When Arsenal were knocking the ball about for 40 odd minutes without any kind of passion or intensity, out of boredom more than anything my eyes scoured Twitter. Amidst all the angst and the frustration on my timeline stood a very interesting point – even Diego Simeone and Jose Mourinho teams are genuinely funner than this.
To be honest, I don’t really mind boring football. Even though I never followed Arsenal during the Graham years, word-of-mouth accounts tell me his brand of fo0tball had gotten stale toward the end, much like Arsene Wenger’s. However, it doesn’t really get my goat if Arsenal don’t play pretty or don’t impress the neutrals. I can live with that, as long as there’s some fire in the team’s belly.
But that’s the thing, isn’t it? There’s no passion. There’s no desire. There’s absolutely no semblance of gumption or bottle left in a team that, in crystal clear terms, doesn’t believe in their manager. They don’t know what the manager wants. They don’t know if he has a vision compatible with theirs. They may not even know his vision. All they know are three things – passing, jogging and throwing away opportunities.
It’s surreal to see, and not in a good way. It’s a slow, dragging never-ending stretch of perpetual limbo of what seems like a Shakespearean tragedy. We don’t know when it will end, and we don’t even know if it will end well. What we do know is that until the end of next season, chances of this stasis continuing are ludicrously high, which (considering the status and resources of the club we’re talking about) is simply incredible.
For me, it’s not even about failure. Losing is hard, and obviously everyone avoids it if they can, but really, this is more to do with the manner of it. Because in most cases, the sadness of failure is, to an extent, pacified with the hope that better things are around the corner. It’s compensated with the hope that failure will galvanize drastic action in the pursuit of success.
Not at Arsenal. By now, we all know removing Wenger and his outdated backroom team is the obvious road to success. Some of us knew this years ago and have had to wait their turn, but that’s a moot point now. The cold reality of the matter is, the board don’t really give a shit about what we feel. Wenger doesn’t really give a shit about what we feel – he’s gone on record saying it. I hate to say it, but there’s really no way to stop what’s about to engulf this club until the next year – a colossal swamp of boredom.
If Arsenal drop out of the top four this season will the club sack him? I’d like to think it’s probable, but we know Arsenal won’t fall so low. Wenger just about does enough to remain in favour with the board. He’s bad at motivating the team to win the title, but he’s excellent at saving his skin when it matters. To an extent, it’s underrated how scrappily we managed to snatch fourth in 2012/13, when the only world-class player we had was Santi Cazorla. Even though this team seems like a fraid of ghosts not bothered about anything other than their weekly salary, he’ll push them enough to get third or fourth.
And… what happens then? I’m not really a fan of the perspective that Wenger will spend huge this summer. We’ve been one or two players short for ages now, and it might actually take someone threatening him at gunpoint to change his ways. And even if he does choose to spend, can we trust him with that money? It’s not like Arsenal have cultivated an atmosphere of developing players in recent years. As I touched on days ago, top clubs Barcelona and Bayern Munich have a history of good players becoming great.
Back in the day, we were like them. Young wannabes like Thierry Henry and Patrick Vieira entered London Colney and because of Wenger’s futuristic teaching, became legends. That’s not really the case anymore. There are loads of players who really ought to have kicked on in the past couple of seasons. They had promise, and it was apparent to see. It took us a great deal of tussle to nab the likes of Aaron Ramsey, Theo Walcott and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain from Manchester United. If you’d remember, the buzz around signing Ospina, Gabriel, Chambers and Welbeck was profound. All of them had potential, all of them had their moments, but none of them really stepped it up. It makes one wonder if Arsenal is really the place to be for a decent player to become world-class.
Will investment in the transfer market change that? I don’t think so. Look at the team we pitched out there yesterday. It had internationals like Mesut Ozil, Alexis Sanchez, Petr Cech and Danny Welbeck, with decent options like Joel Campbell, Olivier Giroud and Walcott on the bench. It’s not a bad squad by any stretch of the imagination, and yet it took them 43 minutes to conjure a decent chance. Why? Not because they’re bad players. The fact that they don’t perform once they enter Arsenal is not down to lady luck. It’s down to an unreal lack of motivation, a loser atmosphere and a manager who doesn’t fill them with belief.
Ozil had another bittersweet game – creating eight chances with no one to convert them. What do you think that will do to his performance levels? After a while he’ll stop playing like he is, and you can’t blame him. It’s not his fault, it’s simple human behaviour. It’s what happens when failure is conditioned to the point where true winners become defeatists. Look at Alexis – not nearly the player he was last season. He’s stopped showing the grit and determination that made him such an asset to the club in the first place.
We’re in a cycle of mediocrity. It’s not just about the manager. The backroom staff, the board and some of the players are caught in an endless loophole where they almost advocate the “good but not good enough” mantra. Throughout the club, there’s an absence of accountability which has seen Arsenal not regress, but stand perfectly still as younger and hungrier clubs overtake us, and continue to do so.
How can this stop? The answer is simple – but not one the club bothers to explore. No one has the guts to make the biggest decision of their lives in changing the manager, and in the meantime they missed out on gems like Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola. Ivan Gazidis showed some gumption in making Arsenal’s cash reserves somewhat public, and importing Shad Forsythe and Andries Jonker. Even so, good but not good enough.
I have a confession to make – when I started writing this post I had titled it “Don’t worry, it gets better” in the naive and Quixotic hope that at this rate, there will have to be a drastic shake-up to change things. Halfway through writing this post I realized how kiddish and misguided that thought was. I’m truly sorry, but if you’re here in the hope of reading the blogging equivalent of a ‘light at the end of a tunnel’, you’d be disappointed. I don’t have any catharsis to offer. I don’t think good things are around the corner. I don’t have any hope that things will get better.
I just have a grim account of the club we love, but one that doesn’t seem to love us back.
-Santi [Follow me on Twitter @ArsenalBlogz ]
Comments