Morning.
The focus for Mikel Arteta and his players will be 100% on Wednesday’s trip to Paris now. In the meantime, we have to pore over the defeat to Bournemouth, one which does have an impact as a fan on your levels of belief going into a Champions League semi-final.
I think you can try and compartmentalise it, and tell yourself it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. The Premier League offers nothing in terms of tangible success, and it’s human nature if your minds – individually and collectively – aren’t fully on the job at hand. Come Wednesday, we’ll be switched on, fully motivated, fired-up, laser-focused, and ready to put in a performance that is far more aligned with that we expect from this team.
It is more than possible that is the case, and that we see a much improved Arsenal against PSG. It has to be, that’s the reality. If it’s not, I think we all know what the outcome will be – bar something extraordinary happening like we take a statistical pummeling but nick a goal and then nick another one in extra-time or win a penalty shoot-out. Not impossible, but unlikely.
But as he prepares for the biggest European game in Arsenal’s recent history, the manager needs to start thinking about his team and what it’s capable of. If we fall just short again, there are probably some legitimate reasons for that, most of which have to do with squad building. We decided against using the January transfer window to bolster the attack, having absolutely failed to do that the previous summer. If, as was the case against Bayern Munich last season, we go out because we couldn’t find one goal in a second-leg tie against high quality opposition, there will be an element of ‘fool me once …’ to any analysis of why that happened.
We knew after that tie in Munich we weren’t as strong as we needed to be, that the team needed that bit of extra quality, and without going into the nuts and bolts of it all, we didn’t address that issue in any meaningful way. Doing your absolute best and not quite achieving what you want gives you a kind of safety net in terms of how people react. There is, at least, some mitigation, some understanding. Ignoring – for whatever reason – something as fundamental as your attack, the thing that wins you games, will simply infuriate people if those chickens come home to roost.
I don’t want to be on a downer here, because I think this is an Arsenal team capable of better, and capable of rising to the occasion against PSG. I want these players … and this manager … to succeed, but as I wrote yesterday the inability to find more than one goal in 17 of our 35 Premier League games has had a significant impact on our results and our points total. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to worry about that issue manifesting itself against the best team we’ve faced this season.
Beyond that, and perhaps I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself, when the post-season analysis sessions are taking place, there’s one word that I hope crops up throughout: variety. Not in the entertainment sense, singing and dancing and wavy hats, but how this team plays. I know it’s difficult when you have a lot of players out injured, but even with everyone fit I feel like there’s a shelf-life to any kind of tactical or organisational set-up, and I think we might be there with this current iteration.
New players bring new qualities and allow you to do things differently, so that will clearly play a part. A striker, a left winger perhaps, do something different with your left-back. I take nothing at all away from Myles Lewis-Skelly who is superb and deserves all the plaudits in the world for what he’s done this season, but everyone knows what Arsenal do tactically with the player who is nominally in that position, and while it’s not a weakness, per se, there are certain things that make us just a bit predictable. If you expose them, as Bournemouth did in the build-up to the long throw than led to the equaliser, you can suffer. Arteta has spoken a lot in the past about his desire to make his team much more unpredictable, and if we’re going to to develop again next time out, there is a real need to address that.
In his press conference last week, ahead of the Bournemouth game, he was asked about whether we were sufficiently covered with creativity in midfield. He answered by saying Declan Rice and Mikel Merino could bring some of that, as well as Ethan Nwaneri – although he’s never played him in that position. Then, unprompted, he brought up the name of Max Dowman, the next exciting Hale End prospect. Everyone loves an Academy starlet, the idea of him following in the footsteps of Nwaneri, Lewis-Skelly, Saka etc is tantalising, but the cynic in me wonders if that was Arteta pulling a little trick. He loves magicians, as we know, this felt like a distraction.
I think that’s a very important question for this team, and while I don’t want to delve into the Odegaard situation again in any depth, my biggest question about the whole thing is why he is really the only player we have for that position. His form isn’t anywhere near his best, but he’s out there catching strays for every tiny thing he does wrong because we have to play him in every game. That’s the job, of course, being a professional footballer can be hard at times the level of scrutiny in the online world we live in is immense, but the bigger issue for me is the make-up of our squad.
‘Look over there, Max Dowman!’, isn’t a great answer for me. He’s 15, not 16 until December, and while he might be a generational talent in the making, how much is a 15 year old realistically going to play in the Premier League next season? So, that question remains valid and demands a better answer, because Odegaard’s trials this season are a factor. Not the only one, far from it, but we have a player whose form is such that you would ideally turn to an alternative that we just don’t have. That’s on the manager and the recruitment decisions we made.
Anyway, I think I just needed to get that off my chest before we start looking ahead properly to PSG. There’s a big summer ahead, everyone – not least the manager and his new sporting director – understands that, and we can’t half-arse another window because as the last two have shown that leads you down a path you don’t really want to be on.
Right, I’m gonna leave it there for now, but as ever we’ll have an Arsecast Extra for you today. We’ve already put out the call for questions on BlueSky @gunnerblog.bsky.social and @arseblog.com with the hashtag #arsecastextra – or if you’re an Arseblog Member on Patreon, leave your question in the #arsecast-extra-questions channel on our Discord server.
Pod should be out mid-morning. Until then, have a good one.
