Talking Tactics: Does Mertesacker’s Decline Lead to Arsenal’s Rise?
by Jane Cavendish (@jcav90)
Per Mertesacker was having a good World Cup. He played in all the group games and then the first knockout game against Algeria. He played well and Germany were solid, conceding only three goals in just under four hundred minutes played in the tournament.
But then Joachim Löw did something unusual, something brave. He dropped his most experienced defender for the quarter-final. Instead, he paired the mobile Boateng with the equally quick Hummels and the team never looked back, going on, as we all know, to win the World Cup. Who can forget the semi-final against Brazil? Seven goals in a world cup semi-final! Pity poor old BFG for missing out. Germany were so in control of the game that they hardly needed to defend, so he could have been out there in his pipe and slippers enjoying the crowning achievement of a brilliant international career. It would have been fully deserved too, as one of the best centre-backs of his type in world football: strong, commanding, positionally superb and a good organiser.
But of course, it’s not quite as simple as that. It was by dropping the dependable Mertesacker that Löw was able to adopt the much more aggressive tactic of holding a high line and overwhelming Brazil in the middle of the field. With the pace of Hummels and Boateng, the German defence played on the halfway line, compressing the play into a space only 30m deep. The two powerful midfield pivots, Schweinsteiger and, especially, Khedira had much shorter distances to cover to press the Brazilian midfield and could do so facing forward, which they’re better at doing, rather than having to turn to track runners behind.
Football tactics are always in a state of flux. They evolve as a reaction against the prevailing orthodoxy, from Chapman’s W-M formation to the fixation with possession that Barcelona and Spain have popularised over the last decade. When tika-taka itself became the new orthodoxy it was inevitable that new ways of thinking would come along to counteract it. Löw’s emphasis was on transitions high up the pitch; stealing the ball by pressing the man in possession and then attacking when already close to the opposition goal so that they have less time to set their defence. It worked. Goodness, how it worked.
The counter-attack has long been one of the most powerful weapons in football. We Arsenal fans know that better than anyone else. Whenever the visiting opposition won a corner during our Invincibles period, the whole of Highbury leaned forward on the edge of their seats expecting Henry, Bergkamp, Pires, et al to fly up the length of the pitch and score for us. In more recent years, the boot has been on the other foot and whenever we coughed up possession on the edge of the opposition penalty box, everyone at the Emirates would dive down behind the chair in front of them, peeking over the top, fingers over eyes, barely able to watch as Clichy, Eboue, Denilson, et al waved goodbye to their rapidly disappearing opponents thundering towards our goal.
There are two different ways to counter-attack. You can either sit deep and then when you win possession, spring forward at pace. Or alternatively, you press high, win the ball close to the opposing goal and go from there. They system you play will depend on the type of players you have available to you, but all else being equal, I have a feeling that the top coaches prefer the more efficient option of pressing high.
At Arsenal, you’d have thought by now we’d have nurtured a good blend of players with the ability to sit deep and spring forward at pace. From March 2013 onwards, we proved that we could defend well by defending deep and with Theo, the Ox and Sanchez there should be more than enough pace to complement the quick thinking and accurate one-touch distribution that Ozil provides. It should have been a perfect combination. And yet it hasn’t worked. When we’ve had opportunities we’ve not been clinical enough, often enough. Players don’t switch on quickly, changing their mindset from “where am I meant to be defensively?” to, when we win the ball, “where can I run/pass to enable a shooting opportunity in the next ten seconds?” Too often we’ve been less than the sum of our parts because players don’t show enough urgency or make wrong decisions; passing too early when they should carry the ball forward or running up blind alleys when they should release quickly.
What’s worse is that this season we have seen the return of old frailties against opposition counter attacks. Away at Dortmund, away at Swansea and, criminally, at home to Man Utd our midfield has been guilty of terrible naivite. With play stretched and large distances between defensive and forward lines, our midfield has just swanned forward leaving huge holes for the opposition to exploit. It’s at this point I ought also to mention the goals we conceded against Monaco at the Emirates but strangely, the entire evening seems to have been wiped from my memory; so I will leave it to you, dear Reader, to decide whether this was also a factor in our defeat.
It was very telling, I thought, that four days later Gabriel and Koscielny started a league game together for the first time. Gabriel looks quick, very quick. Almost as quick as Koscielny. Who, in turn, is almost as quick as Kieran Gibbs. Who, in turn, is almost as quick as Bellerin. Have we ever in our club’s long history played with a quicker back four as we did that day? It was a sea-change in tactics from Wenger as our back line played most of the game on the halfway line, much as the German defence played in the semi-final in Brazil. Wenger, as you may recall, ditched playing with a high line back in early 2013 after several disasters culminating with the embarrassment at the Lane. Mertesacker never had the pace to recover if things went wrong and Vermaelen…. well, the less said about him the better.
The change worked for a while. We had a much better defensive record with Mertesacker and Koscielny camped on the edge of our box but what was the opportunity cost of adopting this safer, lower risk strategy? The emergence of Coquelin is another reason why Wenger might be reconsidering a return to a high line. He’s exactly the sort of midfield aggressor who thrives in pressing further forward. Pair him with someone like Schneiderlin and Wenger will have the same sort of midfield shape that Germany adopted to inflict such pain on Brazil. It will suit Ozil down to the ground, of course, as he’s already shown in the World Cup and this will be a crucial consideration for whatever strategy we adopt because this sumptuous footballer is the mainspring of our offensive play. It will also minimise Giroud’s most obvious weakness, his lack of pace, as he won’t be expected to go on those long 50m sprints when we counter from deep.
We’ve already seen one other important tactical concession from Wenger this season. Our victory at the Etihad was remarkable because he finally dropped his longstanding aversion to playing without the ball. In other words, dominating possession was no longer his only means of winning a football game. Philippe Auclair reports that after the F.A. Cup final victory over Man Utd in 2005, Wenger told him he was so disgusted with the way the team achieved victory that day that he would never again abandon his principles of playing progressive, beautiful football. In practice, this has meant trying to dominate possession, so when we went to the Etihad and came away not only with a win but also the lowest possession figure in a game that we’ve had in over a decade it was as shocking as it was gratifying. Now, imagine this team playing with a high line, content to let the opposition have the ball in their half, but squeezing the space diligently and switched on for those transitional moments of opportunity. It’s an enticing prospect.
All this is very unfair on poor old Mertesacker. He’s done nothing wrong and he’s still one of my favourite Arsenal players. He’s brilliant at what he does but time and again, I come back to the old adage, “the best team of eleven is not necessarily the same as the team of your best eleven players”. A top level team is a living organism, each constituent part having subtle yet far-reaching effects on the others and on the whole.
There is a really very good Arsenal team somewhere in this current setup just waiting to get out. All they need is to find their synergy to become more than the sum of their parts. Perhaps a high line will give our forwards that extra fluency on the transition and perhaps it will rid our midfield of their naivite in emptying out the middle of the pitch so recklessly. Perhaps I’m an incurable optimist but I am very excited to see how it transpires: perhaps we could be on the cusp of another of Wenger’s great sides. If he sees the same result from dropping Metersacker as Löw did then we are in for an exciting ride.
Jane Cavendish (@jcav90)
