- Every season has its disasters. We now have a month to get over this one.
- Losing a match badly in the early days of the sseason
By Tony Attwood
If we had been offered a situation after five games in which Arsenal were second, with four wins, and an eight to four goal difference I think quite a few of us would have said “ok that’s a fair start.” After all the first five last season resulted in three wins and a draw plus the one defeat.
Then of course we went on a five match run of victories which made everything look rather bright. We don’t of course know the future but what we do know is that the current pause in matches has by chance given Arteta and his team every opportunity to see what went wrong, and get any injuries dealt with (unless of course the international events make things worse).
So a nine match winning run comes to an end – but as I say, if there had to be a moment for such a defeat having it now is surely the best of times.
It is also worth noting that some other clubs do have injury problems that are significantly worse than Arsenal’s and might still be having a further implication for them when matches start again.
Curiously it is now Brighton who are reported to be in a bad way with nine men down, as have Newcastle United. Behind them is Hull City with eight and then Coventry and Aston Villa with seven each.
But perhaps the most positive aspect of the result came from Arteta himself as he said,
“They deserved to win the game and it’s a big lesson for us,” said a disappointed Arteta, who felt his players were not their usual combative selves. “From the first throw-in you could sense it, it was so clear…. If you don’t get out of that first part as winners, it will be extremely difficult to dominate the game and to have any probability of winning the game. At this level, it’s extremely important to respect and to understand [that] before anything else.”
So no hiding behind excuses, and I can imagine just how tough the mental training is going to be in the coming weeks.
But upsetting though that result of the weekend was, we can still perhaps get a little bit of a smile out of fact that Tottenham are top of the league as long as one is holding the newspaper upside down.
| Team | P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
1 Manchester City
|
5 | 5 | 0 | 0 | 13 | 5 | 8 | 15 |
|
2 Arsenal
|
5 | 4 | 0 | 1 | 8 | 4 | 4 | 12 |
|
|
||||||||
|
16 Aston Villa
|
5 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 9 | -5 | 4 |
|
17 Bournemouth
|
5 | 0 | 3 | 2 | 6 | 8 | -2 | 3 |
|
18 Coventry City
|
5 | 1 | 0 | 4 | 1 | 10 | -9 | 3 |
|
19 Fulham
|
5 | 0 | 2 | 3 | 5 | 8 | -3 | 2 |
|
20 Tottenham Hotspur
|
5 | 0 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 8 | -6 | 2 |
I know we can’t go on and on and on laughing at Tottenham, and surely eventually they will get things right, but that position as shown above does come after several years of heavy spending, and last summer alone they bought in what Transfer Market says is a total market value of arrivals of €410.50m in order to make them bottom of the league. I was going to run the list here but it is too many to mention.
Meanwhile there is a growing awareness in the club that it is essential that Mikel Merino says Max Dowman needs to be managed well, – as well as an awareness that of course he can’t perform miracles on his own. One that that is particularly important is to recognise also that the day will come when one clogging defender will simply take him out with an injury that could affect his playing ability for months to come.
For Arsenal this means controlling the hype generated by the media who will not let up until something happens, be it a serious injury or indeed a loss of form. Although in the meanwhile we can enjoy the fact that other clubs’ supporters are saying “how come Arsenal find these kids and we don’t.”
The answer of course is that although Arsenal are not afraid of spending money on transfers they have always worked hard with their young players, and tend to attract a multiplicity of such youngsters because of their willingness to give them a chance.
Given that there is now no football of any importance for the next few weeks, it will indeed be interesting to see how Downman emerges for the next game which is Leeds at home on 10 October. And then just to show how carefully balanced everything is Arsenal have no fewer than A six games in 17 days – which according to my calculator comes after no games for the next 19 days.
Which to me makes even less sense than a lot of the journalism about football written in the newspapers.
.
I would rather have had the opportunity to rectify things with the next match taking place sooner, without the international break.
Also, based on experience of every such break, we can expect a number of our players to be unavailable because of injury by the time we play Leeds.