I’m sure many of you have seen the film “Mike Bassett England Manager”, the film about an antiquated stereotype of an English football manager, with little to no tactical nous, some say based on Sam Allardyce. The only difference between Mike and Sam, you could argue, is that Mike would openly know the best betting offers around! The most famous of scenes is when facing heightened pressure from the media and football fans alike, for his poor tactics and general ineptitude, he turns up to the press conference and tells them his formation will be 4 – 4 f##king two.
The reason I bring this up is the recent change in formation at Arsenal to 3-4-3 Initially it had many exclaiming Arsene Wenger had changed, that he was willing to change with the times etc. etc. When Arsenal beat Manchester City in the FA cup semi final, some even said he had outsmarted the famous tactician Pep Guardiola.
Had Wenger outsmarted Guardiola? Is Wenger a tactical genius now? Well no. Sadly Arsene Wenger exposed his real reasons for changing formation. It’s not that he wanted to outsmart Pep at the semi final, or even that he wants to get with the current trend of using a three at the back formation. He explained at a recent press conference, the reason he chose the formation is because Arsenal have been poor recently in defence so he thought if had three centre backs instead of two, it would make them better. Yes, that’s right, his idea was simply if he had more defenders then hopefully Arsenal wouldn’t concede, no amazing revelations about it suiting the team better or even about saying it would copy other rivals in the league.
As I started from the outset, speaking about antiquated, tactically inept managers, the idea that a formation is the be all and end all of tactics, is such a dated idea. Wenger’s idea that simply having more defenders without any extra training to working on shape, defence training or pressing etc. is not only embarrassing but exposes one of the main reasons why players like Mesut Ozil and Granit Xhaka play vastly better for their countries with better tactical training than for Arsenal.
Sadly it all was exposed versus Tottenham in the North London derby this Sunday, as they picked apart the fragile looking tactics Wenger had given his team. Time and again Gabriel would be found out of position on the wing closing a Spurs player down, while Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain randomly ended up more centrally where Gabriel should have been at centre back. There were lots more of this kind of thing going on littered all over the pitch for Arsenal, who were systematically picked apart by a far better trained and fitter team.
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