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"Arsene Wenger is the alchemist of accumulation
By Myles Palmer
Arsenal 7 Slavia Prague 0
Fabregas 5, Hubacek o.g. 24, Walcott 41, Hleb 51,Walcott 55, Fabregas 58, Bendtner 89
________________________________
Success in football is no one thing, it's an accumulation of lots of little things. You improve this by 5%, you organise that, you work on something else, and it gradually comes together. George Graham told us that years ago.
Thumping Slavia Prague 7-0 was emphatic evidence that football is a game of sequences and, therefore, a game of accumulation.
You train, you improve, you believe in what you're doing, you play, you score, you win, you keep another clean sheet. you keep winning, you feel good, you build confidence, you can't wait for the next match, you win 11 in a row and put yourself in a good position to beat Slavia Prague, and when you go 2-0 up against Slavia, you have an opportunity to hit them for six.
And you don't waste it. You don't squander that opportunity.
You spank Slavia Prague 7-0.
That is a statement.
That sends a message to Europe.
And it sends a message to Anfield, where Liverpool play Arsenal at 4pm on Sunday.
This memorable 7-0 victory kicked off as a match and ended as a massacre, but it was only a massacre because Arsenal's slick pass-and-move overwhelmed the Czech champions and demoralised them in the first ten minutes.
The Czechs arrive, deluxe stadium and facilities, huge crowd, 1-0 down in 5 minutes, the scale of what they have to do is too great, and the contest is all over before it's started.And Arsenal sustained it. They had the energy, the focus, the desire, the concentration, to sustain it, and that was what made it memorable. They didn't get lazy or sloppy.
Arsene Wenger was 58 on Monday and now, more than ever, he is proving to be the alchemist of accumulation. It's almost a mathematical accumulation, a bit like banking, a bit like compound interest. You earn interest on your cash, but you earn interest on your interest as well, and after a few years it all adds up and looks good.
This spectacular success against Slavia was an accumulation of training, an accumulation of rhythm, an accumulation of confidence, an accumulation of accuracy in passing and shooting, an accumulation of team spirit, an inevitable moment and when all those factors coalesced and blossomed. The accumulation reached a tipping point and they won 7-0.
Such a scoreline was likely to happen at some point, but you never know when. As Arsene said, "We wanted three points and to play well but you can't predict that."
What made it intriguing was that Arsene chose that moment to launch 18-year old Theo Walcott as a half-striker, darting behind the hard-running big man, Adebayor, who pulled defenders around, opening up gaps.
Walcott scored two goals, played Fabregas in for his second, and was denied a hat-trick by a good reflex save from Vaniak at pointblank range.
In the music business you have an A&R man to identify talent, while in football you have a Chief Scout, and Arsene Wenger is the Big Chief of Chief Scouts. An A&R man signs groups and singers, and if he gets more right than wrong, you end with a successful record company.
When I first became an rock critic, and later co-managed some groups, we used say that A&R wasn't about signing the right groups, it was about doing the right things with the right groups.
Football clubs and record companies are aware of the risks. They all know that signing talent is not an exact science. It never has been and never will be. Not even if you are Arsene Wenger : Upson, Pennant, Jeffers, Richard Wright, it's a list you can keep writing. Wiltord, an £11 million French striker, failed as a striker and ended up as an understudy to Ljungberg, a £2.5 million Swedish winger. The A& R man at Deportivo La Coruna cut his losses and flogged him on to another record company, Bordeaux, with a sell-on clause. Same happened with Clive Allen at Arsenal, never played a game. Would Wiltord get into today's team? Not if I was picking it !
The genius of Arsene is the ability to stick stubbornly to his long-term vision, despite a lot of pain and failure and grief, while working and waiting for the components of his vision to gell together, to fall into place, to accumulate. A lot of it is about doing the right things with the talent, and what he does is often very original.
Arsene never gets enough credit for the originality of what he does.
Petit was a defender who could run for hours, so he used him in a devastating midfield. Lauren was a midfielder who could pass, so he used him as a steady right back to feed the ball out from the back because Sol and Keown were not great passers. Overmars was a flying winger who was turned a striker who scored goals from the same positions as Ian Wright scored them. And Thierry Henry was another explosive, skilled winger who was transformed into the club's record goalscorer by a manager bold enough to build a team round him.
Arsene does it by building a style round what his players are good at, not by working them into the ground to improve the things they are not good at. It's a journey and an experiment, and we're all agog and wondering where this season's experimental journey will end.
Football is about players and we don't know what these players can do yet. It's a new group which is doing unfamiliar things. Neither do the players know what they can do. But they can tell you what they want to do. For the moment, that's enough."
I find this particular article very inspiring. How it relates and reflects back on many aspects of my own so called life, maybe specifically my interest in bouldering/climbing as a hobby and physical training. It might have been a case of the "Ji Muo Nan Nai..Shi Guang Bu Zai" thing going on that made me "kill time" hanging with my climbing khakis and putting alot of my energy and psyche for the sport. 7 years on-off in the sport. 2 major injuries and loss of interest and motivation but fate had somehow led me back to this drive to claw back at past gratifications. Theories, cheap talk and all that jazz about getting stronger. Its been almost 2 years since I got back into the game. Nov 2005 KL trip is something I mentioned alot. Overweight, slightly depressed and dumbfounded. This 2 years of "accumalations" good and bad, and I'm feeling quite alright so far. Like how wenger does it I hope to be able to remake myself. Especially keeping myself injury free and having as much fun now that I have spent so much time getting my fundamentals right again....... |
| | Posted 10/25/2007 1:13 AM - 41 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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