- How did Arsenal get it so right while the others get it so wrong?
- Do Arsenal have enough players to see us through the international matches?
By Tony Attwood
So here we go again with another of these wretched international breaks seemingly just a couple of weeks after the last international break, which came…. well you know.
And I suppose we have to say this gives us, and the club a chance to take stock, while the players get another chance to get injured playing in an unusual position for a different manager whose tactics they don’t fully understand and who doesn’t understand them. Yep, that about sums it up.
The best we can say is that it offers a chance to take stock, as the opening quarter of this Premier League season has revealed a champion unwilling to let go of their run of success, and rivals unable to catch up.
Arsenal are not setting the world alight with multiple goals but rather like a well-tuned engine on a well-maintained car, the club keeps rolling along. Not every goal is a sensation, and yes of course I would love to be seeing multiple goals instead of a match described as “workmanlike” but we keep winning which is more than can be said for some clubs I could mention, but I don’t like to swear.
A 1-0 home win over Hull City, a result later bolstered by the Mancs evening stumble mean that we are top and the Mancs are third, six points behind, after fractionally over a quarter of the season, which suits me fine.
I am not at all sure what has happened to the Mancs but if you know please do write in. Have they just given up, knowing that they are going to be fined vast numbers of points when the league finally get around to it? Or are they thinking that if they drop down the table, the League will think they are ok really and not do anything?
The media, never our friends, are saying that we are “grinding out” wins, and that might be right, but even if it is, that is a lot better than not getting the victories at all. And besides Tottenham showed that really they are still Tottenham, which is to say, while Arsenal win by one, the Tiny Totts lose by one.
For the media, they are generally leaving us alone, and instead asking what has gone wrong with the Mancs, and I can offer a a thought on that. The media deal in physical issues when considering football, such as the obvious injuries and particular skills. But all humans have a psychological element within them as well as a physical element, dictating their behaviour – and we all know this since we see people around us who are (for example) a short-tempered or even-tempered, and so on.
Just as teams will have players of different build and stamina, so they also need players of different personalities to make up a balanced side. And this means that you end up with some who can take criticism and advice, and some who find that much harder.
If I were the psychologist advising the manager at Manchester City (which most obviously I am not) I would be focusing on the fact that normally their players don’t make many mistakes but when they do, those mistakes just go on and on, with no one seeming to be able to get back to basics and rebuild the players’ ability, which is where the psychology comes in.
What happens is that players who are under performing are either left on the pitch for the whole game (which is dispiriting for the rest of the team) or taken off at half time (which suggests that the manager didn’t know what he was doing in the first place).
All groups are made up of two fundamental elements: the individual players who need help from the club psychologist and the team as a whole (which needs to be nurtured by a social psychologist – or if the problem has spread through the whole club, a sociologist).
Now the fact is that many fans and virtually all commentators will say that clubs don’t need social scientists to get the team to work together but instead just need new players. That attitude is feeds the transfer market, but that equally ensures that some teams who keep doing poorly, continue to do poorly.
We can see Tottenham as a perfect example of this. After 16 consecutive seasons coming in the top nine in the Premier League they dropped down to 17th for both the last two seasons and are only a few points above that position now. And part of the answer is not that all the players are terrible, but rather they don’t have a decent psychologist and sociologist getting the best out of the individuals and then getting them all to work together as a team. Tottenham just go out and buy players through considering the player’s football position and ability, but without consulting a social scientist on how to get the team to work as one.
Fortunately there is no danger of the club taking any notice of me, so I can put forward my ideas as to what is going wrong, without thinking that Tottenham will do anything about it. They don’t seem to believe in social science.
With ManC before the investigation started into their finances, you could see that every player bought into the club as a unified success. Then when the inquiries started that fell apart as the players retreated into a realm of “none of this was my fault” attitude. They didn’t deliberately start playing badly, but the motivation to work for and with everyone else vanished. Why should they put in 100% when the club owners could set the club up to be charged with over 100 offences? They feel they have done nothing wrong, but they are the ones being blamed. So the energy levels drop.
Just watch the ManC defence – it is getting softer by the day. Even opposition players are calling ManC cheats, and when your fellow professionals are saying that, it can affect the whole team and down goes morale. Meanwhile people look at Arsenal’s summer transfer activity, and see not only individual improvements but a team that is really bound together. Yes they got torn apart in one game, but then had the power to pull themselves together as a team, to ensure it never happens again, even if that means a whole sequence of winning games just by one goal.
