By Tony Attwood
- Somehow the English media is playing down ManC’s situation. But in Europe….
- Some clubs just threaten others; Arsenal find new brilliance within
The media love to portray football as a fixed game with clear rules while the variation between clubs is in fact the variation between the quality of players rather than between tactics. It is after all the same game with 11 players and the same rules as before. We all have 10 outfield players spread across the pitch.
But for a handful of coaches there is an attraction in suggesting that a new approach or two can help and can take the club up the league, or in Tottenham’s case, down the league.
Thus we currently have the notion that Arsenal found a new “guru” (it’s always a “guru”) and he has been training the Arsenal players in secret, with new tactics. The guru is foreign (that is a pre-requisite) and there is a lot of use of the word “creativity” because that is always a magic word in these circumstances.
Creativity is also a word that incorporates a sense of something not quite English – a sort of misleading trick that the solid English centre forward whose prime instruction is to “give the ball a hefty boot” would never indulge in. And indeed the latest trick for Arsenal comes from that most dubious of foreign locations: Argentina. Argentina, the country that is about to steal the Falkland Islands from us…. Full of foreigners – well they would be, being Argentine. Probably don’t speak English.
But not, this new approach comes from Germán Castaños who has written lots of books. Not something you’d find an English manager dong (and even if a book carries his name on the cover you can be pretty sure someone wrote it for him). This man is an expert in “innovation” which is very much a foreign concept, and is written by a man who has written lots of books already (again, very dodgy sounding).
But worst of all he is described as being a part of “Mikel Arteta’s inner circle”. Now that is worrying because the next thing you know is the new man will be telling the players that under no circumstances should they “thump it hard down the middle”.
Next thing we know we’ll be told he’ll be having the players doing ballet moves as warm ups.
But actually I don’t know that he will be thumping it down the middle, because the innovation expert is described as a “nonconformist” which either means he’s part of a Welsh church, or he doesn’t do what everyone else does, so drives on the right and watches ice hockey.
He is, as of course you already know, German Castanos, and has wheedled his way into the Arsenal “inner circle”. He’s our way of overcoming the tricks and naughty whatnots that are about to be unleashed on the world by ManC and the like. And the clever thng is, he has been at the club for four years already, only nobody noticed!
Now you can just imagine how his arrival is being handled by the guys from the Telegraph and the Express, what with his interest in funny foreign stuff like creativity, and neuroscience-inspired training methods. Worse he’s written not just one book but several!
So what I’d really like to know is what he makes of England and our footballers since we tend to portray creative people as wild, whacky, and coming up with crazy incomprehensible ideas while having bizarre ways of dressing and sitting on the ground a lot saying “om”.
But the point is that in football, creative players have by and large been limited to one per team, and given the right to do their own thing while everyone else plays the game as their fathers and grandfathers did. Then when the creative player falls over the cynics say “genius”.
But no, now we can expect unusual training patterns which no one else uses and an emphasis on thinking about the unexpected.
Of course the notion that creativity is something that can be taught is very unEnglish – in this country you are either wild, whacky, unkept and with a beard (and hence creative) or you follow the rules. We go as far as a spot of originality, but creative, no that’s going too far.
Except that winning the league last season was a creative triumph, and we’ll need some more of that. Players train by being taught what to expect the opposition to do. Just imagine if our opponents do that, and then our team does something else. That could be fun. I rather like the guy already!
As you might recall, way back, English clubs refused to employ players from outside the UK, because they “didn’t get the English game”. Trouble is that approach meant that we found it hard to play against players from other parts of the world.
It was Arsene Wenger who had a mass of experience of working in European football but who had also spent a lot of time watching English football being played, who realised that both European and English games could offer something to the other which could be beneficial.
Wenger brought in Vieira and Anelka, and the world changed. And amazingly he kept Arsenal in the top four while paying for the new stadium. How I bet Tottenham wished they could pull off a trick like that. (Just make sure you don’t let on).
