What the Dickens?!
I thought I would be able to follow the team in person, or at least be in the same country, for most of the season. I wasn't that naive to think it would be a totally fun ride. There would be jolly times, high jinks, embarrassing and humiliating episodes, escapes by the skin of our teeth, white-knuckle moments.. Turns out I couldn't even finish the ride when Covid-19 happened.
Such is life. We make plans, have some expectations that we can fulfill some of them, and life intervenes. I've been able to make some dreams come true by attending more than a few games, enjoy some of them, and share some of them with friends and family. But there have been some low points that go beyond just losing games or managers. And this rollercoaster ride has been the dominant theme this season.
This post was originally titled "Unbeaten this decade!". Talk about tempting fate. As it happened, we lost even before I could post this - to Olympiakos. More on that game and other significant moments on this tumultuous journey will be shared in later posts.
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Early 2020
Quite a remarkable turnaround given the chaotic last days of Emery.
We are the only team in the major European leagues to be unbeaten so far this year. That achievement was 'earned' last week as Liverpool lost in the Champions League. Small consolation given we are still 9th in the league as of today (24 Feb) but in another remarkable statistic (for us anyway), we have 3 wins in a week! Heady days as we finally learn how to turn draws into wins. Yesterday's win against Everton possibly being the first evidence of this new phenomenon. Conceding an early goal, but coming back to win 3-2 whereas we would probably have drawn or lost this under Emery.
How does this happen? How do we take the same group that underperformed so badly before, and turn them into a winning team? Not that we are the finished article by any means of course but it is remarkable, and a stunning rebuke to those who doubted Arteta simply for no other reason than his lack of managerial experience.
What does experience do? In Emery's case, it became an albatross. He would not, or could not, change his ways. The constant tinkering, but in a strange way, a bias towards certain players that played whether on form or not. And contrast this with how he froze out some who did not agree with him. So he turned out to be a real enigma, not one thing or the other. Was he this master tactician, who would be able to seemingly find a solution to any opponent, focusing on negating their strengths? Well his reputation seemed to suggest this was so - surely four Europa League titles was no accident - the results this season said otherwise. Some suggested he was a disciplinarian, and dropping Ozil was evidence of that (?). But disciplinarians are typically authoritarian figures who won't back off from the limelight, and the way he handled (I use the term very loosely) the Xhaka (and captaincy) situation suggested he was not in control, and worse, that he was out of his depth.
So experience is sort of that "fighting the last war" mentality. It's great as long as it continues to work (and sometimes even when it doesn't, but you are still sort of succeeding, by accident) but there needs to be a great deal of introspection and honesty if things start heading south. But the tendency when experience is the dominant perspective, is to double down. "It will work, just give it time... if I just make some minor adjustments...if our luck turns..."
This is not to undervalue experience, but to know and understand what it is, and what it is not.
We are the only team in the major European leagues to be unbeaten so far this year. That achievement was 'earned' last week as Liverpool lost in the Champions League. Small consolation given we are still 9th in the league as of today (24 Feb) but in another remarkable statistic (for us anyway), we have 3 wins in a week! Heady days as we finally learn how to turn draws into wins. Yesterday's win against Everton possibly being the first evidence of this new phenomenon. Conceding an early goal, but coming back to win 3-2 whereas we would probably have drawn or lost this under Emery.
How does this happen? How do we take the same group that underperformed so badly before, and turn them into a winning team? Not that we are the finished article by any means of course but it is remarkable, and a stunning rebuke to those who doubted Arteta simply for no other reason than his lack of managerial experience.
What does experience do? In Emery's case, it became an albatross. He would not, or could not, change his ways. The constant tinkering, but in a strange way, a bias towards certain players that played whether on form or not. And contrast this with how he froze out some who did not agree with him. So he turned out to be a real enigma, not one thing or the other. Was he this master tactician, who would be able to seemingly find a solution to any opponent, focusing on negating their strengths? Well his reputation seemed to suggest this was so - surely four Europa League titles was no accident - the results this season said otherwise. Some suggested he was a disciplinarian, and dropping Ozil was evidence of that (?). But disciplinarians are typically authoritarian figures who won't back off from the limelight, and the way he handled (I use the term very loosely) the Xhaka (and captaincy) situation suggested he was not in control, and worse, that he was out of his depth.
So experience is sort of that "fighting the last war" mentality. It's great as long as it continues to work (and sometimes even when it doesn't, but you are still sort of succeeding, by accident) but there needs to be a great deal of introspection and honesty if things start heading south. But the tendency when experience is the dominant perspective, is to double down. "It will work, just give it time... if I just make some minor adjustments...if our luck turns..."
This is not to undervalue experience, but to know and understand what it is, and what it is not.
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