Welcome to Monday.
Arsenal are back on familiar ground and will get down to the final two weeks (just under) of preparation for the new season. There are games this week against Villarreal and Athletic Bilbao, and these ones will be a bit more instructive in terms of performance than the ones in Singapore and Hong Kong where the conditions played a big part.
There are a few things I’m curious to see this week, starting with:
Viktor Gyokeres
In his article in The Athletic, James talked about how Arsenal understand the need to adapt to the Swedish striker’s style. It goes both ways, of course, but if you’ve bought a player who has scored nearly 100 goals in two seasons playing in a particular way, you have to think those qualities are what you’re going to lean into. It’d be a bit mad to assimilate him entirely into our style, and then hope to get the same kind of output.
What’s most interesting about this is the fact I think Arsenal need some kind of a change anyway. I know there are reasons why we became a bit staid and predictable last season, but even with a clean bill of health, there are games and game-states we struggle with. You can’t stand still in the Premier League, so the onus was always going to be on Mikel Arteta to find new ways to make life difficult for the opposition.
Gyokeres demands that. If we want a player to run in behind and tuck the ball away, as he did so often for Sporting, we need to move the ball more quickly from deep areas. I think the two Martins – Zubimendi and Odegaard – could be key to this. It might also be a case that we lean into our defensive strength a bit to allow the opposition a bit more territory, because if we dominate possession, there are teams who will simply sit back, stay organised, and frustrate us again.
There’s a balance, of course. Arteta loves control, and I can understand why. He seems a bit risk averse at times, and again I get that. But the most exciting football we played under him came when things were a little more free-flowing and less prescribed, and I really think we need to find a way to rediscover some of that. If your major attacking signing of the summer needs you to let the reins go a little bit, that’s what you have to do.
Noni Madueke
The 23 year old wasn’t on the tour after taking some much needed holidays, and I’m very interested to see him this week. There’s clearly an important role for him to play in tandem with Bukayo Saka, taking some of the burden away from a player who suffered a severe hamstring injury last season, and he’s spent most of his career on the right-hand side. However, I do wonder if there’s scope for him to play on the other side a bit more. If we talk about Arsenal doing things differently, a left-footed winger on the left-hand side is certainly that.
We play right-footed Gabriel Martinelli or Leandro Trossard on the left, and left-footed Saka on the right. The tendency to come in on your favoured foot can, at times, play a part in the pitch becoming narrow – not least in games when we’re facing the dreaded low block. So, a player who can go on the outside effectively can help you stretch things. Madueke loves to dribble and take players on, and in the absence of an overlapping full-back on that side, he could well be a different weapon at the manager’s disposal.
Speaking of which…
Left-back
When Oleksandr Zinchenko arrived at Arsenal and started to play the ‘inverted’ role, it really did have a massive impact. That first season when we challenged for the title, his positioning and quality on the ball elevated the team. The opposition had no idea where he was going to pop up and what he was going to do. In time though, they got to grips with it, and him, and his star waned.
In Myles Lewis-Skelly we have a young man who is comfortable in the same areas of the pitch because he grew up playing in midfield. The role, however, remains pretty much the same. It can still be effective, and we’ve seen Myles have a big impact in many games, but I do wonder whether or not it’s something that requires a little tweak going into the new season. If we know what that player is asked to do, and how, you can be quite sure the opposition do too.
The arrival of Zubimendi may play a part here. He’s someone who can operate in those tight midfield areas without a lot of support, so does that give Lewis-Skelly and/or Riccardo Calafiori the ability to push into areas the opposition don’t expect? Arteta seems pretty wedded to this, but we saw a few times last season there’s occasionally a vulnerability, and when the team you’re playing start to press that as a potential weakness, you have to think about ways to offset that. This isn’t a question about the ability of the players, by the way, specifically the position and the way the manager asks it to be played.
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Right, I’ll leave it there for this morning, but we will an Arsecast Extra for you in a little while. We’ve already put out the call for questions on BlueSky @gunnerblog.bsky.social and @arseblog.com with the hashtag #arsecastextra – or if you’re an Arseblog Member on Patreon, leave your question in the #arsecast-extra-questions channel on our Discord server.
Pod should be out around noon. Until then, have a good one.
