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Pain in the Arse-nal

5 min read
by The Fighting Cock
Jim Pollard looks back at yet another painful defeat to our rivals, this time in the FA Cup.

Woolwich have been beating Spurs for fun for years, but in the last few seasons – the odd inevitable humiliation aside – we have been getting closer to them. We’ve even won the odd game, on Saturday night though, the gulf was as wide as ever.

Theo+Walcott+Arsenal+v+Tottenham+Hotspur+FA+tFLe_E0pOjslWe lost on all fronts at the Emirates and we had to endure Arsene Wenger outsmarting yet another Spurs boss with all the ease and disdain of a chess grandmaster forced to play a five year-old at draughts.

Wenger’s team was more committed, half a yard a quicker, better on the ball, took more care of possession when they had it and ultimately beat us comfortably. For half an hour after their second goal, they took their foot off the gas and let us come at them, yet we still barely created a chance of note.

With a couple of exceptions our team looked beaten before we started. We were sluggish and frequently players found themselves without a pass or with a pass only to a teammate who didn’t appear to be expecting it (presumably having temporarily forgotten he was playing the north London derby).

[authquoteleft text=”We lost on all fronts at the Emirates and we had to endure Arsene Wenger outsmarting yet another Spurs boss [/linequote]

Team and mate are the key words. The biggest difference between Spurs and Woolwich is that they attacked and defended as a team. We were a handful of disparate individuals, nodding acquaintances at best.

Hugo Lloris made a couple of good saves but no longer appears to be the rock he was before his concussion. The full-backs were steady, and Kyle Walker seems to be getting back to being the player he was in his breakout season, whilst Danny Rose’s development from an attacker to a defender continues (although as evidenced by his howler for the second goal, it is still a work in progress).

Defensively the real problem was in the middle. Michael Dawson and Vlad Chiriches don’t look like a natural pairing to me – a risk taker alongside a solid plodder – and they’re both donkey slow.

Tim Sherwood however had no choice but to play them – no one else is fit – but when you have a dodgy central defensive pairing you don’t want to be a man down in the centre of midfield too.

Frankly, it could have been another massacre and it’s down to the efforts of Nabil Bentaleb, who could hardly have been handed a tougher full debut, and Mousa Dembélé (our best player?) that it wasn’t.

[linequote]I was amazed how many pundits seemed to think Spurs would win. On the back of a jammy win at Old Trafford[/linequote]

Aaron Lennon was good, however it is well known that his decision-making and final ball could be better, but you cant fault his work-rate. Christian Eriksen is a Champions League quality player but is still new to the Premier league, and his dead-ball delivery must improve.

Upfront Emmanuel Adebayor and Roberto Soldado had their worst game together. The former let the crowd get to him and the latter became more and more frustrated and withdrawn as the team huffed and puffed and failed to get the ball to him. Soldado had pretty much stopped playing for the ten minutes before he was taken off. If the club are thinking about selling Defoe this may have changed their minds.

What we must realise in the aftermath of this defeat is we can’t blame Sherwood – most people would have played pretty much this team – or the players. He and they are the victims of massive hype. I was amazed how many pundits seemed to think Spurs would win. On the back of a jammy win at Old Trafford.

Nobody who had seen both us under Tim (think West Brom and West Ham) and even a little of Woolwich over recent weeks could have thought we were favourites.

We were told we’d signed The Beatles at the start of the season. Maybe. But if so, they haven’t met yet and John Lennon’s still playing his mum’s banjo. Mesut Ozil is the rare exception – a player who debuts in the Premier League as if he’s been playing in it all his life – but he is world class.

We have bought some decent players and one or two of them may go on to be world class. Whether it will happen at a club with such a short-term mentality as Spurs I don’t know.

I hope a few of them will be around next year to give us a chance of finding out. Because let’s be clear, Tim has an incredibly difficult job just to get us close to Champions League qualification. If we’re still seriously in the hunt come Easter he should be manager of the season.

[authquoteright text=”We were told we’d signed The Beatles at the start of the season. Maybe. But if so, they haven’t met yet and John Lennon’s still playing his mum’s banjo[/linequote]

As it is, how will Levy view coming 6th or 7th? Does Tim really have it in him to be a Premier League manager? As with all those signings we’ll just have to cross our fingers and hope. It’s got to be better than yet another hasty decision.

So Spurs fans brace yourself. Woolwich will win something this year and we’ll be top six at best. We could learn so much from them if we wanted to – how to turn players into a team, how to keep the ball when you have it, how to press when you haven’t, how to play fast, slow, long or short as appropriate, how to bring on young players, how to buy players when you need to, how to move grounds. We might even come to learn the importance of the first touch.

Meanwhile, normal service has been resumed. We have our Tottenham back. Unfortunately not the Danny Blanchflower incarnation.

[author name=”Jim Pollard” avatar=”http://i.imgur.com/LHJaICC.jpg” twitter=”” website=”www.malehealth.co.uk” tag=”JimPollard[/linequote]

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12 Comments

  1. Llb
    06/01/2014 @ 1:33 pm

    I still don’t get why spuds are so fixated on the fact that arsenal came from woolwich over 100 years ago.

  2. jules
    06/01/2014 @ 1:34 pm

    Good article.
    Was always concerned about yesterday. We were battered by United in the 2nd half and the arse are much better than they are.
    I think Lloris hasn’t been the same since the injury. Didn’t Cech have a dodgy year after his head injury?
    Eriksen is a concern. His passing was woeful, continually over-hitting thru balls and zero work-rate.
    Fit or not, Soldado has to have one of the worst shots-to-target ratio in the prem. The guy has two shots – balloon over or daisy cutter wide. Come on! 20 games!!! 1 fkn goal! yeah yeah penaltys blablabla! Love being reminded by goons that Bendtner’s scored more in 3 games.
    I dont mind optimism but cannot tolerate bs. yeah, Sandro Paulinho & Vertonghen would’ve made us stronger, but Ramsey, Giroud, and Ozil would’ve killed us more too. They had a donkey in goal and he made no saves!
    Depressed, yeah. Optimistic, not much.
    Top 4? No chance.
    But if no top 4, lets finish 6th and not get into the Eucrapa.

  3. Declan
    06/01/2014 @ 1:50 pm

    With 10 injured players are hands were tied with rotation. But to field Bentaleb as 1 of 2 Cms offering a dodgy back 4 no protection against any team in the top 5 is ridiculous. Danny Rose is not and has never been a LB. He started off as a LW and could probably cut it there for a West Ham team. But he looks a championship quality fullback. But he’s our only one! By some grace of thought we entered the season with only an injury-prone LW as our first choice Left Back. MADNESS. There are a few things wrong with the team and players who no longer can have the tag potential. Aaron Lennon and Michael Dawson are as good as they’ll ever be and they are good enough and wouldnt look out of place for a fight against relegation. There is so much wrong with this squad. And once most of the players return I am interested to see how Timaaah keeps: Sandro, Dembele, Paulinho, Eriksen, Siggurdson and Holtby happy. Oh and Bentaleb and Carroll . madness if he is recalled because if you add (Tims version of AVBs Adebayor in) Capoue back into that lot then that’s 9 CM for 2 positions…. What? And seen as Timaaaah is 0 for 2 in cup games then where will we need even more than 4 of those players. We have some very good players and we have some bang average ones. If Timaah isnt dismissed on the final day of the season then we’ll lose the good ones and be stuck with the bang (below)average Roses, Dawsons and Lennons of this team.

  4. KevinF
    06/01/2014 @ 2:01 pm

    Amusing reading the OTT difference between the posts following the Man Utd & Woolwich games! Last week Sherwood was a tactical genuis, now he’s clueless, whereas the truth is he’s something in between. Your article is very negative – you praise Woolwich to the hilt and refer to the disappointing games since Sherwood became manager but not the good wins over Southampton, Stoke & Man Utd. Calling the win at Old Trafford “jammy” is ridiculous considering how long we had to wait for a result there until last season.

  5. fide
    06/01/2014 @ 2:36 pm

    Good article from a great thinker. Unfortunately, the spurs’ bosses cannot learn from arsenal.

  6. DaSpurs
    06/01/2014 @ 2:56 pm

    Personally my depression is lost for words that even if you can comprehend what I’m about to say – you’ve done well.
    Top 4 – a few distances away
    Top 6 – WHY, to go disgrace ourselves in Europa – its bad enough losing 6 nil & 5 nil at home, taking it to Europe will ruin us more.
    I’d really rather be 17th this season, so when we see how close we have come backwards, we’d reconsider & attack better. Personally, I do not see what Tim is gonna do better that AVB. I’m not a Harry fan, but right now, I’d have him back – WHY WAS HE SACKED IN THE FIRST PLACE, LEVY??? Resign now!!!

  7. matt
    06/01/2014 @ 3:41 pm

    Well written Jim, some refreshing honesty and accurate analysis. I was also one of those fans not getting overly caught up in the heady whiff of success emanating from a narrow victory against a mediocre Man Utd outfit, even though it was a good performance and a deserved result. “Le Arse” away from home, on the back of 3 days rest, was always going to be a much tougher assignment and so it proved. Whether they were more motivated than us is debatable, but what is unarguable is their movement was better, their passing was slicker and their collective game plan was significantly better coordinated and executed than ours.

    What could we have done differently? Personnel-wise not a lot, given our lengthy injury list, except starting Capoue over Bentaleb. That was a naive decision by Sherwood and one which I viewed with a definite sense of foreboding when I saw the team-sheet before the match. Clearly against United we operated better for the first hour with the more physical and defensively minded Capoue in tandem with Dembele, rather than with Bentaleb alongside him when he came on as sub. That is not intended to be a knock on the young lad, who certainly has some potential, but this was not the game to be giving him his first team debut, unless Capoue was injured, which I am assuming he was not.

    In conjunction with that personnel error, we also tactically got it wrong by ceding them too much room in the centre of midfield. After the opening stanza, we never seriously disrupted their passing game, as they always outnumbered us in midfield. For the first 10 to 15 minutes, Adebayor was dropping deeper and Eriksen was pushing inside narrowing the space on the left when we were defending, which made that period of the game relatively even (similarly for the first 15 minutes of the second half). Once Adebayor’s work-rate dropped and Eriksen’s defensive discipline lapsed then the game was up as far as midfield dominance was concerned. It was a fatuous remark by Sherwood to imply that their central midfield dominance was somehow offset by our having greater numbers out wide. It was not and midfield dominance is achieved by controlling the centre of the park not the peripheries. Even so, it has to be said we were still in the game at 1-0, up until Danny Rose’s dithering aberration. After that it was all too comfortable for the Arse to close the game out without us really threatening to break them down.

    The lessons to be learned from this comprehensive defeat? The most glaring one for me is having a style and a system that is engrained throughout the club from the first team down and that all the players buy into and are able to execute, aligned to a stable management structure that is intimately familiar with the system and able to co-ordinate it expertly. Right now Arsenal are a sort of Barcelona lite, they have that system and structure, whereas we do not. Fact is we don’t even know our best formation and the best 11 players to implement it.

    There are other lessons to be learned also, most particularly tactically. The essence of good tactical game planning is to anticipate exactly how the other team is going to set up and then to produce effective tactics to counteract it. Most specifically tactics that are designed to have an element of surprise and to be the least desirable ones you would wish to be facing if you were opposing them. If that is a fair summary of broad tactical game planning and acumen, which I believe it is, then Sherwood’s grand design for this game was an epic fail!

    Hopefully he will learn from this setback and the tactical errors and execution malfunctions that accompanied it. If he can, which I am not convinced of, then we still have a chance of qualifying for the Champions League this season. If not then we are liable to finish 5th or 6th at best and Sherwood will find himself collecting his P45, the blow to his ego softened by a substantial paycheck! I optimistically hope for the former, but realistically expect the latter!

  8. Simon Taylor
    06/01/2014 @ 4:26 pm

    Lots of detailed tactical analysis regarding the defeat at The Emirates on Saturday, none of which I would contradict. I feel, however, that tactics and team selection are the symptoms, not the disease.
    The disease is Levy. He has been our Chairman for over a decade now, yet he has engineered for himself and our club another situation where, in the middle of a derailed season, he has found himself with no option but to sack an under-performing manager. It happened a few seasons ago when Juande Ramos proved he wasn’t PL class. Fortunately, Harry Redknapp was available to pull the chairman’s nuts out of the fire. Fast-forward to a few weeks ago, and a very similar situation had developed. AVB proved that he was lacking either the tactical nous, or simply the stomach for the fight, and was duly despatched. This time however, no Harry. Such was the extent of Levy’s ineptitude and utter inability to learn from mistakes, that the only option was, in effect ‘Harry Lite’, in the shape of Tim Sherwood.
    Sherwood has never managed any club. None. Not a single one. However good he may be at bringing on young players, and fielding attacking elevens, he cannot possibly have the full managerial skill set required by a club of Tottenham’s stature. He may turn out to be a great manager, but it won’t be in time to get us into the CL places this season or the next.
    According to Levy’s plan, we should be top four regulars by now. As a result of his ineptitude, we are not even close. I can only hope that Sherwood is a short-term solution, and that the Chairman is lining up a big name. This would indicate that Levy is learning. That, however, is not something he has shown he is able to do, so I suspect we just in for more of the same old re-heated mistakes.
    Levy has to go.

  9. Lolzz
    07/01/2014 @ 6:28 pm

    Lol, Spurs had their chance to finish above Arsenal when they were very weak, selling their players and financially restricted due to the stadium debt, but I think Arsenal are back and it will be back to how it was, Arsenal fighting for titles while spurs trying to get 5th or 8th.

  10. AnythingButPenalties
    08/01/2014 @ 12:09 am

    This was a reality check after the euphoria of our win at Old Trafford. Playing 4-4-2 against a team with no midfield is very different to trying it against a team full of identikit slick passers. Still after buying 7 new players with no Premier League experience we were always going to need patience, unlike Arsenal with their one quality signing. Hopefully the lack of quantity will come back to bite them as they tire towards the business end of the season.

  11. David Patten
    08/01/2014 @ 3:07 am

    A full strength team would have been a different proposition for Arsenal than the lightweight one they encountered. We all know that. We need to get over the whole Arsenal thing. Since the 90s they’ve been consistently better, both in the coaching department, and with their emphasis on individual skills and passing. So what? Get over it. The inferiority complex borders on embarrassing.
    Calling the United win jammy is disingenuous. They did not batter us the whole second half at all. We were not overawed by any means and could easily have scored five, were it not for the usual profligacy that’s plagued almost everyone all season.
    Losing to Arsenal isn’t cause for deep depression and hand wringing. Now, losing twice to West Ham, on the other hand……

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