It’s all about confidence

Form is temporary, class is permanent, as the old mantra goes. Arsene Wenger more or less confirmed yesterday that this is largely down to confidence, as he spoke of Andrey Arshavin.

The Russian wing wizard had started to look like a Sunday League player for Arsenal over the winter period, but has slowly found form again, which will be helped massively by his goal against Barcelona, according to the boss.

“He was troubled by confidence problems for a while but he is now back and that goal against Barcelona helped him,” he said. 

“He is a top-level player who lives on success and when it doesn’t go for you for a while you question ‘what am I not doing right and why?’

“Nobody is immune to that. I have seen so many big players – and believe me Andrey is one of them – and they all go through periods like that. It is part of being a human being.”

If he’s right, it will indeed be great to have Arshavin back. His undoubted class is there, and we will be needing that for the rest of the season, with so many games coming up and the injuries starting to gather.

The bad news yesterday was that Robin van Persie and Laurent Koscielny, two key players at opposite ends of the pitch, will miss the Stoke game through injury and possibly the Carling Cup final.

With Marounane Chamakh and Sebastien Squillaci going through their own confidence crises at the moment, I worry about how that might affect our chance to end our trophy drought this Sunday. It would be tragic to lose the game from a Squillaci blunder or some missed sitters from Chamakh and think how different it could have been with our first choice in there; something that’s left us wanting for many years now.

There’s no doubt Chamakh is in need of his own ‘Barcelona moment’, and thankfully he has tonight against Stoke to get it. As well as the obvious need for three points, a goal for the Moroccan would be a huge boost. He’s shown what he can do when in form, so it’s just a case of finding it again. He just needs a little something to go his way to give him that much-needed confidence.

Normally this would be the point where I’d question the mental strength of our players, as these confidence issues seem to happen to us more than other teams, but that’s not really true is it? After all, look at Chelsea this season, and Torres and Drogba in particular. It happens to the best of us, as Wenger will concur.

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Mark Brus

I'm 23-years-old and currently living in Bristol, studying to be a journalist. I've been hooked on Arsenal since I was about 10, and as much as I sometimes wish I could stop, I can't give them up. Favourite player of all time would have to be Patrick Vieira for the sheer passion with which he played the game.

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