"IN THE LAND OF THE BLIND THE ONE-EYED MAN IS KING"
Tom Waits- "Singapore"
Ha, I finally found a way to fit in a reference to the great man.
A lot of myths have been propagated about Arsenal, some of them encouraged by the manager himself. Big games now seem to function only to strip these myths down to some harsh truths. Not good enough, boys.
There is so much to be said here, about the game and about the wider context of things. Where to start but with the obvious, yawning gulf between the two sides. Barca are achingly superior in every nuance of the game. Arsenal had an attack straight from kick-off that came to nothing; for the ensuing twenty minutes, they endured the most frighteningly one-sided spell that I have seen at any level of football. It could and should have been over. Almunia, to be fair, made some great saves. But it was, already, humiliating.
After that, Arsenal mustered the odd decent forage forward, and Barca were not quite so rampant, but still very superior. Their possession play was great, but Arsenal miserably failed to exert pressure. In contrast, the home team were slow and sloppy on the rare occasions they got it, and wilted in the face of Barca's pressing high up the pitch. Arshavin went off injured. Gallas went off injured. Fabregas was harshly booked, and thus suspended for the second leg. It was as comically disastrous a first 45 minutes as has ever finished goalless.
How did Arsenal react to getting out of jail? They started the second period by immediately conceding a goal so simple you'd barely see it in a testimonial game. Long chip over the top, amateur offside trap breached, emergency centre-back Song in no-man's land, Almunia tottering out to join him, Ibrahimovic, profligate to that point, accepts the opportunity to lob the clown. It was such a ludicrous goal to concede, but nothing really surprises me with this team anymore.
For another fifteen minutes or so, the same old pattern continued, and Ibrahimovic plundered a quite similar second, this time a finish as powerful as his first was elegant. Before that, Bendtner had crashed a header at Valdes after our first decent move. But now it seemed a mere matter of how many, how humiliating.
Barca's tempo dropped somewhat, and the pace of Walcott, sprung from the bench in a last desperate roll of the dice, worried Maxwell on the left of their defence. From Bendtner's slide rule pass, the player I have ceaselessly maligned passed the ball under the body of Valdes, and the scoreline had an element of respectability that had been absent in the general balance of play. Barca struggled to regain their impetus, the crowd got interested again, but Arsenal struggled to create much until Fabregas engineered a penalty, and a terribly harsh red card for Puyol, by kicking the defender's legs from Bendtner's cushioned header. The skipper, clearly unfit and pretty much anonymous to that point (more of which later), buried the penalty, but injured himself in the act. For the remaining few minutes, he hobbled around ineffectively, but was not taken off, despite Barca also being down to ten. This merely added to the surrealism of a game that was as ridiculous as it was sublime.
2-2 it finished, with the blows of injuries to Fabregas, Gallas and Arshavin apparently softened by the loss of both Barca's first-choice centre-halves to suspension ahead of the return. Still, I find it hard to rustle up genuine optimism for the game at what Bill O'Herlihy calls the "New Camp".
On the surface, it seems a rousing comeback, one that should engender optimism for what remains of the tie. But there was just far too much evidence suggesting that Barcelona will finish us off next time around. Before the game, in spite of my general pessimism, I thought that Arsenal playing at a tempo could worry Barcelona. Herein lies the most disconcerting conclusion. Barca are superior not just in possession, but also in the supposedly "English" traits. Their style has the same idealistic bent, but their system is also tactically astute. We could not live with their pressing, or match it when they had the ball. I remember how Graeme Souness peddled some vaguely xenophobic poo about how foreigner teams cannot deal with the pace at which the best English sides play, after Liverpool hammered Real Madrid last season. He needs to watch this game back.
Barca moved the ball so much more quickly and effectively. It really made a mockery of any notion of a great similarilty between the two sides. That idea is clearly mere rhetoric, one of those Arsenal myths. We are not on Barca's level, or even close, it is just a distant goal to which we aspire. And I know, what other way could it be, with the financial constraints Arsenal are run under. But we are underdogs unable to play underdog football. Wenger, in his football philosophy, does not have a pragmatic bone in his body. No tactical ideas to counter the primacy of a patently superior team. With every big game, his rallying cries are exposed as hollow, naive.
Another appalling element, for the first half particularly- desire. The team who have won everything were first to every ball. Their forwards more willing to track back. The team who have won nothing looked lethargic; some were unfit, some looked unforgivably disinterested- did they freeze? Again we arrive at the same old question about character that hangs over this side.
It is an interesting topic, because on the face of it, the obvious thing to say after recovering a two-goal deficit in a game of such magnitude is that it shows a steely mental fortitude, an unwillingness to lie down. And that is true to some extent, and perhaps something that I would have clung to, only for John Giles producing one of the post-game nuggets of wisdom that he is still capable of. REAL teams built on character start at their business from the first whistle, get on the ball, impose themselves. Arsenal failed to do that, as they have done in all the marquee fixtures this season. Barcelona did it, it was a masterclass for about an hour. Then, it seemed they had the tie done and dusted, and they got slack. It takes a great team for complacency to be their greatest enemy. At that point, as Gilesy said, with the game apparently over, suddenly Arsenal want to play. They lacked the balls, the moral courage, to do it from the start. In any case, it still took a dubious penalty to snatch an undeserved draw. We shouldn't forget how limp Arsenal were for most of the game, and that it should have been an embarrassment in scoreline aswell.
What does it say about the team that they again misfire when it matters? Do the players let the boss down? Maybe, to a point, but they are HIS players, a team he has built, and a team that he claims to have faith in, so he is far from blameless. And what of his continued follies? This ineffective ploy of playing Fabregas off the striker in the biggest games. All it serves to do is rob the Spaniard and his team of his ability to dictate. Did he expect Song and the abysmal Diaby to shape the game from central areas? Really? Because Fabregas never seemed in a position to do it, and this is a familiar sight. Quite apart from the fact that he was clearly in no fit state to play, and may now miss the World Cup because nobody at Arsenal has the balls to tell him he shouldn't start a game. The injuries to Gallas and Arshavin didn't help either, but clearly, Wenger rushed players back, betraying his lack of trust in a squad he constantly professes his supposed faith in. What about the cover at centre-back being so meagre that we had to move Song there, a move that contributed to confusion and the concession of two soft goals? Wenger invites this kind of disaster.
Again, I understand that we have no right to expect to beat Barcelona. They are as good a team as I've seen in many a year. But as I said, if we are underdogs, we cannot afford to go in without a plan. The way Arsenal played suggested that they'd expected Barca to come and sit back. As if they'd never seen them play before. Wenger even said afterwards that ahead of the second leg we need to "study how to win the ball". Seriously? I've never heard an intelligent man say something so stupid. Barcelona thrive on possession, and NOW we think about how to combat that? If we are not as good as a team, let's admit it, and introduce some element of pragmatism, of tactical nous. You can go on and on about our pretty football, but it gets us raped against the best teams, over and over, trying to play that football. It's been found out. Arsenal are not as good as they think they are. Fair enough, the pass and move is an effective weapon against the dregs of the Premiership, but otherwise, our brand is a joke. A piss-poor pastiche of what Barcelona do. Sir Alex Ferguson is probably the best manager ever, and loves attacking football, but he never goes into a big match without a plan. We go in every time begging for our pants to be pulled down. What's so entertaining about that?
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