You think Arteta has proven to be PL winner without winning the league. You are insane which makes your point invalid
That’s not how it works. He has not shown he can win the league because HE NEVER WON IT
Yes it is…we are competing for it and right there. We’d win it this year if we weren’t competing against the best ever prem team who cheated.
2023/2024 champions if it was not the best team ever. Except the City teams Liverpool competed was better and amassed more points
Declan Rice isn’t talking about being 6ft 1in when he mentions his “good height” on the pitch.
Instead, the England international is referring to a subtle change to his positioning as a No 6 when he plays as the midfield pivot for Arsenal.
On a Monday afternoon at Arsenal’s training ground in London Colney, Rice is scrolling through clips — more than 80 of them, put together by The Athletic — as he reflects on his evolution as a footballer since leaving West Ham in a £105million ($130m) club-record transfer last summer.
The time it takes to learn a new game model after moving clubs is easy to overlook but it says everything about Rice’s ability and intelligence as a footballer that he can clearly articulate, as well as execute, exactly what is asked of him under the management of Mikel Arteta.
Pressing pause one minute and rewind the next, the 25-year-old breaks down his game in fascinating detail as he speaks candidly about his adaptation to life as an Arsenal player.
He explains why “short relationships” are the way forward for him at Arsenal as opposed to long diagonals, outlines the nuances of the No 8 role that he has been learning on the job, discusses the challenge of coming up against Rodri and beating Manchester City’s press, and describes what it feels like to make a tackle at the Emirates that “sets the crowd on fire”.
(Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)
But perhaps the best insight into Rice’s mindset and his constant desire to improve is how he asks to rewatch a misplaced pass against Chelsea rather than a brilliant ball against Fulham that breaks the lines and takes out four opposition players.
This is Declan Rice’s game in his words…
Crystal Palace away on a Monday night. Rice is making his second league appearance for Arsenal and running the game.
His role in the build-up is pivotal, typified by a passage of play in the 22nd minute, when he forms a triangle on the edge of his own penalty area with Aaron Ramsdale and William Saliba that ends with him releasing Thomas Partey on the right. Rice’s movement is excellent.
Is that intuitive or coached?
“That’s coached every day, depending on the opposition and how they set up against us,” Rice says. “So we’ll watch clips and see how they press and whether they go man-to-man or whether they sit off. The key is always about finding the free man.
“If you go back to the start of the clip, I’m only able (to receive) because (Odsonne) Edouard has jumped. If (Eberechi) Eze had jumped, I wouldn’t have had that line of pass to Saliba. It’s because Edouard has closed the line off that I can now make the run to give the ball to the free player. And then it’s just about being patient. So my timing is off when Edouard is running towards the keeper – I know (Ramsdale) is about to give me that ball because Edouard is sprinting at him.”
And what about the next phase?
“I just saw there was loads of space and two people (Edouard and Eze) attracted to the ball, so I split them and then I’m free again.”
Rice makes it sound easy. In reality, a player in his position is making split-second decisions in response to when and where the opposition move and in an area of the pitch where a mistake could be calamitous.
Later in the first half, in a much more advanced area, Rice runs off the back of Eze again to set up a chance for Eddie Nketiah. It’s surprising to see Rice so far forward.
Does he have the freedom to take up those positions?
Rice smiles. “I would never have done this before. I probably only learnt this about two or three weeks earlier.
“So when (Bukayo) Saka gets the ball, that space there is occupied by no one,” he explains, pointing to an area that has opened up in front of him (shown in the first image below).
“And it’s happened a lot this season where I make that run into there and you’re free.
“The manager calls it playing in a ‘good height’. If I’m back here (much deeper), we can’t progress the play. We’d end up going back to Ben (White) and back to the centre-half. So that’s why he says he wants his No 6s to always be in ‘good height’.
“Obviously, I’ve then read the moment, stepped onto it and slipped in Eddie. It looks very simple but it’s quite a thought process that goes into it.”
During Arteta’s sales pitch last summer, he gave Rice a detailed explanation of how and where he saw him playing for Arsenal, which included both the No 6 and the No 8 role.
“He said that you have goalscoring capabilities and capabilities to make assists and make things happen,” Rice recalls. “But obviously he knew my biggest strength was probably playing No 6.”
The challenge for Rice after he signed was to put Arteta’s vision into practice as quickly as possible. To help with that process, he had regular tactical meetings with Arteta and the rest of the coaching team during pre-season to learn Arsenal’s game model.
(Marc Atkins/Getty Images)
Rice smiles as he listens to an extract from an article in The Athletic about that stage of his Arsenal career. It references how impressed the coaching staff were with the speed at which he grasped what they wanted from him and also the fact that he could answer questions quickly when quizzed about match footage.
The latter line makes him sound like a contestant on Mastermind — does he still get quizzed in this way?
Rice laughs. “Yeah, we always get asked,” he says. “Still to this day — and in front of the group.
“He’ll ask us to break things down, like in terms of our pressing and where we should go: ‘If that person drops, who goes there?’. Sometimes you feel a little bit on the spot because you don’t know the answer.
“But my main thing (around adaptation) was in pre-season when I’d obviously just got there and was trying to gain fitness. We played against Man United and I didn’t have the best of games. I wasn’t really that fit. And that was when we really tried to play our game model and you could just see I was way out of depth. I didn’t really understand anything that was going on.
(Al Bello/Getty Images)
“There were some good moments when I was trying to learn it, but there were also some moments where you could see I needed to improve a lot. After that, I watched a lot of videos and then on the training field tried to really improve. I think that game (against United) was a real catalyst to helping me out.”
Progress was swift. By the time that Arsenal travelled to Everton in the middle of September, Rice looked totally comfortable with the principles behind their passing and movement patterns.
A passage of play in the first half at Goodison Park, involving Martin Ødegaard, Saka, White and Rice, feels like a trademark Arsenal move.
When Rice takes possession from Saka, he receives on his left foot and shapes to take the ball to that side of the pitch. He could, in theory, clip a ball towards the back post. Instead, he drops his shoulder, shifts the ball with the outside of his right foot and goes back into the same area where Arsenal have just come from, feeding White in space.
“We’re really big on playing ‘same side’ and work on it,” Rice says.
“We’re going to have an overload because there’s two players here,” he continues, pointing to White and Saka. “I know Saka has taken him (Dwight McNeil) in and Ben is on the overlap.
“Ødegaard’s marked by the full-back (Vitaliy Mykolenko), obviously I’m on the ball and pass to Ben and he gets in and puts in a cross.
“But just that fake to initially go one way, ready to take it back the other side, it shifts everyone. So that’s why you see us as a team do that quite a lot.”
Another clip from the Everton game leads to a fascinating discussion about an area of Rice’s game that has fundamentally changed at Arsenal.
The video starts with Rice passing to Saka on the right, before stepping forward to arrow a left-footed diagonal to the opposite flank.
“See, again here, I’m in that height that the manager talks about,” Rice says. “So once I’ve played that pass (to Saka), I reckon the old me would have just waited behind the ball, sat and held, and let the winger go one-v-one — but, instead, I run off the Everton striker (Beto), in a good height, and can then receive and play.”
That adjustment to his positioning is interesting, yet it’s how that phase of play finishes — a diagonal to Trossard — that signifies arguably the biggest shift in Rice’s game since joining Arsenal.
Although Rice switches to the flanks occasionally at Arsenal with a long diagonal (we watch footage of him striking some beautiful balls off either foot this season), it is a type of pass that he rarely plays compared to when he was at West Ham.
The plan was to show Rice a graph to highlight that point, but he is one step ahead.
“The manager doesn’t like diagonals, really,” Rice says.
“He does like diagonals if you’re going to gain an advantage from it. But you see that one I’ve just played to Saka (against Brighton), people will go, ‘That’s a great ball’, but let me rewind the clip and pause it.
“Look, Saka doesn’t have anyone to play inside to and he’s got another Brighton player coming over.
“So if it’s there to hit and it gives you an advantage, you hit it, of course. But if it doesn’t, he’d rather you play short relationships, let them come onto you, and play around them to then create the space for him (the winger).”
It’s an interesting debate within the game. In 2014, Colm McMullan, who was working as an analyst for Opta at the time, delivered a presentation, backed up by his own research, titled ‘Please stop applauding diagonal cross-field passes’.
For some teams, especially those who like to play on the counter-attack, big switches of play can be hugely effective. That was certainly the case when Rice was playing under David Moyes at West Ham, where he was encouraged to ping long, raking diagonals from in to out as much as possible.
The difference at Arsenal is night and day when you see it on a graph.
“Yeah,” Rice says, nodding and smiling as he looks at the data.
“At West Ham last year, I was playing so many passes long. But that was our style. Moyes loved me dropping into ‘false full-back’ (on the left) because I could then cut inside and hit the opposite side. And, as you can see (on the graph), loads of passes going out to that right side – that was a big theme for me and (Vladimir) Coufal, and (Jarrod) Bowen, having that relationship where, if I get it, for Coufal to go. I used to hit that zone a lot.”
(The Athletic)
Rice turns his attention to the graph that shows his “switch passes” at Arsenal. “How many is that?” he asks smiling, before starting to count them. “You can tell, that’s just the way that our game model is – it isn’t really set up for the long diagonals. Unless it gives you an advantage.”
As well as playing higher up the pitch at Arsenal and passing shorter, Rice has built up an excellent understanding with one team-mate in particular.
The slide before the next set of clips is titled ‘Ødegaard’, and I ask Rice if he can imagine what the footage is going to show. His reply catches me slightly off guard. “Passes that people say I don’t play enough of,” he says.
Whether that is the perception of Rice or not, the reality is there are plenty of examples of him passing between the lines for Arsenal, zipping balls into the feet of Ødegaard with a mixture of pace and disguise, but also into Saka and Leandro Trossard too.
It is no different with England, where he connects with Jude Bellingham and Phil Foden in a similar way.
“People don’t think I play these passes,” Rice says. “But every time I get the opportunity to rap that pass in, I do it. When I get into that position and get into that space, I love playing those passes.”
City is a dynasty. The only team to EVER win 4 straight if they win the prem this year. They’ve cheated to do so.
Did he have slow release for our 2nd vs Sp**s? Forward, between two Sp**s players.
True. But I’m sure he will get better at it imo. It’s one of the area I’m sure he is working hard in.
Yeah and also, it seems like he clearly favours the 6 role.
This is why I have been saying for the longest Arteta management style will not lead to success at the highest level. Against Villa and Bayern the team got stuck and because it had all its spontaneous creativity coached out of it. The players tried the same pattern of play over and over while nothing was working
