36 consecutive passes leading up to the second goal and the feelgood factor rises

By Tony Attwood

Can you imagine what the response would have been if it had all gone wrong last night?

Arsene Wenger had the choice: go with a full blooded first team selection and not only aim for a win but hope that PSG stumbled, or put more back up players into the team and give Ozil and Sanchez a break.

Either approach could have led to disaster: the weaker team might have drawn or even lost, leading to a feeling that without Ozil and Alexis we were not serious challengers at all.   The stronger team that we saw could have stumbled in the freezing fog, or worse one of Ozil or Alexis might have been injured.

But football management is always a four stage process:

1. Build up your squad by buying the right players and nurturing others through the academy.
2. Select the right team for the right occasion with the focus being on the team not the players.
3. Build up the social psychology of the squad so that they love playing for the club, will accept it when they are not playing, and so that other teams hate playing against them.
4. Take the right gambles: the ones that you can win.

Of course each stage is utterly dependent on the others; if any of the four stages fall apart then the whole model starts to crumble.   Besides which no manager gets that final step in the process (taking gambles) right all the time; the great managers get it right more of the time than the lesser managers, and have a team with enough resilience to fight back if the gamble backfires.

Which is why part three of the operation (generally utterly ignored by the media, largely because anything that involves either the word “psychology” or indeed “sociology” is derided these days) is vital.   Football is a team sport.  The clue is in the word “team”.

Yet it could have “Gone wrong” last night – meaning we might not have won and/or PSG could have won and/or someone could have got injured.

But this shows football is about gambles.  We could have won 1-0 with a lesser team and PSG might still have lost, and then everyone would have said we were lucky.   The implication for the game against Stoke next Saturday would have been that Arsenal were jogging along but not setting the world alight.

However last night, although against lesser opposition this team did set the footballing world alight.  Not just because we won and scored four, not just because in the last three games in which we put out the proper first team we have scored 13 goals, not just because we looked good, and not just because Ozil and Alexis are both doing things that are out of this world (and the last time we had two such players was Henry and Bergkamp).  No not just because of that but because before the second goal we had something like 36 consecutive passes.

Watching the game I felt the number of passes was very high, but guessed something around 25 was the number.  But today the Telegraph has helpfully provided an evolving diagram of the movement for that goal, and I think the number is 36.  It might be 34, 35… it is somewhere around that number, it gets hard to follow after a while.  (And I started counting after the last opposition player touched the ball).

That is something special – even against a weaker team.  And since I have quoted the Telegraph article once, let me throw in a second point they make:

It’s easy to dismiss this win as simply hammering a dreadful side, but Basel are a decent outfit. PSG only claimed victory when they visited the St. Jakob-Park with a 90th-minute winner, while the Swiss team had beaten Manchester United, Chelsea and Liverpool in their last three Champions League home games against English clubs. 

So my point is not that we are on a bit of a run – that is obvious.  But the feeling inside the Arsenal squad must be exceptional at the moment – and perhaps because a lot of my own early research work (outside of football) was in the social sciences I do tend to find that oft ignored element of a team to be important.

Take any of the issues that have been raised about Arsenal over the last couple of years and you will now find them seemingly solved.

We need a new centre forward

Suddenly we looked at the goal scoring record of Alexis and realised we had one.  Better he can play on the wing or in the middle.  And we discovered that Giroud could pop onto the pitch and score.  And that £17m on yet another player who can play centre forward or out wide was not wasted – oh, he’s just scored a hattrick.  And Theo has come back to life.  And the Ox has started to deliver…

Without Santi Cazorla we are only half the team

Is there a permanent replacement for Santi as deep midfield playmaker?  On this site I’ve been over the six combinations of Coquelin, Elneny, Xhaka, Ramsey, time and again, and people are still moaning about not having a replacement for Santi.

But the point is there is no Santi Mark II, but there are other solutions.   Coquelin / Xhaka has been looking like one of them.   Xhaka / Ramsey is another.  And certainly having two such combinations that work is not a bad idea given that the defensive midfielder is the one player more than any other who can get carded rightly or wrongly in any match.  Indeed that was why Coquelin was not playing yesterday.

We need a new defender or three

Mr Wenger was criticised for not buying a new central defender earlier, and for not having a pairing ready for the opening match (remember the late finish of the Euros?)

But he bought the right man.  Indeed the right men, for we are coping even when two of our right backs are injured and a third has suffered a loss of confidence (not at all unusual after a very long period out of the game) and we still have a replacement full back and a replacement centre back.

In fact more than the right man was bought: remember Holding, and all the derision about a £2m player from Bolton?   That purchase could end up as a the deal of the century.

We need a new goalkeeper

This was directed at Ospina because he made one mistake that led to a goal.  Yes, one mistake.  OK like all keepers he made a couple of slips, but really all the howling and derision in the media about Ospina came from one error.  But he has looked solid and in control in each game since.  And besides we have just put our third choice keeper on a new long term contract.  I think we are quite well stocked.

So after the game Arsene Wenger says he will feel “less guilt” if the Gunners get a tough draw in the Champions League last 16 after his side topped Group A and we can see what he means.

As Mr Wenger then said, typically underplaying the result, “It is a positive night.  We wanted to do our job and we got lucky with the PSG result.”

Yes we got lucky, but we were there to make use of the luck.

And it is that thought that led me to compile this table of all our results with an added psychological factor at the end.  Of course there is no actual science in the last column but I have simply given a number out of ten about how I think the players might feel about the club at that moment.

So to kick off, after the first game it was very low – there was a lot of disquiet about the transfer window and about the fact we lost.   There was some hope since we had players to come back, but it felt very low everywhere.  2 out of 10.   Then we got a draw against the champions, but it was uninspiring stuff, and the nutters did their “Wenger out” chants.  At least we didn’t lose.

And so on through the season.  One win at Watford didn’t change everything but made everyone feel a little better…

Comp	Date		Home	Score	Away	Result			Factor
League	14 Aug		Arsenal	3 – 4	Liverpool			L	2
League	20 Aug		Leicester	0 – 0	Arsenal		D		3
League	27 Aug		Watford	1 – 3	Arsenal	W			4
League	10 Sep		Arsenal	2 – 1	Southampton	W			5
Champs Lge	13 Sep		Paris St-G.	1 – 1	Arsenal		D		6
League	17 Sep		Hull	1 – 4	Arsenal	W			7
EFL Cup	20 Sep		Nottm Forest	0 – 4	Arsenal	W			8
League	24 Sep		Arsenal	3 – 0	Chelsea	W			9
Champs Lge	28 Sep		Arsenal	2 – 0	Basel	W			8
League	02 Oct		Burnley	0 – 1	Arsenal	W			8
League	15 Oct		Arsenal	3 – 2	Swansea	W			8
Champs Lge	19 Oct		Arsenal	6 – 0	Ludogorets	W			9
League	22 Oct		Arsenal	0 – 0	Middlesbro		D		8
EFL CUP	25 Oct		Arsenal	2 – 0	Reading	W			8
League	29 Oct		Sunderland	1 – 4	Arsenal	W			8
Champs Lge	01 Nov		Ludogorets	2 – 3	Arsenal	W			9
League	06 Nov		Arsenal	1 – 1	Tottenham		D		8
League	19 Nov		Man Utd	1 – 1	Arsenal		D		8
Champs Lge	23 Nov		Arsenal	2 – 2	Paris St-G.		D		7
League	27 Nov		Arsenal	3 – 1	Bournemouth	W			8
EFL CUP	30 Nov		Arsenal	0 – 2	Southampton			L	6
League	03 Dec		West Ham	1 – 5	Arsenal	W			8
Champs Lge	06 Dec		Basel	1 – 4	Arsenal	W			9
League	10		Arsenal		Stoke
League	13		Everton		Arsenal
League	18		Man City		Arsenal

Of course you can disagree about the feel-good psychology in the last column, but the exact numbers are not the point.  The point is that the way the players feel about themselves and the group is part of building a winning team.  I think this has been happening.

I believe the incredible final goal against Ludogorets away gave the team a real boost, a feeling that they could always grab something amazing from somewhere, hence the 9.  And we’ve still got that feeling.  36 passes helps too.

Let’s hope it continues against Stoke, and raise a glass of something to those 36 or so consecutive passes.

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