Arsene, Einstein, and Stoke Thoughts
12 comments May 9th, 2011
Stoke City 3 – 1 Arsenal (Jones 28, Pennant 40, Van Persie 81, Walters 82)
Highlights | Arsene’s reaction
The fight, in as much as there was one, is over. At long last, Arsenal are officially out of the title race. As ever, the end of a long battle against the inevitable comes with a certain degree of relief. But fans will mourn too for the passing of another trophyless season.
‘Trophyless’, the red spellcheck indicator tells me, is not a real word. And yet at Arsenal, it’s a prominent part of the vernacular.
For Stoke to be the firing squad who finally ended our miserable decline was horribly poignant. They are in many ways an anti-Arsenal. Ugly, classless, but undeniably committed. They beat us because they wanted it more.
That hurts. Arsenal still had plenty to play for this season. Pride alone should be a prize big enough to motivate a team of this stature. But our rivalry with Stoke runs deeper than that. One only needed to look at our starting XI and see the name of Aaron Ramsey on the sheet to understand that this game had to be about going there and imposing our footballing principles upon an inferior opponent.
Sadly, we fell short. Every time this Arsenal team are expected to make a bold statement, they instead unfurl a crumpled piece of toilet paper and stammer like Colin Firth fishing for an Oscar. When they fancy the occasion, they are fantastic – witness last week’s defeat of Manchester United. When they don’t, they are flimsy.
Our weakness from set pieces has reached an absurd level. Arsene said yesterday we have now conceded 21 goals from set pieces, and just 17 from open play. That is an embarrassing figure. It shows a complete lack of preparation. Arsene went on to say that our organisational weakness is “the easiest thing to correct in the game”. Which begs the question, why hasn’t it been done before now?
The manner in which Kenwyne Jones was allowed to nod in Stoke’s opener, unchallenged, without even needing to jump, was almost funny. I say almost, because even the best jokes wear thin over time. We have seen this again and again and again, and we’re tired of it.
After the match, Arsene said:
“This team has done well overall this season. This is not the best moment to analyse [the season] after a disappointing game. If you analyse all the competitions and how we have done, we have done well. Something has gone [and] you could see that today. We have to take a distance and make the right analysis of the season.”
To a degree, I understand where he’s coming from: in real terms, the season was over before yesterday’s game even kicked off. But this customary end-of-season collapse cannot be written off as an anomaly: it has now occurred in three out of the last four years.
Albert Einstein, who generally knew what we was talking about, labelled insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Unless real changes are made this summer, Arsene is in serious danger of falling foul of that definition.
