Premier League 21/22: Page 54 - The Arsenal discussion forum and community: One More in the Tolly

Premier League 21/22

Sicario

3/4 wins for Gerrard. Villa look much better under him.

KingslandBarge

Have you been catching their games Sicario? what have you noticed that's different in their play?

Anzac

https://www.football365.com/news/premier-league-reached-peak-managerial-heights-rangnick
we're the only big6 club without a bona fide top class manager, and our rookie who is learning on the job is struggling to impart his playing philosophy that is probably the most complex and demanding in the game atm.

jones

What exactly is complex about Arteta's philosophy?

Burnwinter

The excuses made for it not working have been pretty elaborate ...

FEBravo

Burnwinter wrote:
The excuses made for it not working have been pretty elaborate ...

Have they? "It's the players' fault, not mine" is pretty basic. I guess he's good at elaborating on how come it's their fault.

Clrnc

I think BW meant the excuses conjured up by many here.

Anzac

jones wrote:
What exactly is complex about Arteta's philosophy?

Supposedly being based upon positional football much like Pep.
General consensus being from the descriptions I've read, that it's essentially all working together as intended or it falls apart like a house of cards. For mind that is a recipe for disaster when half the team are youngsters who will be inconsistent.

Qwiss

I think he gave up trying to play like Pep a long time ago. Pep doesn't have his keeper hoof it long the way we do. He wouldn't stick Laca in to win a few battles and get some free kicks, etc We are not a side that plays cultured football.

jones

I don't think he ever tried playing like Pep in the first place. Guardiola's football is more than any other in the world based on drills in possession, he's become a meme in that he orders three 50m defenders per season but almost none of them arrived being used to play the type of short passing football he has them play, they're taught to pass it and make themselves available there. They hog possession not only because they're better on the ball but because his drills enable them to do so, if it weren't like that plenty of other rich clubs would be the same. We never dominate teams like that, not by possession nor scoreline.

Arteta's tactics are nothing special whatsoever, he's much closer to your bog standard 90s British manager than he is to Guardiola and that's not a slight, it's an observation. He sets his teams up to not concede (or """control""") first and foremost and hopes that his players come up with something on their own in the middle and final third. Again if there was a single player who looked to have improved under him from his performances before he took over - bar AMN who was immediately banished and might have been just as well a coincidence - there'd be grounds to think there's something else going on in training, but there isn't

Klaus

Jones is spot on here. I've said this before, but the manager Arteta looks up to isn't Wenger or Guardiola, it's David Moyes. He idolised Guardiola as a player but it was Moyes who gave him a career, who shaped him as a footballer and helped him develop as a person.

That season Arteta played on the wing for Everton I think he created more chances than Ronaldo did for United, but he was taught to suppress his technical superiority and play a more intellectual role for the greater good of the team. You can see the same trait in our football where we readily sacrifice attacking excellence for hard work and defensive rigidity.

He spent all his formative years playing for that Everton side with their little brother mentality, and the football he advocates for as a manager shares that attitude too. I think that's an entirely consistent analysis of what makes Arteta think the way he does. He keeps surrounding himself with the same people too. Steve Round, who he immediately brought in as his assistant when he got the Arsenal job, was assistant manager to Moyes at both Everton and Manchester United.

goon

I think he's a jumble of ideas personally and has probably borrowed from all or at least a few of the managers he's worked under. If he was like Moyes at least we'd have played with a lot of intensity which is a feature of all good Moyes teams. Whatever his style is, I don't think he's got it quite worked out how to make it fit together, while some of his ideas probably don't work in practice half as well as he theorises.

Even if his tactical system is a work of art though, as Jones says I don't think he emphasises much on drills and coaching and instead overloads the players with instructions and information. There's been a couple of references to this from the players themselves. It would explain a couple of things. Firstly, it's probably why we lack intensity and play the game like we're playing a football video game from the early 90s, they're thinking about what they should be doing rather than what they'd instinctively do. It would also explain why we suffer a sudden and complete loss of confidence. I've played under people who overload you with a bunch of instructions that go against your natural instincts and it's soul draining.

Clrnc

How's that kind of micromanaging a work of art?

Mirth

jones wrote:
I don't think he ever tried playing like Pep in the first place. Guardiola's football is more than any other in the world based on drills in possession, he's become a meme in that he orders three 50m defenders per season but almost none of them arrived being used to play the type of short passing football he has them play, they're taught to pass it and make themselves available there. They hog possession not only because they're better on the ball but because his drills enable them to do so, if it weren't like that plenty of other rich clubs would be the same. We never dominate teams like that, not by possession nor scoreline.

He's nothing like Pep. There was an interview with Henry on his Barcelona days where he said Pep's focus was to transition the ball to the final third. After that the players were free to do what they like. If anything our football becomes more rigid as we cross the halfway line.

goon

I took that interview very differently I have to say, particularly since the emphasis over the whole segment is how Pep insisted they stick to their positions.

Our main issue is the first part, we rarely get the ball up to anywhere near the final third.

@[deleted] - not saying it’s a work of art, I’m saying even if it was it probably wouldn’t work.

Burnwinter

Klaus, you could call that theory "Moyesteta" … but now I'll give you "Pep's Homunculus" …

We do have a few things on Arteta. He grew up in a small town with a demanding and critical father. He was above all a disciplined player by the end of his career—a guy who'd carry out a role with great care, commit professional fouls where necessary, give a bit of dignity to the captain's armband etcetera.

I reckon we're looking at a manager who contributed to technical work as an assistant at a top club where personnel management wasn't his responsibility and high standards were already established with a ridiculously talented squad, and came out of that experience with a savage case of the Dunning-Krugers that made him think he'd mastered the human spirit—but in fact he doesn't know how to lead people.

What we're seeing is man management marked by ignorance that appears publicly as negligence and stubbornness, and a neurotic regime of tactical instruction in which the imagined freestanding authority of Arteta's word as father and master absolves him of match day responsibilities, and licenses his punitive outlook.

flobaba

Oookay Dr OzBurns.

Burnwinter

I pulled out Occam's Razor and deep-seated childhood trauma was about the only explanation left for the way Arteta's selecting and substituting our midfield and forwards.

So of course he loves his daddy Granit Xhaka—makes sense, right?

Coombs

Weirdly, it does.

Ricky1985

It does seem to me to be a problem of motivation. I don't think Arteta has the charisma to get the players to give their all for him. I'm sure he knows his stuff, but it all falls apart when you don't have that crazy Klopp/Guardiola-like almost insanity which inspires the best from the troops and has them all pulling as one.

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