Good morning Gooners! Happy Friday, the weekend is nearly here. I know there’s been a lot of football lately, and at first I was glad of the break, but after I saw everyone else play in the Cup in midweek, I really couldn’t wait for this game to come round so I’m glad the wait is nearly over!
I’ll do my preview of the game tomorrow morning so I won’t go into too much detail on the game in this post however, I will say that it is shaping up to be a massive game in the season. ANOTHER massive game. We don’t seem to play small ones anymore, but I guess that’s how we want it.
The way I look at it, we’re two wins away from being top of the Premier League at Christmas, as well as being top of the Champions League and also in the Semi-Finals of the League Cup. So if we manage to pick up those two wins, I think that would put us in a position that most Arsenal fans would have bitten your hand off for at the start of the season. Two big games though, so I’m not counting my chickens just yet!
They have drawn the League Cup Semi Final games now and again, I’m not going to delve too much into that as, well, we’re not even there yet!!! What I will say is that the awful quarter final draw made it so that pretty much all of the ties were very predictable, with ours being the hardest of the draws from the remaining so-called ‘big 6’ (remember those days!!) teams. So the draw was going to be tough no matter who we got, so I don’t think it matters too much.
Reflecting on the Wolves game
Thinking back to that Wolves game, where I think even the most biased Gooner will admit we got away with one, I’m really hoping this can be a turning point in our season. Maybe that’s just what every football fan thinks when they see something from their team that they don’t really like, but I do hope that this is a catalyst for something better. The last few away games the results have not gone our way and the performances haven’t been as strong either so we have an opportunity to go to a really tough away ground and send out a message to City, Villa and anyone else who thinks they can match us. A really strong performance is an absolute must and should be enough to bring home the points.
The poor performance, yet ultimately winning the game, reminds me of a game during the 1997/98 double winning season (yes, I’m that old!!). That was my first season when I started getting into football and although it sort of pains me to admit it, I didn’t really get into it properly until the season after. The season that was unfortunately pull of pain and utter heartbreak. What was I saying again?! Oh yeah, the 1997/98 season. I wasn’t much of a fan in those days, but I remember my Dad talking about this game a lot, in terms of turning a season around, for years after.
We played Leicester on Boxing Day and were absolutely dreadful. We went 2-0 up, including an own goal in our favour, and then David Seaman had a mad moment by his standards and got caught dribbling with the ball outside of his box to make it 2-1. From that point onwards we had to dig in and managed to cling on to a big three points, despite playing poorly. Arsenal never looked back from that point onwards and stormed to the League and Cup double and it proved that it doesn’t have to be a painful defeat that causes a spark and a change in attitude/performance. Sometimes it can just be a shock of how lucky you had just got or how you realised that the standards just weren’t there, so I hope that the Wolves game can be that for us this season. If Declan Rice’s demeanour after the game (and during) the game is anything to go by, I think a least one player realises we got away with one and I’d bet good money that he let the others know in the dressing room after the game.
I don’t get assists
Football has changed a lot. I get that. Most of the change is quite gradual so you don’t always notice it however, when something changes quite significantly, it tends to stand out that bit more. For me, one such change is the football ‘assist’.
Passing the ball isn’t new, but the attitude to assists has changed drastically over the past 10-15 years and it seems to have gone up another level in the past few years even, with even the term ‘goal contributions’ being used to quantify goals and assists into one figure.
Thierry Henry still holds the record for most Premier League assists with 20, yet I don’t remember that being such a big deal in those days. I mean, in terms of the number of assists being talked about specifically in a players stats. It was more like: ‘Thierry Henry has just done something class again, hasn’t he?’ ‘Yeah, probably, it’s because he’s f***ing brilliant!’ Rather than, oh, that takes Henry’s assists up to 17 for this season…
The first time I remember taking an interest in assists was when we bought Mesut Ozil – the one player who seemed to be more interested in assisting goals, that scoring them himself! I mean that as well, he even said as much in a few interviews. Mesut Ozil, like Thierry Henry, was another world class player who played for Arsenal, but they did it in VERY different ways. Thierry Henry impacted the game from almost the first minute, in just about everything he did. Whether with pace, power, skill, determination or his goals, he just oozed quality and even people who didn’t know anything about football, could see how good he was. Ozil was, near enough, the complete opposite. He could go 20-30 minutes or more and barely touch the ball, but when he did, he usually did something pretty special with it and often led to an assist, and that’s how people measured Ozil’s quality – with numbers, his output, his assists etc.
Fair enough, I get it. I was hyping him up like everyone else at the time, talking about how many assists he got and how many he’s on course to get by the end of the season and all that.
From those days though, we seem to have gone to another level with the assist. It now seems to define whether a player is playing well or not. At the start of the season, Noni Madueke was our best attacker, in my opinion, yet I often heard people saying things like, ‘he’s doing well, but he’s not got any goals or assists yet’. End product is important, of course it is, but it’s not everything and it shouldn’t be used as a stick to beat a player with, especially one who is playing really well!!
If anyone is still reading, I’d imagine you are wondering why I’m ranting about this, and specifically, why now. Well, the game at the weekend, however, terrible, was decided by two bits of quality from Bukayo Saka. One wicked corner (or shot?!) and one perfect, injury-time cross, led to Arsenal scoring two goals, yet Bukayo Saka gets nothing for it. No official, statistical recognition of what he did to turn this game into our favour.
If the ‘assist’, is going to be used to measure players quality at pretty much every turn, how can you look at that game and say that Bukayo Saka didn’t get an assist. The fact that Mosquera headed the ball into his own net had no bearing on whether or not that was a good cross – it was an absolute beauty and deserved a goal and it therefore definitely deserved an assist!
So on the flip side, you have a striker who has a chance laid on for him to tap home, who fluffs his lines, but he manages to shin the ball onto another teammate who scored (I can think of at least two Danny Welbeck ‘assists’ that fit this description!!). The hopeless striker in this example, would get an assist, yet the person who deliberately laid the chance on for the striker would get nothing.
Sorry, makes no sense to me. If you’re going to hand out assists in such a literal way – oh he touched it last so he assisted it – they you might as well scrap it completely. Let’s just go back to goals and performances being measured for a player’s quality!!!
Signs of life
Finally, to end this post on a bit of a positive, I wanted to mention the second half from Viktor Gyokeres against Wolves. I’ve been critical of Gyokeres of late, and he still has a long way to go to convince me that he’s our answer up top yet, I still think there was a few really positive signs from him that gave me hope that we’ve not just blown £55m on another dud. After watching the game back, his movement in that second period was vastly improved and his touches also seemed a lot more deliberate, with the ball not just bouncing off him. He nearly capped it all off with a really good goal as well. That take and turn under pressure reminded me of why we signed him in the first place. That was the sort of player that we thought that we were getting. The big, burly striker, who takes the ball, back to goal, pins the defender, spins and then gets his shot away.
We’re not out of the woods yet, but definitely signs of life from Gyokeres. Now, he needs to build on it.