Hi, good morning, how are you?
I woke up, made coffee, gave Lana some pats on her head as she sleepily looked at me from her very fluffy bed, and came upstairs to my office. I checked the Arsenal news, as I always do (not much going on to be honest), and resisted the temptation to check my phone. Or, as I like to call it, my early-morning-existential-dread-device.
There’s nothing quite like the news headlines first thing in the morning to get your day off to a cheery start. I don’t think this is necessarily an original thought, but I often wonder how society has been, or will continue to be, altered by being blasted with LOOOOOK AT ALL THIS TERRIBLE SHIT when you open your phone, and then on social media a glut of people/bots insisting it’s not terrible at all and actually if you’re not on board with the terrible shit you’re the one that’s terrible.
Which is why I have reduced social media intake to an absolute minimum. It is a requirement of the job, to an extent, and I can’t lie and say that there aren’t still positive interactions on my feeds, but my goodness, more and more it feels we let a genie out of the bottle there, and the genie was evil and cancerous. Anyway, I just want you to know I appreciate you being here this morning and every morning, and that despite the wave of terrible that seems to accompany every new day, there are good people out there who want to do good things and make the world better. None of them own social media platforms though.
Nevertheless, here’s an example of a post that I thought was good. I mean, it’s just some information, but I think it’s pertinent to what we’re all here for: the Arsenal.
We talk a lot about the schedule being hectic, and here’s a great example of it. That’s an average of a game every 3.5 days, or every 84 hours, with 65% of them on the road. There has been some room for rotation, but it’s still a lot, and the schedule basically boils down to play, recover, prepare briefly, play again, with some travel built in. To be completely fair, we haven’t had any massive trips, Italy and Germany as far as we went in Europe, with Mansfield Leeds about the longest trip in England, but being away from home is just another layer to add to the pressures of each fixture.
If things start to feel a bit predictable at this point of the season, the schedule (along with accumulated fatigue for some players), is a big part of that. There is no time to try and do anything new tactically, and the one time we did – when we trained with a back three for 10 minutes according to Mikel Arteta – it wasn’t necessarily that successful. Plus, there’s some inherent risk in that anyway. I don’t think Arsenal have been the most exciting team to watch this season, but we remain very hard to beat and well capable of grinding out results.
At this stage, there are no points for artistic merit, and it feels very much a case of ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and who gives a fish’s tit what anyone else says about us once we keep winning?’. Perhaps though, with the balance of home v away tilting back towards us in a more favourable way, we can benefit from that. Mikel Arteta talks often about how much the team needs the fans, particularly inside the stadium, and while I’m much more of the opinion the supporters react to what’s happening on the pitch, I’m sure he’s going to look for the crowd to try and help lift the team over the next few weeks.
We’re heading towards the final straight here, and obviously it’s down to the players to perform and the manager to prepare his team in the best way possible, but maybe those legs don’t feel quite as tired with the weight of the home fans providing that bit of a push from the stands. I realise it’s a kind of utopian ideal to an extent, and it’s not to demand anything of anyone, just to understand how the dynamics of the schedule might give us that bit extra in games that you don’t quite get when you’re outnumbered, so to speak.
Let’s see.
For a bit of extra reading this morning, here’s Tim on Max Dowman. Later on, we’ll be looking ahead to Everton with a preview podcast on Patreon, and we’ll bring you all the stories from Mikel Arteta’s press conference over on Arseblog News.
For now, take care out there, mind yourselves. Catch you later.