The Perfect Pitch

So far so good in all competitions. Still unbeaten (setting a new club record on the way), qualified for the knock-out stage of the Champions League with two games to spare, and top of the league (albeit only on “goals scored”).

If there is a cloud on the horizon for Arsenal (other than a horrible set of December fixtures, 6 away games, 2 more at home and one of them is against Chelski) it’s the selection problem Wenger is having for every game. Not all players are happy at being left on the bench (or not included at all), but why should they be? We certainly don’t want good players that are just happy to sit on the bench and pick up pay cheques (did someone mention Cudicini?).

It’s certainly a nice problem to have compared to our usual “oh dear, all our of 9 left backs are injured” one, and I don’t think the increased competition is that harmful to team spirit, apart the rubbish coming out from Mad Jen’s lips (although to be fair, he was always a bit of a loner even when he was playing). Here are some of the selection problems Wenger faces every match:

Goalkeeper: Mad Jens vs Aluminium vs Wookash
Jens won’t be around come February I think. Almunia, while I think he is a good keeper, is not world class (maybe world class at shot stopping, but his decision making is a bit dodgy at times). Fabianski is an interesting one … he’s at a good age, with a good reputation, and you would think he is being groomed as our long term number 1. But I think Almunia will finish off playing this season (bar any serious injuries or stupidness), with the Wookie taking over next season after gaining good experience in this one. If Lehmann leaves in January, we will probably bring someone experienced in (another Poomster?).

Central Defence:
We don’t have much depths here – just three players for 2 positions. Kolo will be gone in January for the ACN, but Djourou will be back – so that’s 3 players again. Song or Gilberto at CB makes me extremely uncomfortable. So Wenger’s job here is easy – just pick the best 2 out of 3.

Full-backs:
Clichy and Sagna have made their positions their own. Traore and Hoyte will have to wait patiently. Eboue is now playing as a winger, but not a really good one to be honest. Diarra can play at RB, but all the positions he plays seems to be occupied by lots of people – perhaps Diarra for Eboue on the wings?

Central Midfield:
This is where Wenger has his work cut out. Cesc, Flamini, Gilberto, Diaby, Denilson, Diarra, Song … only two of these players can be happy, three at best if we play 4-5-1. Diaby and Denilson may put up with waiting and playing in the cups, but Gilberto and Diarra will want to play every game. Song, well, I think he should find another club that has a place for him instead of being our 7th choice CM and 5th choice CB. Cesc and Flamini seems to working, and one thing you should never do is to break up something that is working. Diarra I would like to see more of, and I think he can control the midfield quite well.

Wingers:
We don’t have any and apprently, we don’t need any either. (alright, that’s not true. We don’t have “true” wingers and Hleb, Rosicky, Eboue and Walcott are doing alright, but a new signing in this position will improve us tremendously)

Forwards:
Adebayor seems to be first choice now. And when Van Persie is fit, he will play. So Eduardo, Bendtner and Walcott will have to wait for their chances and take them. To be fair, they’ve all taken some of the chances given to them and they’ve all done enought warrant a place on the bench at least. Eduardo, I think, can be our secret weapon for the latter part of the season once he acclimatises to the Premiership and starts scoring goals.

A few weeks ago I posted some crap about paintings and such, and I alluded to the fact that Sepp Blatter is a cunt.

The master painter has enemies too, at home and abroad. One of which wants to impose some kind of nationalistic view on how a painting should be composed, to perhaps use colours that best represent the country, rather than the best colours for the painting. Perhaps French paintings should only contain red, white and blue in equal portions, maybe only orange paintings for Dutch masters, and green ones for the Irish. The Mona Lisa shall have red hair, a white complexion while wearing a green dress. Will this advance art as we know it, or will it simply bring down the level so that even average paintings can masquerade as masterpieces.

Blatter is in a long list of people who have something to gain from reducing the quality of club football. Everybody knows International football is played at a much lower level, for many obvious reasons, and is no longer that entertaining. Club football is where it’s at, to use the current vernacular. You can add Michel Platini, friend of Blatter, to the list too. He has had a go at Wenger for buying too many teenagers. The French asshole said:

I do not like the system of Arsène Wenger. In France, Italy and Spain it is easy to buy with money the best players at 14, 15 or 16. I don’t like that. If the best clubs buy the best 15 or 16 players, [then it] is finished for all the clubs in Europe. If my son is playing at Millwall and at 16 Manchester United come in for this player, then when will Millwall have a good team?

So if your son is indeed a talent, he should rot away at Millwall and not enjoy Manchester United’s state of the art training facilities and modern training techniques, not to mention miss out on the experience of playing with seasoned professionals and improving his overall game? It’s true that Millwall might make more money if Platini Jr. is sold on at a later age, but that’s assuming Platini Jr.’s career hasn’t been damaged by not training with a big club earlier. Would Fabregas be where he is if he stayed playing in the Barcelona reserves? Would Messi be the current world’s best player if he had stayed in Argentina?

And why question only Arsène Wenger? Surely, the biggest exploiter of signing even pre-teen players is Barcelona and its academy. They sign kids as young as 10 from all over the world, and these kids basically live with Barcelona. Talent such as Giovani dos Santos, for example, came to Spain from Mexico when he was only 12. In fact, Lionel Messi signed for Barcelona as an 11 year old, because his old club in Argentina could not afford to pay for his medical expenses (he has a growth problem that require hormone therapy). So according to Platini, Messi should have stayed in Argentina to live the life of a little person? Barcelona’s practices are somewhat controversial, but it’s not as if they steal kids from their parents – and those kids that don’t make it are still given a good education, football and non-football too – something that may not have been possible if they had stayed in their home countries.

In the end, it’s about improving football and improving the quality of players. And that’s what clubs like Arsenal can do for youngsters. And inevitably when some of the kids don’t make it, they still have had a great education that they wouldn’t have received at clubs like Millwall (no disrespect to them, of course), and while they are not good enough for Arsenal, they are still good enough for many other clubs, including Millwall. And that’s when Millwall will have a good team, Monsieur Platini, that’s when.

So another week, another two victories. What can you say about our 7-0 win over Slavia? Seventh Heaven? The Magnificent Seven? Arsenal in Theoven Nil Rout? Heh, and all this from same media that said we won’t finish above 5th just two months ago.

I think sports journalists just really don’t know what to make of this Arsenal team. At the beginning of the season, it was easy to brand us as the one “Big 4″ side that will drop out of the top 4, and make way for their other creation, Top Four Tottenham (haha, I bet Sp*rs fans would even settle for being Bottom Four Tottenham right about now). It’s a story that they could run with to sell papers, so that’s what they did.

Now, Arsenal are winning game after game, and journos have split into two camps about us. Those that say that we are the new Invincibles despite us not having gone anywhere near winning anything yet, let alone do it unbeaten. And then there are those that seeks to belittle our little run by saying we’ve only played easy teams (and then go on to say “but they can only play the teams put in front of them” so to cover their arses in case we do beat the “hard” teams). Both camps are right and wrong though.

As I posted two weeks ago, yes, we’ve had the easier fixtures compared to the other sides. Most of our games are at home, and we’ve played bottom of the table teams more often than not. But at the same time, we’ve also played back to back UEFA Cup champions Sevilla, albeit at home. And we’ve also played 3rd placed Man City, 5th placed Portsmouth and 6th placed Blackburn, but again only Blackburn away from home and we didn’t win that one (thanks a lot, Jens). Tottenham, West Ham and Steaua Bucharest away, while looking like easy games against poorly performing teams, have traditionally been hard games for us. Even Bolton is usually not a straight forward victory for us, although we never seem to lose to them at home. It’s like us versus Reading last season – we beat them twice, but the other “big” teams failed to do so. So does that make them an easy team or a hard team? They were certainly easy enough for us. This is why you can’t just say, this team is top or bottom of the table and therefore it should be a hard or easy game. The easy games are the ones you win easily, the hard games are the one that you don’t – no matter which team you are up against. All you can say is that we’ve had a more generous fixture, but the teams we have beaten so far are the same types of teams we dropped the most points to last season.

As for football from another planet, it only matters if we end up winning something at the end of it, because beautiful football and no trophies is still a failed (and ultimately, frustrating) season. To be honest, apart from the 7-0 and a few selected games, we haven’t played as good as I know we are capable of. Even last season, some of the football we played were the best I’ve seen, but the result didn’t always reflect the performance. In fact, I think we played just as well against CSKA Moscow last season at home as our 7-0 from Tuesday, and we didn’t even score a single goal in that game. We’ve always been creative, but end product has been inconsistent. This season, we’ve been very clinical without being overly creative at times which just goes to prove that the result, not the performance, is everything. So no, this is not the best Arsenal side ever, but it’s definitely more efficient than last season’s team.

Anyway as the media would say, our next two games will determine our season. Our first real tests. Games that will decide our chances for the title. Pundits have already said they will only back us to win the title if we can beat both Liverpool and Man Utd. Really? You mean if we beat all the easy teams like you say we have so far, and then beat the two hardest teams and our main title rivals, then we might have a good chance to win the league? Wow fellas, don’t stick your neck out too far. I’m going to expand on that and say that if we win all our home games and then win all of our aways games, we just *might* win the league!

Another round of boring international football is over. England are looking more and more unlikely to qualify for Euro 2008. Henry broke Platini’s goals for France record. And of course, tons of injuries for a host of players, and not just Arsenal ones.

For Arsenal, Senderos has a back problem that may rule him out for 2 weeks. Gallas was said to have suffered a set back in training for France, but did play 90 minutes for the French in midweek. Rosicky was left out of both matches for the Czech Republic and looks unlikely to start for us this weekend. And the most disconcerting news of all was what looked like a very nasty knee injury for Van Persie which may rule him out for 4 weeks to several months. Fuck!

International football sucks because it consists of teams limited by nationality and played by a bunch of people who haven’t really played together for much time. For other sports, this may be fine, but for a competitive team sport, it just takes the competitive and the team element out of it. This is why it is boring and this is also why the level of football on show is so low that you wonder if a second division club team might just be able to beat the national team. About the only thing that gives International games some excitement is the patriotic fervour that it may stir and give matches a bit of an edge, but that’s just a breeding ground for nationalism and racism (see Easter European football “fans”). And don’t even get me started on International friendlies (also known as money generating events for FIFA – and don’t get get me started on FIFA, also known as …).

Anyway, thank goodness club football is back (albeit minus the players injured during International week, such as Terry, A. Cole, Robben, Van der Vaart, Anelka, Mellberg, Nuno Gomes, Nicolas Burdisso, Van Persie, Rosicky, Senderos …).

Well Arsenal looks to stay top of the league for another week and a bit due to international (zzzzzzzz) football. A lot of Arsenal fans will feel that we’ve had a somewhat lucky start to the season, with some easy games and most of them at home. Man Utd and Liverpool fans will point out this fact too to say that we haven’t been really tested so far. I would have to say that I agree partially, but to say that we haven’t been tested is a stretch. We’ve already played the 3rd, 5th and 6th placed teams, 2 at home, 1 away. But our fixture appears to be easier than the other two team’s, I will admit. An easy start is the best, it allows you to build confidence while still warming up to the new season, and by the time the hard games come, you will be ready for them – I believe that it’s these little differences in luck that help teams win trophies, but only if the team manages to take advantage of the luck and win the hard games too.

As a stats freak, I thought I would get an Excel sheet up and to scientifically determine just how easy or how hard our fixtures are compared to the other two teams. Boring? Blame it on the international break then.

First of all, I take into account the opposition’s current league position, and find the average position of the teams each side has played. For the record (and lower is better), Arsenal’s average opposition league position is 12, Man Utd 10.78 and Liverpool 11.63. Not a huge difference to be honest, but it does support the claim that we’ve had the easiest of fixtures.

Next, I take into account the home and away status of these games, halving the opposition’s league position if our 3 teams are playing them away from home, while keeping it the same for home games. (Let’s call this “LPHA” for future reference) This produced (again, lower is better) an average of 9.88 for Arsenal, 8.44 for Man Utd and 9.38 for Liverpool. Again, we’ve had the easier fixture when home/away status is accounted for, although it’s close between us and Liverpool.

But simply playing hard teams does not a great team make – the actual result of the games is probably the most important aspect. It’s no good to play easy games and lose or draw them all (us last season), and it’s easily no good to play the hard games but not pick up 3 points. So finally, taking into account 3 points for each win, 1 points for a draw, and 0 for a loss, and then adding to these bonus points based on the opposition’s league position and home/away status (the formula is “21 – LPHA“, so playing Derby at Home will give you 21 – 20/1 = 1 bonus point, where playing Man City away will give you 21 – 3/2 = 19.5 bonus points). This produced an average of 13.88 points per game for Arsenal, 14.17 points per game for Man Utd and 13.63 points per game for Liverpool. If goal difference is then taken into account as a measure of performance (basically add “GD / num. of games” as a bonus point to the average points just calculated), then Arsenal has 15.5 points per game, Man Utd 16.68 and Liverpool all the way back at 14.88.

The table below summarises these stats:

So to summarise. Man Utd have had the harder games and have gotten the results despite their poor start. Arsenal are not too far behind in second with the easiest set of games, but more points per game than Liverpool even if you take into account the difficulty of the games. And when goal difference is accounted for, the difference between Man Utd and Arsenal is almost negligible, but Liverpool fall further behind.

But what does this all mean? Nothing really. Well, it does highlight that the difference in fixture difficulty isn’t as great as some would claim, it’s not as if Arsenal have been playing bottom of the table teams at home, while both Man Utd and Liverpool have been battling teams at the top away. Arsenal are 2 points ahead with a game in hand, and that’s probably the most important statistic right now. With Arsenal’s first “hard” fixtures coming soon (Liverpool away, Man Utd at home), the situation could be completely different by the end of these games. And of course, the most important statistic is the one that is marked “points” at the end of the season. Time will tell …

The mini-crisis over at Chelsea has me thinking about what makes a football club successful. The story that Mourinho not being able to buy the players he wanted and forced to play certain players provides a striking contrast to how things work at Arsenal, where nobody interferes with Wenger on any footballing matters.

The more I think about it, the more I think of a painting. Imagine an artist who is told to paint a masterpiece, but is told by the patron, who is not an artist at all, that he can only use certain colours, can only paint one specific subject matter and then to top it all off, can only use a certain brush stroke. If the artist was talented, then he might still paint a good painting, but the patron is not satisfied with merely a good painting – he had ordered a masterpiece. And pretty soon, artist and patron part ways.

At Arsenal, Wenger is the master painter. He alone chooses the subject matter, what colours he wants to use, the brush stroke and everything else related to the painting. His patron is happy to sit back and let the master do his work, and their reward is the ownership and enjoyment of masterpieces. However, Wenger is not simply satisfied to be ‘just’ a master painter. He wants to re-invent how paintings are made in the first place, to find new colours, new brush techniques, and while some of the earlier experimental works were not quite up to standard, you just know that a masterpiece, possibly his best yet, is to come.

The master painter has enemies too, at home and abroad. One of which wants to impose some kind of nationalistic view on how a painting should be composed, to perhaps use colours that best represent the country, rather than the best colours for the painting. Perhaps French paintings should only contain red, white and blue in equal portions, maybe only orange paintings for Dutch masters, and green ones for the Irish. The Mona Lisa shall have red hair, a white complexion while wearing a green dress. Will this advance art as we know it, or will it simply bring down the level so that even average paintings can masquerade as masterpieces.

Okay, enough with the metaphors.

An important game on the weekend. I know some will say it’s only Sunderland, and that we’ll put 3 or 4 past them. I said before Derby that the game could turn out quite differently than what was expected, but I was wrong. But I just don’t think Sunderland will be easy to beat, not with Roy Keane as their manager. I’ll settle for a narrow win, thank you very much. The Mancs and Red Scousers, hopefully, will drop more points before we play them, and we will hopefully pick up 6 points before then too. We need to build up a big enough buffer for when we do drop points – and December in particular looks very tricky.

So the kids have done it again. And by kids, I mean the slightly younger kids than the usual kids we call the first team. Whenever we get a Premiership team in the League Cup, I always fear that our kids will get knocked out. But they never do, and it’s win after win. Our last five League Cup opponents were Everton (away), Liverpool (away), Tottenham (home and away), Chelsea (final) and now Newcastle (home) … 4 wins (one was in extra time though), 1 draw (2-0 and they fucked it up … haha) and losing to a near full strength Chelsea in the final is a great record against these strong teams, League Cup or otherwise.

The team that played against a pretty much full strength Newcastle (who are sitting 5th in the table, 3rd if us, Liverpool and them all win our games in hand) contained not one single player that could be considered part of our current first choice 11. Eboue, Eduardo, Bendtner, Senderos, Denilson and Walcott and maybe even Diarra might fight their way into the first 11, but in all likelihood, they will be lucky to just get a seat on the bench. The media often say we have no chance of winning the title because we lack squad depth, but that’s only because they don’t know our kids like we do. They may not be full internationals, or may not have attracted million dollar fees, but that doesn’t mean they are not good enough. We have a chance to win the title, maybe not the favourites to do so, but that will suit us even more.

The media then go on to say the Mancs will win the title easily because of their squad depth (two weeks ago they said it was Liverpool, again for the same reason), and then this happens. By my estimates, more than 50 million dollar worth of talent was on show at the end of the game against Coventry (Nani, Anderson and Carrick), and what did they have to show for it? Is this the squad depth that the media was talking about?

This actually got me quite curious, so I drew up this table comparing squads between us, Mancs and Liverpool. The squad list comes from Soccerbase.com, I believe they only include players that have had first team experience (including pre-season friendlies) – they missed a few obvious Arsenal players like Nacer Barazite (who scored against in our first pre-season game) and reserve team captain Havard Nordtveit. It shows the first XI, the bench, “reserves 1″ consisting of players that most people have actually heard of and have made some impact on the first team (first team squad players), and then “reserves 2″ consisting of players that most fans of other teams not know about, mainly because they haven’t played in first team games (League Cup and pre-season apart).

Liverpool seems to have the strongest squad, and they will need it when Benitez rotates his squad every twenty minutes. They have the likes of Babel, Kewell and Sissoko not even making the already quite strong bench. I still think their starting XI lacks class in certain areas though, and our kids have shown that they can beat their “B” team quite comfortably. But if you compare Man Utd to us, it seems that players not in their first XI + bench aren’t really all that good. Okay, they have good players in Nani and Anderson (but worth the price paid for them?), and Ben Foster is a good keeper, but while Fletcher, O’Shea and Silvestre have experience, they are hardly going to win games for you. That’s why the team they assembled could not beat Conventry, and the team we assembled can beat Newcastle. And even on our “reserves 2″ list, we have the likes of Fran Merida, Carlos Velas and Nacer Barazite, and as Arsene pointed out recently, our new reserve captain Havard Nordtveit is quite a player too.

So while we could still use a few more players, wingers in particular, I don’t think squad depth will be much of an issue for us unless we have 8 or more of the first team out due to injuries (we currently have 4 out injured, so it’s not so far fetched), and even then, we’ll just play some of the players that started against Newcastle and they should be alright for a game or two.

As expected, the financial results for the year ending 31st May 2007 has been released. As expected, our turnover is through the roof (up 46%), making us the richest club in Britain. Some may argue that turnover does not equal profit, which is true, but that’s how football club wealth is measured by accountancy firms such as Deloitte, so who are we to argue.

Our cash reserves are at a massive £73.9m, and Keith Edelman has said that if Wenger wanted to spend it all, he could (but we all know he won’t).

Other pieces of interests include details of our stadium loan (which Edelman and Fiszman had already covered in the interview with Rick B, see yesterday’s blog post), which is at a low interest rate of 5.3%. That’s much less than what you would be paying for a typical home loan in the UK or here in Australia (I’m paying 7.6%!). Put this in contract with the American-led takeover at Manchester United, and their staggering £100m annual interest payments with interests as high as 15% for parts of their debt – and they don’t even have a new money generating stadium to show for it.

The club is doing well on and off the pitch (long may it continue, especially on the pitch), and the club is in the hands of some very good people who love Arsenal, but also know that it needs to be run as a business (and they have the expertise to do so). We don’t need a billionaire to “come and save us” under the guise of being a good guy, but really is out to get his hands on the profits we will be generating soon (Highbury Square redevelopment is set to earn us more than £100m in 2009, with additional money from property developments and land sales to come soon as well).

When two other clubs in London imploding due to interference from owner and executives, another near imploding due to debt up in Manchester, and another who are still yet to go through the pain of building a new stadium, just be glad that the board at Arsenal are doing a fantastic job managing the finances while staying out of Arsene’s way and letting him build his best team yet.

Over at Bigsoccer, the moderator of their Arsenal forums, Rick B, has posted a very interesting interview with Arsenal MD Keith Edelman and major Arsenal shareholder Danny Fiszman.

A couple of pieces of very interesting info is in the interview (please use the link above and read the whole thing, my summary doesn’t do it justice). A summary:

• A hostile takeover will never succeed
• An explanation of what a blocking stake is and how it’s basically completely useless for Usmanov to have one
• The board is currently writing a new agreement that extends the current “lock-down” agreement by a further 12 months
• The stadium loan situation is discussed, and our low interest rate compared to the Manc’s £80m (!) per year interest payments
• Who decides on player purchases at Arsenal
• Danny reveals two very interesting quotes from Arsene, one involving our plan to buy Eto’o
• And some other interesting tidbits …

A very interesting interview, and a must read. Kudos to Rick B for taking the time to do the interview and asking the questions us fans have all been wanting to ask (as opposed to the crap questions sport journalists tend to ask).