• Are Arsenal falling apart or really were they never any good?
• Untold Arsenal, and Arsenal both have problems!

There is something singularly depressing about a headline (in this case from  the Observer) along the lines

Arsenal’s sloppiness calls into question whether they are serious contenders”

For the premise is that one can judge a team on one performance – on one match in fact.   There is no doubt that Arsenal’s showing this weekend was not what we hoped for and not what we expected – that is not the issue.  The question is can you judge a team by one match?

If your answer is yes, then the question is which match or matches are you going to choose?  And besides that, why do we need to have commentaries on all the games?

Take last season for example, would you go for the league cup defeat by three goals to one to West Ham, followed by the 1-0 away defeat to Newcastle as defining the season?

Or that run starting on 9 December when Arsenal lost away to Villa, drew away to PSV, beat Brighton at home and then drew with Liverpool away before losing to West Ham at home 0-2, Fulham away 2-1 and then finally Liverpool at home 0-2 in the FA Cup.

Yes these were pretty horrible results by and large, and yet in the next five league games Arsenal scored 21 goals and conceded two.

In fact the question becomes a two-fold affair.   If you are going to select one particular run to define whether Arsenal are any good or not, which run do you choose?   And second, why are you choosing a short run to define whether Arsenal are any good or not?

The fact is, the season is the whole season and only one team, as far as I know, has ever gone through a whole season in the last 120 years or so.   In which case why make a big fuss about one match?

Journalists do it because it is easy, and by and large football journalists are incredibly lazy, always taking the easiest answer rather than digging deeper into what is going on.   (This of course is not true of all football journalists and some of the more in-depth articles these days really are quite revealing – but these tend not to appear on the websites of the national newspapers).

So a team with a lot of support across the nation, having a bad result makes easy writing for a lazy journalist, who can take one match and generalise out from that.

But that is not all that is wrong.   For as far as I can recall no one has generalised out from that run of matches last season in which just two goals were conceded.   Ah, the journalist would say, but Arsenal weren’t playing as badly in the run-up to that as they are now.   Except that this isn’t quite how the media portrayed the results at the time.

In fact the issue for Arsenal is to take the fantastic form that they have shown in certain runs in the last couple of seasons, and then ensure when that run comes to an end (as all runs do) it ends not with a defeat but a draw.   

Now what has made matters more difficult at the moment is the array of injuries the club has had.  For although some players came back for the game yesterday, the fact is that there were several players coming in and out of the team, and the team as a whole had not had enough experience playing as a group in the particular positions they were asked to occupy.

This of course does not mean that everything is ok and that the defeat doesn’t matter  and doesn’t hurt.  Of course, it does matter and of course, it hurts.  But what it does not show is that this team is useless and needs wholesale changes.

The simple fact is that the team need more time together, and somewhat fewer injuries to get to a position where they achieve all they want to, even when the injuries come pouring in.

But no journalist is going to give Arsenal time – because that is not what they do.  Everything is criticised when it can be, and when the run is unbelievable as last season’s run in January and February was the praise is still muted.

In fact if we just consider the league games in the run last season it was even longer than I suggested above..  Here it is

 

30 Jan 2024	Nottingham Forest v Arsenal	W	1-2
04 Feb 2024	Arsenal v Liverpool	W	3-1
11 Feb 2024	West Ham United v Arsenal	W	0-6
17 Feb 2024	Burnley v Arsenal	W	0-5
24 Feb 2024	Arsenal v Newcastle United	W	4-1
04 Mar 2024	Sheffield United v Arsenal	W	0-6

 

The question to be asked here is simple.  Does a team that could do that, lose its ability in one summer?  The answer of course is no.  Injuries and the resultant changes play their part.   Just don’t expect the national media to recognise that simple fact..