Good to see Olof Mellberg again. It's been a while.
In case you hadn't guessed, I am watching Arsenal vs. Olympiokos on DVR as I write this column. I figured I'd better watch because I need to catch up on all the midweek excitement that I started missing out on yesterday while I was on the road for work. Jeremy wrote about the drama at Manchester City and we've started to see stories elsewhere on topics related to the quality of Manchester United minus Wayne Rooney after their second consecutive draw to an inferior opponent.
The story line coming out of Arsenal seems likely to be the effectiveness of the unusual line-up that Wenger trotted out for the home tie with the Greek side. If we didn't know Wenger better we'd guess that a line-up featuring Chamakh, Ox, Santos, Rosicky, and Frimpong would be one that would feature in the Carling Cup or the earlier stages of the FA Cup, not the Champions League group stage after dropping 2 points late in their opener in Germany. Now, we DO know Wenger and for that reason we can be reasonably assured that his Carling Cup team will be significantly younger than this one.
[Match Update] The returns are positive early as I'm only two paragraphs in and the Ox made a nice move across the box and finished with aplomb. [/Match Update]
The topic of The Ox brings me to another Arsenal related topic that underscores a point I made a few weeks back about how difficult and/or unusual it is for innovators like Wenger to be able to repeat the magic a second or third time once his rivals have caught up or surpassed the initial innovations that made him special in the first place.
Wenger's real trick was identifying undervalued "properties" and those opportunities generally came from one or two places - players like Vieira or Henry who were under-performing on the benches of big clubs elsewhere and players from lower profile countries or leagues. That second group of players tended to come from places like West Africa that most clubs hadn't yet realized was a hotbed of emerging talent. In the supply and demand-driven world of transfer economics, the relative lack of suitors meant low prices.
[Match Update] Nice ball in from Santos for a streaking ChamWow and then an even better follow-up for Arsenal's second goal. That guy would be a fantasy force and a line-up fixture if he weren't, you know, forced to defend. If Arsenal played with a true left midfielder in the Ashley Young/Stuart Downing mold, I'd advocate for Santos to be that guy and all the better since he's listed (without irony apparently) as a defender. As I was finishing this mini-update off ChamWow got a great opportunity and couldn't finish, what happened to him? [/Match Update]
A funny thing happened on the way to this model continuing to produce for Arsenal and Wenger, they either stopped pushing the frontier of emerging talent. With the widespread realization that a bunch of African nations produce a great deal of talent, the competition and prices for that talent has gone up. As other clubs have gone to places like Uruguay, Paraguay, Mexico, and the US to find relatively cheap talents like Luis Suarez, Chicharito and Clint Dempsey. Until the summer acquisitions of both a Japanese and Costa Rican player, Arsenal had been conspicuously slow to either enter or find any success in these emerging markets for talent. Carlos Vela has been their only real brush with any of these emerging countries.
Instead, they have been spending their time and resources on recruiting expensive domestic and continental talent like Ox, Walcott, Nasri, and Ramsey at the "up and coming" level and players like Arshavin, Gervinho, Arteta, Mertesacker, and Vermaelen at the "established" level. It isn't necessarily a complaint related to the players acquired but a question about the ability to succeed if they are going to be competing for players everyone is watching. If guys like Aguero, Silva, and Mata represent the best "obvious" players that could be bought, it means that Arsenal are going to try to win by buying the second tier of "obvious" players. Their system of play has been successful and fun to watch but it isn't sufficiently superior to elevate a team of second tier talents over a team of first tier talents.
[Match Update] Can we just ship Arshavin off now. I just saw the reverse angle of Olympiokos' comically-easy first goal. As the Greek player steamed toward the ball he eventually headed into the net, Arshavin - the closest Gunner - just sat there and watched like it was beneath him to track a late attacking run. If that's how he feels, then why not at least spread the field and be further up for a quick counter attack? Just no excuse for wandering aimlessly NEAR the area without putting out any effort to defend while you're there. [/Match Update]
In case you're wondering, the above was inspired indirectly by an email conversation I had with Simon Kuper (and yes, I'm shamelessly name-dropping) in which he called the types of books he writes "useful". I figured I'd better continue to use what I learned from reading Soccernomics and his column from Financial Times [Free Registration Required].
I know I write about Arsenal a fair amount but hopefully you continue to find the perspective both unbiased and at least a little bit different than what you're reading elsewhere. With that, we're on to our analysis of the upcoming schedule:
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