By Tony Attwood
Now available: Untold Referees
- Club Brugge against Arsenal: how are the opposition doing of late?
- Why do Arsenal get so many more negative stories than other clubs?
We have a game tomorrow so it must be an occasion for Arsenal to be “sweating on injuries” as the media like to put it.
In fact, Arsenal are near the top of the injury chart, as supplied by Premier League injuries, but not at the very top. But then I suppose Arsenal in 5th in the injury table doesn’t really make a good headline, so the numbers are not regularly reported.
In fact, here is the injury league in descending order
- Burnley: 8 injuries
- Nottingham Forest: 8 injuries
- Bournemouth: 7 injuries
- Tottenham Hotspur: 7 injuries
- Arsenal: 6 injuries
- Brighton and Hove Albion: 6 injuries
- Chelsea: 6y injuries
- Crystal Palace: 6 injuries
- Everton: 6 injuries
Now it is true that Liverpool have five injuries, Manchester City three, and Manchester United three, so we are ahead of them, but most of the media that cover injuries do so by seeming to suggest that Arsenal are out on their own in terms of the total of men missing.
But then, having made that somewhat misleading statement, they don’t do is ever ask WHY? Is it the training, is it pure carelessness, is it the fact that other teams are encouraged to kick Arsenal on the grounds that Corporal Pike might have suggested that “they don’t like it up ’em”, or is it something else?
If we look at the number of tackles that Arsenal make, we find they are 14th in the table for this season, noting perhaps that Tottenham, thus far, have made 20% more tackles than Arsenal in this campaign.
Or we could look at the number of times we are fouled, where we find Arsenal players are fouled the 8th highest number of times in Premier League matches this season. Aston Villa are fouled 26% more times than Arsenal (at least according to the league referees this season).
Now, maybe these figures do have some effect on the number of injuries Arsenal suffer, but I suspect there is another factor that is affecting this side. Arsenal have the second-highest number of shots of any club in the league this season at 5.3 shots a game.
And we must notice that Arsenal also have the second highest number of goals scored this season (fractionally under two goals a game on average in the league). So the logic must be, for clubs lower down the division, and indeed clubs that see Arsenal top of the Champions League table at the moment, to be told by their managers to “stop Arsenal shooting”. And when you consider that in this campaign Arsenal have had 56% more shots than Tottenham, then you can see why this is so important.
Which implies – if you can’t get the ball off the Arsenal man, then kick him. Arsenal are, in fact, fouled 26% more than Tottenham this season and yet have still scored more goals than Tottenham. I know not everyone likes such figures, but they really do spell out what is going on in the games, and where referees are failing to take action over cumulative foul play.
Indeed, overall, it does look very much as if fouling Arsenal has become to go-to method for stopping them scoring. Not least because Arsenal concede so few goals.
Only twice this season have Arsenal conceded two goals (and to be clear, they haven’t conceded more than two goals in any games). These games were against Sunderland and Aston Villa – both away.
Now, what is happening is that clubs that Arsenal play against are using every tactic imaginable to stop the smooth-running of the Arsenal machine.
One such tactic has got quite a lot of publicity, as Sunderland used it, moving the advertising boards closer to the edge of the pitch to reduce the amount of space players like Rice had when taking a throw-in..
Régis Le Bris admitted as much in an interview after the match, adding, “We tried to find the details to win the game.” And yes, there is nothing to say that a club can’t do this, although I suspect even PGMO might start getting a bit agitated if other clubs do it for one half of the pitch and then change the positioning at half-time. Indeed what next? Are the hordings going to be positioned on rails to make it easier to move at halftime?
But it was not just about stopping what Arsenal could do, but also how Sunderland went about the game itself.
Sunderland are known for scoring in injury time, and Aston Villa have clearly very much pinched the idea. So it must also be time for Arsenal to react, perhaps by bringing in several defenders and adjusting the positioning of the team if they are winning by one goal with ten minutes to go.
Such an approach doesn’t seem to be much like the way football is intended to be – moving the hoardings to disrupt the opposition, bringing on a group of defenders to hold a lead, etc, but if this is what it has come to, I guess Arsenal just have to be part of it. It’s a shame but if PGMO and their Euro counterparts don’t react, then Arsenal have to.
