MistaT But I'm not yet sold on our attacking patterns being more entertaining than what Wenger served up.
I didn't say more entertaining, although I think as we improve further, they may well be more satisfyingâas they'll be more clearly rehearsed, and higher percentage manoeuvres against better organised defences.
Abandoning "entertainment" as a core value is key to what we're doing at the moment. There's a recognition that true pleasure in the sport consists in playing optimally, and you can see how much the players enjoy this aspect, versus the latter Wenger era when our pride in being "entertaining" was accompanied by dissatisfaction from the senior players about how unserious we were about some aspects of the game.
As others are pointing out, Guardiola deserves the credit, but this new football seems to amount to physics, geometry, biophysics and stochastic processes. subject to the quality of players' collective movement, passing and execution, and good luck.
Under this kind of thinking (for example) one imagines cutbacks are explicitly favoured from overlapping players, on the basis they're more likely to lead to high percentage angles for scoring opportunitiesâbut not excessively favoured, as that would lead to predictable attacking patterns. I guess it's just another factor that goes into the precise instruction of the forwards.
That's the difference from a vaguer idea that "cutbacks are good" or "you're good at cutbacks, do them", or even "cutbacks are entertaining, let's do more of them" âŚ
It's the need for properly coordinated, collective action and creativity that leads to a corresponding need for all the highly detailed analysis and training. That's the work that encodes specific combinations of actions in the team's repertoire. Put simply, we can score goals any which way, but we can't truly succeed as a team with a playâeven one that superficially appears to lead to a brilliant goalâunless the team knows the play and it's in the playbook. And scoring with team plays is the thing that positively reinforces the intense communication and work done together in training.
