Tag Archives: 4th place cup

Gambatte Arsenal

I made myself French toast for breakfast. I had an egg, some day-old brioche, and some half and half leftover from making crème fraîche* and the idea of French toast just struck me. I suffered greatly while eating that I can tell you. It started very well, was a bit dry in the middle but went down well with a giant cup of coffee. I just had to make do with what I had and it turned out pretty good.

There was a similar feel to the QPR v. Arsenal match yesterday. Arsenal got off to a great start, Theo Walcott scoring in the first 21 seconds, but then spent the next 60 minutes in an exercise of playing with the handbrake on. Which they followed up with 30 minutes of trying to increase the scoreline but just falling short. In the end though, they scored early, tried to get some more goals at the end of the match and kept the clean sheet through a combination of great play in the outfield and by the finger-tips of Szczesny. But in the end, they made due with what they had and it turned out pretty good.

We can’t underestimate the change in the way that Arsenal have played football with Giroud this season. The Big Gallic Galoot has attempted 231 aerial duels this season, which is 136 more than Robin van Persie attempted last season. In fact, Arsenal’s total aerial duels attempted is up from 765 last season to 1118 this season, 39% of that increase is accounted for just with the difference between Giroud’s attempts and van Persie’s last season. That is in a season, I should mention, in which all aerial duels are up mostly because Stoke have attempted 75% more aerials this season than last. I’m serious, Stoke have tried 746 more aerials this season than last. That’s 21 more aerial duels per game from Stoke. They try 50 a game. FIFTY.

Regardless of Stoke’s Hail Mary tactics, Podolski is no Giroud. In the last two games, Arsenal have kept trying to play the same style of football that they worked on under Giroud but unlike Giroud, who is 56% in the air, Podolski has only won 5 of 17 attempts. Podolski is passing the ball better than Giroud but he’s not creating anything for anyone. Against Norwich, Giroud had one of his best games of the season, scoring a goal, and setting up 4 chances for teammates. Not only that but as much as we have a moan about Giroud’s finishing, he does get shots off with a season average above 3 shots a game, which is around his career average. Podolski on the other hand has never been a prolific shooter (two year average 1.9 per game) and it shows, he’s had just three shots in his two games up front for Arsenal.

I did a poll on twitter (accurate as hell, I know) and the results were close but 38% would like to see Theo Walcott given the chance to start at center forward with second place going to Gervinho. My vote was for Podolski. Not because I think he’s been good in the position but because I don;t think Arsenal are well drilled enough to play a new style at this point in the season and he is bigger than Theo and against QPR he did put himself about a bit better than he did against United. He won 5/12 aerial duels against QPR and did have two shots, though he still didn’t create anything for anyone else.

Theo, on the other hand, is not being stifled at all by playing wide. He’s had 8 shots (5 on target) in the last two games and under Arsene’s non-system system has the freedom to drop into the middle to clog things up by being an extra body all he wants.

I’m leery of saying that there has been some kind of “sea change” at Arsenal but over the last 14 games Arsenal have been statistically unlike the Arsenal that we are all used to seeing. They have scored 26 goals (5 of them against West Ham) for an average of 1.9 goals per game (1.75 if you take the West Ham match and one of the 0-0 matches out) which is about right for an Arsene Wenger side. But what’s different is that they have only allowed 10 goals in that time, which is an average of 0.7 goals allowed per game, and they have kept 6 clean sheets.

As I wrote in my By The Numbers Column, that’s not because Arsenal are limiting the chances of the opposition, as they did with the tiki-taka football under Cesc Fabregas, there’s something else going on here: pressing from the front, fighting for possession, winning defensive headers, helping each other on defense, all of that seems to have taken hold at Arsenal. And I feel more confident about the Arsenal defense than I have all season.

There was a momentary bit of anxiety toward the end of the West Brom game but yesterday against QPR I honestly felt that the result was never in doubt. Even though it did require a fine save from an otherwise dreadful Szczesny.

So, I don’t see Arsenal changing things much. It’s been a very successful formula over the last 14 games and Arsenal are the form team of the Premier League because of it. I know that’s rather boring to say and that there is some “brilliant” blog out there right now with the headline “Why Arsenal need to give Gervinho the starting center forward spot” or some such nonsense but then grinding out 1-0 wins can get rather boring. For those who wanted their “Arsenal back”, they got it.

And one last thing because I know that everyone is trying to figure out the permutations of how Arsenal could finish 4th or whatever. I did see that Chelsea won today and there are a lot of worried Arsenal fans that think that means more pressure has been heaped on the players. But the reality is that Arsenal needed to win every game in this run-in no matter what so if these players didn’t already have pressure on them then there was something seriously wrong.

When Arsenal drew with United that essentially took the finish out of our hands and now we have to hope for Chelsea to beat Tottenham. But for me, I’m not worried. I’d like for Arsenal to finish in the top four but its not a prerequisite for me as to whether I support the club by flying over at great expense and seeing games — it will only change where I fly to. And as for whether the club will or won’t invest if they lose out on Champions League money, that makes for great speculation in the blogosphere but no one has one shred of evidence that they know what this board and manager will do this summer.

The season is going to be over in a few weeks and we will have all summer to bitch and moan about transfers. In the mean time, let’s just enjoy the football we have left. And for those of you wanting to do the math on what happens if Chelsea win against Tottenham or whatever, here’s a simple formula: root for Arsenal to win every game.

And that’s all we ask, right? Do your best, gambatte in Japanese. And if they fail at the finish then they just get back up and try again next year.

*Real crème fraîche contains at least 30% butterfat. So what?

Fantasy Football: defense, offense, errors

Let’s play fantasy football for a minute. Ok, get out three 6 sided dice and roll for Starting Center Forward… oh wait, not “Dungeons and Dragons for Sports Nerds Fantasy Football” but rather the type of fantasy football that folks have been playing for a century: “what if?”

What if, your team could have scored just one more goal? What if, they could have saved just one more goal? What if, they could stop making bone-headed mistakes like the ones that cost so dearly against Manchester United?

It’s a fantasy game that everyone plays with every team from relegation fodder to the teams challenging for the title. And we do it because if football is our fantasy world away from the real world, then this re-imagined sports season is our world away from the world away from the world. In a sense it’s our perfect world, the beer is always free, the football is always on and your team doesn’t always win but it always wins in the end.

Interestingly, though, even in this fantasy world we create rules and try to make it realistic. Most of us don’t create fantasy seasons where the Arsenal win every game 6-0. I say “most of us” because I know some of you probably do – I’ve seen some of you play sports on your X-Box. But for most of us we like to create intricate fantasy scenarios with our sports team filled with all kinds of realistic rules for how the season could play out.

For example, you might start with a question like, what would happen if Arsenal scored one more goal in every game versus saving one more goal in every game? Then you would look at the results table add points, add goals, subtract goals, and come to the conclusion (somewhat rightly) that offense holds the edge over defense in terms of which has a bigger impact on final League position over the course of a season. You might then ask, what impact did errors* have on Arsenal’s defensive record this season and what would Arsenal’s record look like if they had been able to eliminate just the errors that cost them points?

You might then, if you’re a nerd, make a table like this:

Fantasy Football!

As you can see in the far left column is Arsenal’s actual record and actual points tally. Arsenal are currently on 64 points with 66 goals for, 36 goals against, and a +30 goal difference.

In the next column over I chose not to just add a goal for every single game but rather to add goals in just the games in red or bold. Instead of an extra 35 goals, that added just 15 goals because out of Arsenal’s 17 draws or losses there were 15 games this season where the outcome was decided by one or fewer goals. In that column, Arsenal are winning the League easily but it’s kind of unrealistic to expect that Arsenal would score the exact 15 goals that would add 25 points to the bottom line. Isn’t it?

In the next column, I remove goals against Arsenal that changed the result and as you can clearly see, Arsenal get fewer points than in the goals for column because it is true that every single team would benefit more from adding an extra goal a game than from removing an opposition goal a game. Simply because there is no place to go but up in sports. No one can have a negative score. Thus, this term Arsenal have four 0-0 draws (Everton, Stoke, Aston Villa, and Sunderland) and one 0-1 loss (Norwich) taking four points from a possible 15. Scoring just five more goals in those games means that Arsenal would have taken and extra 11 points, not enough to win the League but enough to put us within touching distance and comfortably in second place. When you start creating fantasy worlds away from worlds, there’s one that seems attainable: have enough talented forwards that when you face dross like Stoke, they can’t park the bus and get a result.

The second conclusion that the astute observer might draw is that if you look at the top of the table (they are sorted by actual table position) it doesn’t matter if you add offense or add defense, the results this year (excepting Everton) were the same. Not only that, but taking those 4 points away from United would make them have a total of only 81 and adding in the 10 points Arsenal would get from an improvement to either end of the pitch would get us again in second place, this time with 74 points.

But if you look at the last column and just remove the glaring errors that led to goals Arsenal are winning the League with a points total of 83. That would be two more than United who would be on 81 points because Arsenal would have won one and drawn one with them. Errors are a specific problem with this Arsenal team that pre-dates the loss to Birmingham in the League Cup final and are a problem that seems to have gotten worse over the last two years.

But my conclusion is that none of those three are the sole answer. My answer is that Arsenal need to get (or develop) a flat track bully who will make the difference in close games and need to work harder on team defense so that they aren’t conceding as many silly goals off mistakes or goals off lax play overall.

Every title winning team makes mistakes, eliminating mistakes entirely is not the only answer. Moreover, every title winning team finishes the season with one or more 0-0 draws. But cutting down on costly errors certainly helps; mostly because it goes hand-in-hand with allowing fewer goals. And scoring against teams like Aston Villa is also crucial. You can slip once or twice but 5 times? You’re fighting for 4th.

And no matter how we fantasize about what might have been this season the reality is that Arsenal have three games left in which to salvage a 3rd or 4th place finish. The other reality is that those three games are against three of the worst defensive teams in the League, with the last game of the season against Alan Pardew’s defensive trainwreck, Newcastle. It’s conceivable that Arsenal could win all three games and finish 5th, though that would require Chelsea to falter just enough and Tottenham to win out, but no matter how we go back through the season and cherry pick the results we wish we had, or how we try to predict the results we and others could have, the reality for me is that if Arsenal don’t win all three of their remaining games they probably won’t deserve a top four finish.

Realistically.

*An error here has to be a big mistake, for example: Sagna’s back pass plus poor tackle in the box that gives up a penalty, that’s an error. Failing to mark your man is an “error” but is not the kind of error that we are looking at. We are talking errors on a grand scale here. Like the keeper dropping an easy catch in front of a Southampton player so they could score. Glaring errors.

Arsenal closing in on second place? Not if Swansea have anything to say about it

Take a look at the Cann table for week 27 (below). Spurs have a game in hand tonight and if they win, they leapfrog Chelsea into third place – a mere 5 points off second place Man City. However, if they lose (or even draw), things are so close in the 3rd-5th place bunch that the North London Derby next Sunday becomes game which Arsenal could overtake their local rivals.

But if you look at the Cann table, you can see that no matter how optimistic you are in looking up the table, there are people who could look down the table and have just as much right to think Arsenal could still finish anywhere from 2nd to 9th.

Personally, I’m not thinking either extreme. Arsenal don’t play City or Chelsea again this season, meaning that the Gunners can’t take points off them as direct rivals. Taking second place, then, means a major slip by the two wealthiest teams in the League. And if you look at the remaining matches it’s actually the clashes between the top 9 teams which are going to decide those 2nd-4th place slots and ultimately the 7amkickoff 4th Place Trophy™.

Man City and Arsenal play 5 of the top 9 teams while Chelsea and Spurts play 6 of the top 9 teams in each of the last 11 matches of the season. It’s those teams, the Swanseas, West Broms, Liverpools, and Evertons which have a major say in the final table.

Despite the major gaps in spending, I bunch all of those teams, from Chelsea to Swansea, together as fighting for the 2nd-9th places. There are only 12 points difference between Chelsea (49 points) and Swansea (37 points) which is the same difference as between Man U (68 points) and Man City (56 points). And if Man City has a right to believe that they could still win the Premier League then surely Swansea has every right to believe that they could take third place? Especially since so many of these teams are all going to be playing each other.

The race for 4th place has been this close for two seasons now. By matchday 27 last season Arsenal were only 4 points behind Spurts and the remainder of the season turned on a few special moments. This season, I’m thinking could turn into a photo finish for several teams with each vying for Champions League football and all of them playing each other.

So, while the North London Derby is important, one of the biggest games of the year for both teams regardless the history of the match, it’s the others against the West Broms, Swanseas, Liverpools, and Evertons which are equally important. And the team with the real mental strength, the real consistency, will be the one to take third or fourth.

But second? Not impossible, but let’s just win the games in front of us first.