Kevin Whitcher
I don’t think anyone should underestimate the importance of Arsenal’s victory over Swansea yesterday. Performances can wait. What matters now is points. The club, after the experience at Old Trafford, need to regroup and effectively start again. The 8-2 defeat, at long, long last, put to bed the idealism of the manager’s youth experiment, a costly piece of self-indulgence that has seen the club go backwards since 2006. Five years on, the five newcomers in the death throes of the transfer window are a clear admittance that Arsène Wenger got it very badly wrong in his misguided vanity project.
Now, we are rebuilding from the wreckage – not only of the drubbing at the hands of Alex Ferguson’s younger team (who seem to be performing more than capably in comparison to Wenger’s) – but of five long years of decline. A period that has seen the club fall from title contenders to an outfit whose ambition is now to make the top four. No-one’s talking about a challenge for top spot this season. A huge part of the problem is obviously that the true rebuilding can’t take place until the manager and his backroom team (and in that I include the medical staff) are displaced. It was interesting to read an offering sent to the Arsenal Mailing List recently that Steve Bould had turned down the opportunity to replace Pat Rice (hence the tubthumper’s continued stay), because he felt the manager was a goner and that once he was booted out, he did not want to go with him, preferring to keep his job and see what developed. May of course be complete bullsh*t, but you could easily believe it.
I have heard talk of a Carlo Ancelotti/Martin Keown ‘dreamteam’ in the technical area, but I find the prospect unlikely. Wenger won’t be given the shove until next summer, and by that time, one imagines Ancelotti will have been approached for a job back in Italy. So we travel to Dortmund with the delightful prospect of Pat Rice looking up to the director’s box for guidance as to which substitutions to make, as he pathetically did during the home leg v Udinese. That is the quality of the coaching staff Arsene Wenger chooses to employ.
Fortunately, there will be a little more knowhow on the pitch. No-one’s worried about killing the careers of Denilson and Bendtner anymore. Who knows what proportion of their respective wages the club are still covering, but it’s safe to say neither is likely to appear in Arsenal’s colours again. Eboue, the clown in the dressing room and on the pitch, will be joked about for seasons to come, but ultimately, the joke is that he was retained by the manager for so long. Mertesacker and Arteta had decent debuts yesterday, although the quality of the opposition means that Tuesday evening will tell us a lot more. It was something of a surprise to see Marouane Chamakh come on for five minutes at the end of the game when the new Korean striker could have made an appearance. If that is an indication of the pecking order, we are in genuine trouble. Benayoun looked busy when he entered the fray. It was genuinely refreshing to see the effort expended by both he and Arteta in contrast with the sometimes lacklustre or unimaginative displays of too many Arsenal players of late. There is no question that things needed freshening up and a glut of new faces will do no harm whatsoever in that respect.
Performance-wise, Arsenal played like a mid-table team, needing a goalkeeping howler to secure the points. But ultimately, points are what matter at the moment. Wins will go a long way to slowly restoring confidence. The team need to focus very hard on winning the games they would be expected to as a side with aspirations of a top four finish. That means beating those sides that are likely to finish in the bottom half of the table both home and away. They really have to stop conceding cheap points, which is always a danger given the questionable solidity of the defence. Kieran Gibbs looked shaky at left back, and I cannot imagine he will remain ahead of the more experienced Andre Santos before long. People mitigate his defensive displays by citing Andrey Arshavin’s lack of assistance, but Ashley Cole had Robert Pires in front of him. Gibbs is in need of the kind of coaching he simply isn’t getting to develop as a defender, so there’s no blame attached, it’s just a matter of fact. One assumes Santos can do better against the quality of opponent Gibbs was struggling against yesterday.
Arsenal have a run of games that normally would not concern them greatly. Dortmund away is the toughest, but the home ties in the Champions League are the ones that will determine the club’s fate. Then it’s Blackburn away, the Carling Cup home tie, Bolton at home and the visit of Olympiakos before the end of September. It is important that the team can build momentum from this point on to salvage something from the season. They will have to perform a lot better than they did against Swansea, but winning when you play badly is no bad thing, and it is certainly something that hasn’t happened enough in recent seasons. So although yesterday afternoon’s game will not live long in the memory, thank goodness the Gunners won it, by hook or by crook.
