Play Like Kids
It was something Wenger said in the profile of him on the BBC the other night that really got to me. It was strange. Really strange, and although it brought up a well of emotion in me for its sheer idealism, I can’t stop thinking about its ambivalence. Amy Lawrence, who writes for the Observer and the Arsenal Website, who was presenting the programme, was talking to Le Boss about what he’d like to do when he finished coaching. He talked about being a director, and implicitly that could only be of Arsenal, the club he’s done so much to change. But then he talked about coaching kids in Africa or India, trying to meld them into the type of players, to play the type of football, he likes. He wasn’t talking about solid professionals though, of the roundly unambitious kind churned out by the FA Centre of Excellence. He was talking about players who wanted to play like kids, because the happiness and freedom of play that kids have is what he wants from his team.
That’s odd. Touching but odd. And I tried to imagine it coming out of the mouth of any other coach on earth. I couldn’t.
The funniest visual image was of Sven Goran Eriksson saying it. Try it. Eriksson is the most determinedly ‘adult’ of managers. Every step is a safe one, measured, controlled, assured. Dull as dishwater but witheringly effective at achieving limited ends. Eriksson, unlike even Ferguson, and Souness, and all those other old fashioned types who believe football is still a man’s game and not a clash of image rights and contractual negotiations, thinks of football not as something ultimately to be enjoyed, but something to be encountered. By encountered I mean that a game is something to be controlled, secured, removed from the possibility of humiliation.
Humiliation though is a childlike thing to experience. Someone humiliates you it makes you feel like a little baby, falling over in the midst of its first step. Like the 6 year old who misses an open goal who ends up with all his friends laughing at him. Sven doesn’t want his players humiliated, and always regulates against it. England’s defeat against Brazil in the World Cup was depressing, but we were never shown up for a capacity not to be annihilated, as so many teams have been by that nation’s amazing array of talents. England just kept going nowhere, measuredly.
Arsenal and Arsène don’t do measuredly. If you tell your players to play with the freedom Arsène does, then measure goes out of the window. The most measured thing Arsenal did against Kiev last night, as they have done before, is that trick where one of Kanu, Henry, Pires or Wiltord gets the ball up to the corner of the pitch and dicks around for as much time as possible. Even that’s quite childlike, wasting time as a metaphor for an irritating six year old, with a stupid smile that says ‘we’ve beaten you now’. Na na na na na.
I’d guess, after going through that horribly frustrating, but finally ecstatic game against Dynamo Kiev last night that most Arsenal fans felt as helpless as 5 year olds. Screaming at the screen or down on to the pitch, ‘Just do something else you bastards’, because there’s only so many times a perfect pass can go askew before you know it can’t go on. If it is impossible to imagine any other manager saying what Arsène said about football, it’s still only too possible to see how other managers would react to it when they heard it. Or when they watch Arsenal play in Europe.
Just do something different you bastards.
It’s evident they can’t. Arsenal’s players are pushed to their physical limits in ways few other teams are. The work-rate of all of them is quite astounding, they all try and do everything they’re capable of, all over the pitch. But it’s what they’re not capable of that’s so frustrating. Freddie gets into the box, but he can’t play on the wing and up front simultaneously. And he can’t cross. He can’t do the things he’s there for to a level high enough to achieve what he has to to make a difference every match. Henry is the best striker outside the box on earth, but he can’t terrorise defences with his runs and be on the end of his own mesmerising through balls. And no-one else in the team can. He can, I learnt fully last night, win balls in the air. And thank god for Ash taking that chance and heading the winner. If only there was a regular forward there all the time – we’d have won by a mile if there were.
The team are at their limit, and small changes have to be made. The players don’t need to be asked to play a different way. I thought they could before, but those on the pitch can’t. I’m not sure Wenger has it in him to get players to be different kinds of players from the one’s they are. We need a new striker, one who doesn’t need to think about getting in the box, and a right winger who picks crosses because that’s what he wants to do, and then we’d be flying. That’s obvious.
What’s less obvious about that is how much pressure that would take off us. Particularly in Europe. In the two games against Kiev, and in the first and last twenty minutes against Inter, we created so many chances. So many. More than you get in the average England qualifying campaign, let alone individual match. Our team can make chances like bees make honey, because that’s what they do. It’s who they are. But the absences in the team make that creation of openings a burden rather than a relief. Add all those chances to a flurry of balls through the air, from deep or out wide, and you have the material to rip opposition teams apart psychologically. Goals would come easy as they don’t right now. Everything, I’m utterly convinced, would be alright, and the players central to our team – Thierry, Bobby, Ash, could start enjoying themselves again in the way Wenger wants them to. Like children, doing what they were made for.
Wenger knows this. Don’t think he doesn’t, and that he won’t act on it. He tried to force his hand earlier in the season, making Wiltord into a goal-poacher, papering over one of the holes. But it didn’t last. Wiltord plays outside the box, not as well as Henry or Bergkamp, better than Kanu, but all four play from deep, and you can’t change what players do intuitively altogether. Again, when Wiltord drops deep, comes looking for the ball where he’s most likely to get it, he can’t be on the end of his own through ball (as Trezeguet is for France). And Henry won’t be there either. It looks also as if he’s asking Aliadiere to learn how to be an all out forward. But from what I’ve seen that doesn’t work right. Ali too looks like another one who comes from deep. He’s not the answer, unless something magnificent happens.
That’s why the rumours make so much sense about Eto’o coming from Mallorca. He’s exactly the natural forward Wenger likes, but with one key difference, he moves further forward, he’ll run at high-balls and messy balls when Thierry’s flowing. Because it’s what he does. Wenger doesn’t force people, it’s why everyone except Wiltord has been happy at Arsenal under Wenger’s reign. And that’s more an oversight on Wiltord’s part, not seeing fully where he’s most effective on the pitch.
We may get through to the next round of the Champions League, we may not. It’ll be luck more than style. And luck is something we’re due. But at the moment the Arsenal machine is broken, and it needs two players to fix it. Someone who crosses, someone who runs into the box, because it’s what they do. Eto’o, Pennant. Simple.
Simple changes, nothing drastic. Then the players can start to play like kids again. Happy, rather than expectantly waiting to fail, which is all they look like on European nights. Like the sad kid in the playground who knows he’ll get picked last for the team, not the superstar ready to make dreams come true.
The problems go on, but they can be solved.
It was something Wenger said in the profile of him on the BBC the other night that really got to me. It was strange. Really strange, and although it brought up a well of emotion in me for its sheer idealism, I can’t stop thinking about its ambivalence. Amy Lawrence, who writes for the Observer and the Arsenal Website, who was presenting the programme, was talking to Le Boss about what he’d like to do when he finished coaching. He talked about being a director, and implicitly that could only be of Arsenal, the club he’s done so much to change. But then he talked about coaching kids in Africa or India, trying to meld them into the type of players, to play the type of football, he likes. He wasn’t talking about solid professionals though, of the roundly unambitious kind churned out by the FA Centre of Excellence. He was talking about players who wanted to play like kids, because the happiness and freedom of play that kids have is what he wants from his team.
That’s odd. Touching but odd. And I tried to imagine it coming out of the mouth of any other coach on earth. I couldn’t.
The funniest visual image was of Sven Goran Eriksson saying it. Try it. Eriksson is the most determinedly ‘adult’ of managers. Every step is a safe one, measured, controlled, assured. Dull as dishwater but witheringly effective at achieving limited ends. Eriksson, unlike even Ferguson, and Souness, and all those other old fashioned types who believe football is still a man’s game and not a clash of image rights and contractual negotiations, thinks of football not as something ultimately to be enjoyed, but something to be encountered. By encountered I mean that a game is something to be controlled, secured, removed from the possibility of humiliation.
Humiliation though is a childlike thing to experience. Someone humiliates you it makes you feel like a little baby, falling over in the midst of its first step. Like the 6 year old who misses an open goal who ends up with all his friends laughing at him. Sven doesn’t want his players humiliated, and always regulates against it. England’s defeat against Brazil in the World Cup was depressing, but we were never shown up for a capacity not to be annihilated, as so many teams have been by that nation’s amazing array of talents. England just kept going nowhere, measuredly.
Arsenal and Arsène don’t do measuredly. If you tell your players to play with the freedom Arsène does, then measure goes out of the window. The most measured thing Arsenal did against Kiev last night, as they have done before, is that trick where one of Kanu, Henry, Pires or Wiltord gets the ball up to the corner of the pitch and dicks around for as much time as possible. Even that’s quite childlike, wasting time as a metaphor for an irritating six year old, with a stupid smile that says ‘we’ve beaten you now’. Na na na na na.
I’d guess, after going through that horribly frustrating, but finally ecstatic game against Dynamo Kiev last night that most Arsenal fans felt as helpless as 5 year olds. Screaming at the screen or down on to the pitch, ‘Just do something else you bastards’, because there’s only so many times a perfect pass can go askew before you know it can’t go on. If it is impossible to imagine any other manager saying what Arsène said about football, it’s still only too possible to see how other managers would react to it when they heard it. Or when they watch Arsenal play in Europe.
Just do something different you bastards.
It’s evident they can’t. Arsenal’s players are pushed to their physical limits in ways few other teams are. The work-rate of all of them is quite astounding, they all try and do everything they’re capable of, all over the pitch. But it’s what they’re not capable of that’s so frustrating. Freddie gets into the box, but he can’t play on the wing and up front simultaneously. And he can’t cross. He can’t do the things he’s there for to a level high enough to achieve what he has to to make a difference every match. Henry is the best striker outside the box on earth, but he can’t terrorise defences with his runs and be on the end of his own mesmerising through balls. And no-one else in the team can. He can, I learnt fully last night, win balls in the air. And thank god for Ash taking that chance and heading the winner. If only there was a regular forward there all the time – we’d have won by a mile if there were.
The team are at their limit, and small changes have to be made. The players don’t need to be asked to play a different way. I thought they could before, but those on the pitch can’t. I’m not sure Wenger has it in him to get players to be different kinds of players from the one’s they are. We need a new striker, one who doesn’t need to think about getting in the box, and a right winger who picks crosses because that’s what he wants to do, and then we’d be flying. That’s obvious.
What’s less obvious about that is how much pressure that would take off us. Particularly in Europe. In the two games against Kiev, and in the first and last twenty minutes against Inter, we created so many chances. So many. More than you get in the average England qualifying campaign, let alone individual match. Our team can make chances like bees make honey, because that’s what they do. It’s who they are. But the absences in the team make that creation of openings a burden rather than a relief. Add all those chances to a flurry of balls through the air, from deep or out wide, and you have the material to rip opposition teams apart psychologically. Goals would come easy as they don’t right now. Everything, I’m utterly convinced, would be alright, and the players central to our team – Thierry, Bobby, Ash, could start enjoying themselves again in the way Wenger wants them to. Like children, doing what they were made for.
Wenger knows this. Don’t think he doesn’t, and that he won’t act on it. He tried to force his hand earlier in the season, making Wiltord into a goal-poacher, papering over one of the holes. But it didn’t last. Wiltord plays outside the box, not as well as Henry or Bergkamp, better than Kanu, but all four play from deep, and you can’t change what players do intuitively altogether. Again, when Wiltord drops deep, comes looking for the ball where he’s most likely to get it, he can’t be on the end of his own through ball (as Trezeguet is for France). And Henry won’t be there either. It looks also as if he’s asking Aliadiere to learn how to be an all out forward. But from what I’ve seen that doesn’t work right. Ali too looks like another one who comes from deep. He’s not the answer, unless something magnificent happens.
That’s why the rumours make so much sense about Eto’o coming from Mallorca. He’s exactly the natural forward Wenger likes, but with one key difference, he moves further forward, he’ll run at high-balls and messy balls when Thierry’s flowing. Because it’s what he does. Wenger doesn’t force people, it’s why everyone except Wiltord has been happy at Arsenal under Wenger’s reign. And that’s more an oversight on Wiltord’s part, not seeing fully where he’s most effective on the pitch.
We may get through to the next round of the Champions League, we may not. It’ll be luck more than style. And luck is something we’re due. But at the moment the Arsenal machine is broken, and it needs two players to fix it. Someone who crosses, someone who runs into the box, because it’s what they do. Eto’o, Pennant. Simple.
Simple changes, nothing drastic. Then the players can start to play like kids again. Happy, rather than expectantly waiting to fail, which is all they look like on European nights. Like the sad kid in the playground who knows he’ll get picked last for the team, not the superstar ready to make dreams come true.
The problems go on, but they can be solved.
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