Are Wenger's Tactics Stuck In 2006?

He reasoned that if Barcelona attack through the middle and don’t create any worthwhile chances from the flanks, why defend the flanks at all? If Xavi, Iniesta and Messi are the most dangerous players running at you in the central third of the pitch, why bother wasting resources marking Alves in the outer third if he’s not actually going to do anything with it? Anyone who was lucky enough to be there at the Emirates that night will attest to the spectacular success of this new idea in what is still my favourite ever game at our new home. Wenger probably stumbled onto the idea more because of the disparity in talent between Xavi and Alves but it showcased a wider truth. The answer to the problem of a back four being pulled apart laterally is just to defend more narrowly.

For a purist like Wenger it turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory, aside from the fact that our budget team got thumped in the return leg (FFS Bendtner). Like the nineteenth century British Navy inventing the dreadnought, thus at a stroke destroying the comparative advantage their fleet of sailing ships had over the rest of the world’s navies, the football world now had a template to match and overturn the strength of the beautiful possession game. Over the last few years, teams in the Premier League have defended with full-backs tucked right in beside the centre backs, only going out to press the balls in wide areas at the last possible minute or sometimes not at all. Many of the teams coming to the Emirates to park the bus defend only the width of the six-yard box. With so many bodies crammed into the central area, the aim of moving defenders around and making runs into vacated spaces to be found with passes made through the eye of a needle becomes more and more a game of diminishing returns. The better and more experienced teams become at defending narrowly, even modestly resourced sides like Swansea, the more difficult it is with each passing year to break them down by pass-and-move possession football.

Now the arms race had tilted again. Defences had previously been playing paper while offences had been playing scissors. Now they had switched to rock and were blunting the scissors. Stalemate had returned. But as we have seen, nothing lasts for ever and in another of life’s wonderful little ironies, Wenger was to have a ringside seat at one of the first demonstrations of the new world order; the night Jupp Heynckes’s treble winning Bayern Munich side came to the Emirates in 2013.

Heynckes’s Bayern team could play possession football as well as anyone but it wasn’t the only thing they could do. They could press you high up the pitch, hunting in packs to hustle you off the ball and make it impossible for you to get into any sort of rhythm. They could also strike from deep in a lightening counter-attack to have the ball in the back of your net before you even realised the danger. In short, they were masters of possession but equally, they were masters of transition. In a world where defences had learned how to set up to defend against attack, the solution turned out to be not to let them set up in the first place.

Every football team sets up differently when they have the ball. Attacking players run ahead of the ball and defensive players move up the pitch to stay in contact with their team mates and also, possibly to join in the attack, before dropping back into their defensive shape again when they lose the ball. The idea now was to attack the centre of your opponent’s defence while they were still out of position in their offensive shape, before they had a chance to form their narrow defensive wall. This could be achieved either by striking from deep in a rapid counter-attack or by pressing your opponent, forcing a turnover (the nearer the goal, the better) and shooting within a matter of seconds. It’s not easy to do, of course. It involves a lot of organisation and a high degree of athleticism. It’s very difficult for any team to press as a unit for ninety minutes over a thirty-eight game season but the beauty of Bayern’s lesson was the idea that you didn’t have to. They showed that the different styles could all be integrated into a single whole; just because you were good at tiki-taka doesn’t mean you couldn’t be good at counter-attacking and pressing too. If you couldn’t score one way, then you could by another.

All the top teams in Europe took note. The high priests of possession added Suarez and Neymar to their ranks and on yet another night at the Emirates earlier this season they were quite content to wait for seventy minutes before launching their own lethal counter attack from inside their own box to break the deadlock. Pep Guardiola himself overcame the stubborn Juventus resistance by mixing his tactics; possession, lots of crosses and another counter-attack from deep.

In England, however, the message seems to have been slow to get through. Arsenal and both Manchester teams have played most of the season eschewing the lesson, insisting on playing only the slower, very deliberate build-up possession football that dominated Europe several years ago. It’s left the field wide open for anyone else who had been paying attention to adopt these new tactics and compete with the traditional great powers on level terms. Step forward, Leicester and Tottenham. In a normal season, when there is parity in systems and tactics, where there is a clearly defined orthodoxy and each team basically plays the same way, then usually the richest teams will win because they can afford the best players. In times of change, when not everyone plays the same way, then there is an opportunity for a 5000-1 outsider to upset the odds and that it precisely what has happened. Leicester and Spurs are top of the league because they have mastered the transition game while everyone else is still playing 2006-era football.

So what comes next? The obvious answer is that the richer clubs learn the lesson, modernise their tactics and ape the methods of the smaller successful teams but from an Arsenal perspective, the answer is much less clear.

Arsène Wenger is a purist and that is to be admired. But as with all fundamentalists he seems to have a very rigid world view which can sometimes make it difficult to interpret evidence in a rational manner. Famously, after the 2005 FA Cup final, he told the journalist @PhilippeAuclair that the dour nature of the victory was so abhorrent to him that he’d never compromise his principles again. He would prefer to lose, he said, playing what he considered to be beautiful football rather than win with the reactionary, defensive style that had triumphed in Cardiff. For many years he was true to his word until matters culminated in some real thumpings by some very good teams. 8-2 at Old Trafford. 5-1 at Anfield. 6-0 at the Bridge. It hurts me enough just to type out these results years after the event, so I can imagine what it must have done to Wenger to endure these ignominies. It was enough in 2014/15 for Wenger to change his mind. Only for the bigger games against the toughest opponents, mind you; at the Etihad he played a deep block and a counter attacking strategy, with only 30% possession and Cazorla excelling. Against Liverpool at home he utilised a high press to win 4-1 and extract some measure of revenge. He used a combination of both tactics earlier this season to destroy Man Utd 3-0, pressing high in the first twenty minutes to squeeze them to death, then dropping deep in the second half and playing on the break. But for most the other fixtures, fixtures against the so-called lesser teams, he’s simply reverted to his previous slow-possession game.

My personal nadir this season was the home game against Swansea. This is a Swansea team, remember, who had already worked us out last year, easily holding our slow attacks at arm’s length before striking with a counter-attack to win the game. So what did we do again this season? Exactly the same thing. Genius. Because Swansea doesn’t count on the Wengerometer of big teams he’s willing to mislay his principles for, we played into their hands yet again with the same, predictable results. In years gone by, before the tilt in the arms race, if something wasn’t working, if a defence was being obdurate, more often than not the better team could just keep plugging away until the lesser team cracked. No more. As we have discovered, defences are wiser now and defenders are fitter; they’re able to execute their defensive plan as well in the 90^th minute as in the first.

This isn’t something that Wenger doesn’t know or doesn’t understand. He gave an interview to Sky before the Sunderland game in which he correctly identified many of the problems and also some of the reasons for Leicester’s success. But I found his conclusion worrying. He was adamant that Leicester’s success playing the way they do is not sustainable. Now, I’m not sure whether he’s talking about the physical strains of playing as they do without the distractions of playing in Europe, or if he’s talking about their favourable conversion rates at both ends of the pitch or even whether he’s talking about the fact that the rest of the league have been remarkably naïve in the way they’ve set up against “Little Leicester” all season. Whatever, I find the conclusion he draws to be troubling. Deeply troubling. Instead of adapting the old model of possession football by grafting elements of transition football on to it where necessary in the way that the best teams in Europe have done, his answer was to stick to the old plan but find ways to execute it better.

If indeed this is his answer, then I wonder if he can pull this off. If he were to manage it, if he were somehow to find a way to breathe new life into his symphonic music when the rest of the world have moved on to heavy metal, it would surely be his greatest achievement. My personal opinion is that it is fundamentalism for its own sake. There is nothing wrong with transition football. There is nothing aesthetically inferior to a team that can press for twenty minute spells like Dortmund or Spurs or a team that can execute perfect counter attacks at pace like Leicester or either team from Madrid. As results have proven, there is nothing tactically inferior either and it is entirely unclear to me why such a strategy will be unsustainable at least until another footballing genius finds a new way to tilt the arms race in favour of the attacking players. Will that man be Arsène Wenger and will he be able to do it immediately? Sadly, I don’t think it will be.

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