn’t about injury or style.  It was about getting more control of the midfield and winning the game.  I think Denilson did really well, closing down, picking up loose balls and making simple passes.  It meant we had much more control in midfield in the second half.  It reminded me of some solid second half performances by the likes of Giles Grimandi and Reme Garde.

We shouldn’t get too carried away, we’re still not playing brilliantly. But in the last two games we haven’t rolled over against tough, hard-working opponents like we have been, and we’re second in the league.

C’mon Arsenal!