By Tim, January 27th, 2012 | Tags: Jack Wilshere | Category: Arsenal, Injuries, transfers |
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
We pick our way through carefully crafted arguments about substitutions. We model Arsenal’s accounts and check sums. We stare at squad sheets late into the night looking for blame. And we turn to graphs and charts of performances to reveal ultimate truths. But in the end, it’s just a foot that derails an entire season.
Or does it?
As we’ve seen nearly every year as far back as I can remember an Arsenal player always has some kind of injury to start the season. Then the boss talks about how his recovery is going well. Then he starts light running or training. And just when the butterflies are settled in my stomach and the transfer window is closing, the boss announces a setback.
This time it’s Jack Wilshere who has had a setback and could be out for the remainder of the season. I won’t bore you with the details of his injury or what the setback is because, frankly, I don’t care. Maybe you need to know if it’s an inflamed bone or a tendon in his calf that rubs against another tendon and causes him discomfort. Maybe you’d like to know the course of treatment. Maybe it will be horse placenta, which seemed to work wonders for van Persie.
I’m also not someone who is going to blame the medical staff at Arsenal because from what I can tell this team doesn’t just suffer from some fluid in the muscle, this team has had an unusual number of broken bones. Cesc, Nasri, Clichy, Frimpong, Robin, Gibbs, Diaby, Eduardo, and Ramsey all had their bones broken before this season and have spent/will spend time in the recovery table for those injuries. And this year alone we’ve had Wilshere, Jenkinson, and Sagna all out with broken bones.
If you want to complain about the fact that “they” rested Wilshere’s “inflamed bone” at the start of the season instead of going straight into surgery then you’re missing a major plot point in that story. “They” includes Jack Wilshere who, in consultation with his doctor, chose to rest his leg rather than go under the knife. Jack Wilshere is under contract at Arsenal, but last time I checked, he is still allowed to make medical decisions for himself without first consulting us.
Or perhaps you want to blame Capello, Psycho, or Arsene for playing him too much? Sure, go right ahead. They did play him too much and do deserve some of the blame. Along with Jack, who took way too long to take a stand against playing in the U-21 team.
Maybe it’s squad size? Wenger perhaps shouldn’t be carrying dead weight in the squad and should be buying players who can compete and in a perfect world I would totally agree. But then again last season was a year in which I recall lauding the depth in midfield at the start of the season as the Arsenal midfield was Nasri, Cesc, Song, Wilshere, Rosicky, and Denilson. Again, it was injuries to players like Cesc that forced Wilshere to play so much.
Sure, burnout of Ramsey is a very real threat but Arsene has tried Benayoun and Rosicky there and Rosicky actually had a great game for Arsenal against Man U. Probably the best performer in midfield. So, rotation there is an option.
I don’t know. I do know that Wilshere was seen by many as the existential-crisis- slayer at Arsenal. The player who was going to come back fit and right all the wrongs. And there is no doubting his talent, spirit or love for the club. He would be a huge addition to the squad and will be sorely missed, no doubt.
But the position that Wilshere plays in is actually doing OK as far as numbers. If there’s a crisis requiring a rash purchase, it’s fullbacks that Arsenal need at the moment. Djourou is a decent player but his passing numbers are unsurprisingly much lower than Sagna. Also, Djourou’s pace is suspect and you saw that against Man U and will see it again against any team that has a speedy left wing player (read, “all of them”). And as on cue, the team news this morning is the surprise announcement that Bacary Sagna is back in contention for Sunday’s match.
Ahhh the mysteries of the universe. I think I need some night air.
Qq
 Arsenal’s First Half v. Man U
 Man U first half v. Arsenal
 Arsenal’s second half v. Man U
Man U second half v. Arsenal
I don’t want to be too simplistic but looking at the FourFourTwo Stats Zone Powered By Opta* application on my iPad I noticed a few things.
First, simply put, Arsenal’s first half was very poor in terms of passes in the final third against Man U but was, when compared to Man U’s second half, pretty much a wash. Except! They scored a goal in their period of profligacy and Arsenal didn’t.
Second, Arsenal’s second half was superior to their first half but the amount of rebound fell well short of the effort Man U put into their first half. Arsenal attempted just 68 passes in the Man U final third compared to Man U’s 100 passes in Arsenal’s final third in the first half. Still! Both teams scored just one goal in both of those halves.
Third, you can see how Man U targeted the right back in both halves but how Yennaris was better equipped to deal with the threat in the second than Djourou was in the first.
And finally, the debate will continue to rage over Wenger’s substitution of Arshavin for Ox but don’t see a huge drop in passes in the final third after the Ox’s sub. Arsenal still completed 25/31 in those final 15 minutes which is nearly half the attacking passes in the second half in just the last 15 minutes. But! Defensively, is where Arsenal failed there. United completed just 11/20 passes in the Arsenal final third in the last 15 minutes of the game but crucially, they completed 7/7 passes in Arsenal’s final third from the moment that the Ox was subbed to the moment that Welbeck scored — including the three in the build-up to the goal.
One sub, seven minutes, seven passes, one goal.
Is that the lack of concentration that we keep hearing about? Is this just down to Arshavin? What else do you see?
Qq
*I’m being silly in mentioning the entire name. I was NOT paid to put this here. In fact, I paid for the damn app myself. Grrrr…**
**I also was not paid by Apple to mention the iPad. GRRRRRR…
By Tim, January 25th, 2012 | Category: Arsenal, Press Bias |
Some of you may already know this but for those who don’t; on Sunday I unsubscribed from nearly every major Arsenal news feed. This means that I no longer get ESPNSoccernet, the Telegraph, the Guardian, the Mail, the Mirror, or This is Staffordshire* in my daily diet. And much like a person makes a major change in the food they eat because of a health crisis, this shift in my reading diet after the Man U loss has revealed some hard truths. As well it should. After all, few people find themselves in a dietary crisis after a lifetime of eating well.
I used to get up at 4am and almost before my feet hit the floor, open my Google Reader. Once there I would skip down to the “News” folder and start skimming through the daily news feeds from all of the sources listed above.
Skimming was intentional. I know that I could set up an Arsenal only feed or filter out the content that wasn’t Arsenal related but doing that meant I would lose some of the context. For example, what is the point of understanding Arsenal’s semi-annual financial report unless it’s in the context of the financial reports of other clubs?
Another reason skimming is important is that I didn’t grow up in the football culture and I don’t live near the club that I’m covering. So, I need to immerse myself as fully as possible into that culture and, in a sense, catch up with the rest of you. Things like “banta” and chanting aren’t completely foreign concepts but I need to try to understand the subtexts of those cultural artifacts in order to comment intelligently.
I would get my breakfast ready, coffee on, and spend an hour to two hours just reading football related news feeds first thing in the morning. Then at lunch, more news feeds. Then after supper, more news feeds. Then before bed. And if I woke up in the middle of the night worried about something. How else would I have know important details like the fact that the Rwandan president has called time on Arsene Wenger’s tenure at Arsenal?**
I’m exaggerating, slightly, but the reality is that I spent an extraordinary amount of time sifting through the output of just a small handful of media outlets’ content to find maybe 10 stories that interested me, per day. There was a lot of duplication in there, there was a lot of contradiction between sites and even within, there was a lot of opinion, and the vast majority of the opinion and coverage of all the clubs was negative.
I’m not telling anyone anything shocking to say that newspapers thrive off negative coverage. Objectively, the Arsene Wenger era has been the most successful in the history of Arsenal and one of the most successful in the history of English football. And it doesn’t matter how you measure that success — trophies, players, fans, money, stadiums, reputation, etc — Arsenal are a successful football club. Also just as objectively, Arsenal are going through a rough patch.
It’s natural for the newspapers to cover the negative over the positive in that situation. In fact, I’d argue it’s natural for them to make the negative the norm. You only need to see the negative coverage of Man U, who are objectively the most successful club in Premier League history and who are not going through a rough patch despite losing players to injury and not splashing big money this January, to see that no matter what’s happening at your club the reporters will make the negative the norm.
How many red cards did Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal get when they were winning trophies? If you know the answer to that then, again, I’ve proven my point. It’s more complicated than that, of course, but I’m not writing an ethnography on English sports reporters here, rather, just pointing out that negativity has and always will sell and when multiplied with the number of stories that I was reading, it was and still is a bit of a burden.
I imagine it would be less burdensome if there wasn’t so much ubiquitous reblogging, republishing, and repeating of so much content. Well, I say “content” but I really mean “bullshit.” And the thing is that it’s not just simple multiplication of bullshit, it’s some kind of exponential function of bullshit. Bullshit begets bullshit and each of those bullshits begets their own bullshit and so on until we are entirely covered in bullshit.
See, what happens is that if negativity sells then people have to out-negative each other. One writer calls for a player to be fired, the next guy is dissatisfied with just one player and calls for a clear out of multiple players, the next for assistant coaches to be fired, the next guy for the manager to be fired, and then the board, and then the owners, and then….? What? Do we call for the Premier League to be fired? the FA? FIFA? Europe? The UN? God himself?
Now, imagine that you could take all that gluttony, that negativity, and all that bullshit that you’ve been carrying around for the last few years and put it down for a second.
It’s like double-rainbows all the way across the sky, man.
Trust me.
*I had to keep up on what people were saying about us in Stoke!
**I don’t read Brooks Peck’s “work”, someone from twitter sent me that link this morning and I thought perfectly illustrates every point I made above and below.
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