F365 re-writes United victory against Arsenal

If you’re a regular reader of this blog or our forum then you’ll know nothing gets my goat quite like an idiot journalist; following our recent exhibition at the Emirates I wasn’t surprised to see people concentrate more on Arsenal than United. I was surprised how quickly they would forget however and how quickly said exhibition would be translated by a journalist on Football365.com as a “one dimensional”, “counter attack” philosophy.

Apparently, playing that way against Arsenal means that it “only takes a quick moment of unanswerable quality to throw off the plan”. If that one moment of unanswerable quality never arrives or if it’s after three moments of the oppositions own quality, well, I’m not quite clear what that means. What it does imply is that Arsenal are capable of this quality and no other team, certainly domestically, are.
We hear about Arsenal playing the best football in the land. But.

What is this fabled superior brand of football that Arsenal are supposed to play? How does it manifest itself? What visual evidence is there of this? What statistical evidence is there?

Up until recently I couldn’t turn a page in the football section of a newspaper without being reminded of Arsenal’s staggering scoring rate, they were the top scorers. They’re not anymore, Manchester United are. Suddenly though this is unheralded.

Is it the number of passes made by a team? Shots? United lead the way by a comfortable margin in both those categories.

Individual style of players? Darren Fletcher might completely dominate Cesc Fabregas every time they face off but apparently Fletcher is something of a hatchet man and Fabregas is the silkier of the two. The facts don’t really back that up.

I’m not going to argue that Fabregas off the front man against, say, Blackburn at home, Fabregas will look far better on the ball than Fletcher, but if you were picking your team, had one position left to fill in midfield, and you had to choose between Fletcher or Fabregas to play directly against the other, based on history, who would it be? I would pick Fletcher every time, not just because I support United, but because the past has shown us that Fletcher can stop Fabregas playing and still be able to play his own game.

Is it in preference of the ability? Would you rather see Arshavin do.. well, whatever it is that he does, presumably, play OK at Anfield, or the style of pass that Berbatov recently played to Rooney for his fourth against Hull? He may be inconsistent but that actual word is given a whole new meaning when describing Arshavin.

Is it in the mythological opinion of players who are injured or absent? Eduardo is a distinctly average forward and was before his injury yet he has been elevated to Ronaldo like status with a confidence issue. (He’s crap, just admit it, the sooner we can all put to bed this and the Walcott facade the better…)

To be honest I’ve always been of the preference of an actual visual experience that you can pinpoint and say “yes that’s why they’re effective”, “yes that’s good football”. Sure, statistics can flesh out the skeleton of an opinion but it has to be a strong skeleton for the stats to really have any meaning.

So what recent examples can be provided to exhibit this brand of Arsenal magic? I have to be under the impression that many have seen it as it is much loved, so how has it actually transferred itself? For all of Arsenal’s “possession” football and for all the talk of “they try to walk the ball in”, I’m yet to see a goal of true breathtaking quality like the Carlos Alberto strike even against the smaller teams let alone on the big stage. Nothing since Bergkamp that truly took my breath away – and it would be arguing with a brick wall trying to convince me he was acting out Wenger’s vision and not his own. In the interest of fairness I thought I would search to see if anything would help me change my mind – that lead to me a 50 greatest goals in Arsenal’s history as run and decided by the clubs official website. Taking away those goals that have historical significance (I’m not about to say Thomas’ Anfield goal doesn’t deserve its place just as no-one would argue with Solskjaer’s Nou Camp goal though it’s fair to say both were more about the occasion than the quality) there are very few aside from Bergkamp in there and certainly nothing knocking around the top 20 that would perpetuate the real existence of a revolutionary brand of football. All of the best goals, by the clubs own standards and admission, owe more to the brilliance of one individual than the philosophy of the manager. Not quite the plethora of 50 pass moves I was expecting.

However there are plenty of United goals that I could refer to. That would take all day; however, a slightly quicker list is going through the brilliant footballing goals scored against Arsenal. In Ronaldo’s goal at the Emirates last year and Rooney’s there this season there are arguably both seasons best goal; if counter attacking at blistering speed doesn’t take your fancy then what about the free kicks from Ronaldo and Hargreaves? If free kicks aren’t your bag then what about slick, penetrative team play, with Ronaldo finishing our second at the Emirates in 2007. That’s not to say Arsenal haven’t scored good goals in their history against ourselves – Nasri last year with the best in recent times – but it’s very clear that anything Arsenal can do, we can and have done as good, and usually better, and this after all is the point at the end of the day. The Scholes goal against Panathinaikos; the Irwin goal against Wimbledon, these are the kind of goals that this revolutionary football should be producing yet they haven’t on any level.

What we’re left with after deconstruction of the stats or the visual evidence is clearly a personal interpretation of how a game of football should be played. In this instance there will always be a case (to borrow a Wenger analogy) of “prettiest wife” syndrome.

However it’s one that’s bought into by the media and can really only be explained by the bias of the Southern media because the fact of the matter is no matter how you try and define this wonderful brand of football, there are plenty of examples from United’s recent past that give evidence they are not only capable of the same style but are also capable of different styles and all at a much higher level, one that is challenging for and winning trophies rather than one that has pretensions of one day doing so.

The “prettiest wife” comment itself was celebrated by BBC’s resident simpleton Phil McNulty back in 2002. Instead of analysing the situation for what it was – a good achievement in a double winning season in competition against a severely injury weakened Manchester United team – McNulty announced Ferguson had “met his match” against a “cerebral footballing figure” who he pondered was “too clever for him”, pre-empting a power shift. It’s these little minds that refuse to believe they could have been wrong 7 years ago, those that thought Ferguson was a tactical dinosaur and still refuse to acknowledge after all his recent success that they may have been wrong, instead clutching pathetically to the “vision” of someone whose charm has worked its magic on them despite the actual football being no better than the Chelsea team of the late 90’s. A Chelsea team that actually won things.

One line we could take with the visual evidence is the head to head games between the sides – more recently there have been better quality matches as opposed to the blood and thunder wars made legendary by Keane and Vieira. From that period, what’s the game you most remember? Probably the 2004 2-0, for all it stood for but also Wenger’s comments that “they kicked us off the park”. That the game was of such significance that neither side played good “football” and that the previous fixture was marred by much worse behaviour by Arsenal players were probably defining factors for the atmosphere but as demonstrated earlier in this article there is no reason to assume that just because Wenger said it, it should be fact – indeed, it should be considered to be quite the opposite.

This is a man canonised for his interpretation of the beautiful game by those who share his legendary myopia when it comes to bastardizing it with openly telling players to cheat. It seems that this is symbolic of the entire argument given that there is no tangible proof that “Arsenal play the best football”, only that Arsene Wenger believes they do and that they want to. So now, when they don’t play well, and United arguably give the best footballing performance of the season, websites like Football365.com lament a sad day for “beautiful football”. Agenda, much?

Of the most recent head to heads, I would be compelled to argue that not only do United have the edge, but they have regularly given their much-heralded opponents thorough footballing annihilations, whether the 4-0 FA Cup win in 2008, the recent back to back 3-1 wins at the Emirates, and even in the close run affairs – Arsenal played their part and deserved to win in a thrilling game last season in London but United did likewise in the first leg of last season’s Champions League game at Old Trafford and in April 2008 overcame Adebayor punching the ball in the net to win another pulsating encounter.

If all we’re left with is a “vision”, an individual “vision”, of football that no-one can actually see and has yet to actually come to fruition on the field then how can the person who has that vision be lauded as a genius when the actual practical demonstration of the vision is so incomplete and flawed? Bearing in mind that the commonly accepted view of attractive football is attacking football then how does this make the man a revolutionary, someone any greater than you or I? This is someone paid millions of pounds a year and given resources competitive enough to fulfil this vision and the net total on the pitch is a few batterings of a Blackburn and a Portsmouth here and there with no remarkable moments of football to speak of, no seminal moment in recent history, nothing to really elevate the club to the platform on which it is currently held, only the hope that it will someday arrive.

And until that moment arrives the “beautiful” football that Arsenal play is on a balance between future hope and myth. There’s nothing wrong with investing in that if you’re a supporter of the club; but it’s endemic of this generation in the media that their failure to actually reach the heights they aspire to – for no other reason that they are not as good as other teams at playing the game – is met with widespread media celebration in mere anticipation instead of what is surely the fair thing, to celebrate those teams that are actually better! Why not celebrate the fact that Ronaldo (last May) and Rooney (last week) absolutely destroyed them? Why not celebrate the fact that Drogba showed you can just walk through them and smash them out of the way?

Clearly, as mentioned right at the top, this is a blog prompted by the stupid article by Nick Miller at Football365. The heart of the debate does lie in what we individually find pleasing in a game of football, but the fixation from the media is not and has not been in the brand of football, it’s the team that they want to play it and the sad, sad obsession with Arsenal that presumably stems from long discussions with a charismatic foreigner means that while the league and the teams in it are probably the strongest they’ve ever been, many teams are not getting the credit they deserve. Obviously I believe that United have suffered as a direct result of this – in 1999 and 2008/9 Sir Alex produced probably the best two sides in English football history in terms of achievement but because Arsenal have been recognised as their longest “rivals” in recent history our rivals collectively have invested in the myth that they play better football simply to argue that we don’t.

The amount of credit afforded to Arsenal simply because Wenger says “they try to play the right way” is sensational. Right back to the United team of 1999 which had everything in its locker as well as a never say die attitude. Do you want Harlem Globetrotter style football? See Real Madrid circa 2003. Impressed with seemingly impenetrable force? Chelsea under Mourinho in 2005. Devestating counter attack? United 2007. Cultured, all round brilliance? United in 2008. The closest thing to total football at club level? Barcelona 2009.

Arsenal do not have the components either as a whole or individually to replicate any combination of the teams above, and even including the Chelsea side, have not bettered any of the football played by any of those sides. Barcelona and Real Madrid are eulogised for their football and rightly so in terms of achievements but Arsenal are staggeringly mentioned in the same breath AND have been constantly described as “the best team to watch” in England for over 4 years. No trophies or no landmark big game victories to really stamp their arrival – and knowing how to beat them time and time again gets labelled with jaw dropping irony as “one dimensional”. In that four years Manchester United and its players have broken many records – indeed, in the last 2 years, we have reached heights the likes of which Arsenal have never climbed to in their entire history.

If I sound bitter, then I suppose to an extent I am. Not because I want everyone to cream about United being the best – but because I’m saddened to realise that in todays game I can pre-meditate writing a blog like this. After the Arsenal game I made a deliberate effort to not over-praise our performance with a gushing blog, instead choosing to study the aftermath in the media. I predicted the fallout would entail of toys out of the pram stuff who couldn’t comprehend that a team they had built up to impossible standards could get so easily destroyed.

Instead of giving credit where it is due the path was chosen for a collective, introspective sigh of recognition. The media and Arsenal fans once again united in a common theory. Almunia is in fact useless. Clichy has gone backwards and is not quite the best left back in the world. Diaby and Song are decent athletic midfielders but aren’t quite the players of the year, just yet. Arshavin is terribly inconsistent, Walcott is terrible. Some Gooners even started singing from MY hymn sheet with the idea that Fabregas hasn’t actually proven he can do anything in a big game yet.

Of course, the sensible explanation is always that Arsenal are the third best team by a distance in both senses. Liverpool are a long way off them just as they are a long way from Chelsea and United. But by refusing to come to this acknowledgement, by refusing to simply say there is a chasm between the sides, the media and Arsenal fans alike can then completely turn face and pretend like those crushing defeats never happened. And we can all go on with another year of watching them fool themselves before a head to head meeting exposes Arsenal as the footballing equivalent of the Emporers New Clothes.

We can all see it; why can’t those employed to report on football actually document it?

The supporters don’t help, either. Every club has its knee-jerk reactionaries after a bad result but with the media cocoon that elevates Arsenal’s underachieving players to the level of their superior peers (I use the term peers loosely, therefore) in the same sport, their supporters are given carte blance to trot out the same tosh every single year. I was recently reminded of a debate I’d engaged in on BBC’s 606 service back in 2007 where Arsenal fans were convinced Senderos was on a different level to Pique and Evans. They were right, but not in the way they intended – this is just one instance but, as I said, it’s a problem really elevated by the media’s insistence to play along with it and then sweep it under the market as if it never happened when the worst rears its head. I’m shaking my head now recalling the times I couldn’t convince someone that Ronaldo was and would be better than Reyes, and that I was told in no uncertain terms that Gilberto was a more intelligent footballer than Scholes.

The topic of this blog was “inspired”, if you like, as I felt annoyed by Miller’s article, something that I knew would come, a piece that re-wrote the demolition job we did on the Gunners as something of a counter attack smash and grab but I would now like to finish by focussing on the more general point to which I have alluded – what actually constitutes good football? Is it the tricks alá Zidane and co, the speed of a Ronaldo or the intelligence of a Scholes? The physical strength of a team? Is it a combination of all the above? Is one particular attribute more important? In Arsenal’s case you would have to say is the ability to play a 3 man central midfield and keep hold of the ball really a revolutionary tactic that is the most pleasing on the eye over the last generation? Is it the ability to play the same formation, despite it not being familiar, and still being able to play to your own strengths (alá the Rooney goal)? Is it complete domination or is it counter attack? Why is playing on the counter such a bad thing anyway? It is an additional form of attack which the other team should always be wary of; when executed right it’s football in it’s purest form, the need for precision, pace and intelligence. Arsenal’s choice of attack is a straightforward plan A, narrow and patient. Do they have a plan B? Apparently not. They clearly at times need one, which means that by definition their plan A is sometimes useless. Hardly the best football to watch.

I keep coming back to the same answer, it’s all personal opinion. But whatever it is; you can be sure that it isn’t a brand of football that only exhibits it’s true potential against the lower placed teams in the division, and it isn’t a brand of football that can be exposed as easily as it has been implied it has done recently.