Bless Arsenal. In a strange, strange English Premier League season in which the main villains Manchester United and Chelsea have completely lost their identity, and Liverpool and Manchester City are still working on finding theirs, Arsenal have been a beacon of stability.
Stability of results? Of course not. But Arsenal’s flakiness has been the one regularity we’ve been able to count on in this wonderful 2015-16 season.
Arsenal became a cliche a long, long time ago, a whirlwind of ball movement, sideways passing, thrustless goalscoring and bloodless conquest of the smaller fish. This was combined with a propensity to fall apart when physical and situational pressure was applied.
Year after year Arsenal have topped up with midfielders from both continental Europe and more obscure places, who were supposed to both take the next step and be the next step for the club itself. Instead what always happened to Arsenal recruits post-2006 is that, once incorporated into the machine, they lost their individuality and became a type of clone of each other, lacking any sort of character or penetration.
Players like Jose Antonio Reyes, Aleksandr Hleb, Tomas Rosicky, Andrei Arshavin, Abou Diaby, Denilson and latterly until this season Mesut Ozil have all come to personify Arsenal’s beigeness, their lack of standout leaders, their lack of resolve.
There are many of us who would like Arsenal to take the leap that had always been promised. Yours truly was a big Thierry Henry/Dennis Bergkamp/French Connection fan of 2004 vintage. I felt surprisingly bitter when the revamped Arsenal kids lost the 2006 Champions League final to parallel fairies Barcelona.
The last time they were relevant was the first half of 2007-08, when they ditched Henry and Emmanuel Adebayor proved a surprising counter to back up ‘Ewing Theory’ (the theory that teams rally from departed superstars by lifting their overall game, such as Geelong 2011). But the drain of the ‘second generation’ of Sami Nasri, Cesc Fabregas, Adebayor, William Gallas, Kolo Toure and such all eventually leaving the club in their primes was a dispiriting leap of faith too far.
The low point was probably the 8-2 loss to Manchester United in 2011. Cesc and Nasri were on the way out and there was a huge possibility of missing the Champions League in the next week. At that point manager Arsene Wenger revealed the one thing he is still good at – keeping Arsenal at a static third place, second-round Champions League level.
Arsenal beat Napoli in UCL qualifying to stay afloat, but lost to Milan in the second round when Robin Van Persie had the miracle one-on-one chance to level a 4-0 deficit but chipped the ball gently into the keeper’s hands. Très chic. He would also leave a few months later.
Personally I haven’t bothered since about 2010 – coincidentally the last time they won a knockout tie in the Champions League – but our own Jay Croucher tried his luck on Arsenal as a worthwhile subject matter as recently as a year ago.
This next part writes itself: It was all well and good to say there was unequal financial footing blah blah, but so have Tottenham and particularly Leicester City dealt with such obstacles this year – and how!
Alexis Sanchez is probably the one Arsenal recruit of the last decade who hasn’t lost his zingy x-factor and become a soulless member of the Borg. But he is clearly out of gas towards the end of each Premier League season. Ozil can twinkle around but is not a definitive personality. Getting a winner like Petr Cech onboard was a good move but couldn’t stop the rot.
The hope has always been that Arsenal would sweep aside the evilness of the world (you know, Chelsea) by playing an expansive style that wins multiple trophies, like in 2004. But the world has seemingly moved on. Barcelona did that already. The evil also became less evil: even Bayern Munich and Juventus have the ball circulation thing going these days.
And as far as tackling financial juggernauts with stealthier means and by being cleverer, well I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Claudio Ranieri pretty much has Arsene Wenger beat.
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