“We don’t train for training’s sake we train to win!”
Unai Emery’s interview on the dot com made me laugh a little. “We train to win!” It feels like either something got lost in translation or it’s a throwaway line. I’d like to think it’s the former, because later in the interview he makes a much more salient point “we train to improve”.
That’s something that makes sense to me and also fits with his admission that his team selection is based on player improvement. As he says: “The players that play the most are the ones that seem to have the most scope for development, but I’m convinced that they all have the ability to develop – not just because I’m saying it, it’s what any coach would say. That’s our idea.”
Emery was brought to the club to do exactly this, to improve players. To develop them and not at all cynically, ultimately to make them more valuable. Arsenal need a manager to do this because we don’t have an owner who is going to sink £100m in player transfers every year. So, improving players, making them better in training, working on their faults, improving their good qualities, and then playing them to get valuable experience, is the only way that Arsenal are going to be competitive.
I tend to disagree that Xhaka has been improved but I think we can all agree that Iwobi has. Adrian Clarke’s assessment of his performance against Bournemouth was excellent. Clarke showed how Iwobi popped up time and again in the half spaces between the back four and the front six and how, with willing runners, was able to play in some sublime passes which led to both goals. In a very real way, Iwobi’s value as a player has been tremendously improved this season with Emery’s coaching.
Bellerin as well. In 1800 minutes, he’s already had as many goals and assists (1 goal, 6 assists) as he had in almost 3800 minutes of his breakout season under Arsene Wenger (2015/16). Emery also has Aubameyang as the leading scorer in the Premier League and simultaneously has been able to work in playing time for Lacazette to the point that the Frenchman has 5 goals and 2 assists already this season.
Unai Emery is doing what Wenger was famous for at the beginning of his time at Arsenal and seemingly incapable of in his final few years at the club.
That’s not meant as a swipe at Wenger, but this is: Wojciech Szczesny and Lukasz Fabianski gave an interview to a Polish TV show and shared their memories of former Arsenal goalkeeping coach Garry Peyton. Arseblog has a copy of the video on his site if you want to watch but I’m going to publish the transcript here (if you know who transcribed this please let me know so that I can give them credit*):
This twitter account tweeted these photographs
This is a topic I have covered numerous times on the blog and on twitter and for which I have received undue calumny. The reality is that Wenger and Peyton failed both of these keepers and the proof is in the fact that both have gone on to be massively improved under new managers and have good careers.
Both players have publicly stated that they have improved since leaving. Toward the end of his time at Roma, Szczesny said “I learnt more in four months under (Roma goalkeeping coach) Spalletti than in 10 years in England. He puts a lot of importance on details and wants the goalkeeper to be able to play the ball with his feet.”
Meanwhile Fabianski hasn’t come out as direct as Szczesny did with the criticism but in his most recent interview with the Guardian he said that when he left Arsenal (after 7 years) he felt like he had to build himself back up from scratch. Luckily, he was able to do that with the guidance of Javier Garcia, former Sevilla goalkeeper coach and Europa League winner with coach Unai Emery.
Garcia is currently the goalkeeper coach at Arsenal and as an aside I had a piece set to go this summer about how Leno is a bog-average goalkeeper. It was full of analysis of not just his last year but his full career. He wasn’t terrible, but he also wasn’t good. In the end I canned the article because I didn’t want to pre-judge the player. I’m glad I did. I also suspect that the reason why he didn’t start right away was because Garcia didn’t think he was ready. We don’t know when Garcia and Unai would have started him but in the end it turned out to be immaterial because Cech picked up a knock and Leno has shown himself to be a good keeper both with the ball at feet and in terms of saves. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see an article later this year in which he praises Garcia.
You might wonder why Wenger gets any blame for this but he was the one who steadfastly held on to Peyton after it was clear that goalkeeping was a problem. Wenger even had so much loyalty to Peyton that he dropped Szczesny, then sold him for a pittance, and let Fabianski go on a free. Garry Peyton stayed on at Arsenal up to the day that Wenger was fired.
I love Arsene Wenger and respect what he did for Arsenal but the way that he treated Szczesny and Fabianski was a real black mark on his copy book.
*According to twitter this image was from a Reddit post by Drac0Rex
Imagining what Cech though in these last few years. Worth an interview.
Last few?
How about the first year after coming over from Chelsea heralded as a 10-15 points a season difference maker.
After he saw Payton’s ,shall we say, less than ground breaking coaching techniques, he must’ve thanked his lucky stars for choosing Chelsea over Arsenal coming over from Rennes.
Just a point here:
In his first season at Arsenal, Cech saved an incredibly high (topped the League) percentage of the big chances and shots in prime that he faced. Those numbers have slowly tailed off season after season until this one where we are back to his “first season at Arsenal” numbers.
I will also mention that Cech’s penalty save numbers at Arsenal are atrocious. In the Premier League he’s 1/16 for Arsenal and 6/22 for Chelsea. “Go with your gut” says Garry Peyton. What a joke.
Very much agree with this, especially your last paragraph. Most of us saw Szczesny as our keeper for the next ten years; in addition to his obvious physical talents, he clearly loved the club, which made it even sadder to see him discarded. Both he and Fabianski (and Ospina, while we’re at it) showed tons of ability but could be inconsistent, so clearly the coaching wasn’t getting the best out of any of them.
Mate good work..agree with parts..But not entirely fair to just blame Wenger and the goalie coach..Application is very important too. We need to hear Wenger’s side and Peyton’s. Secondly..I think that the delay in starting Leno was man management. No keeper can come to a club and automatically displaces a player of the stature of Czech immediately. He had to be patient and wait his chance. When his chance came admittedly he took it. Think the same thing happened with Laca.. Emery kept him on the bench at start to get him hungry amplify his application…
It seems highly unlikely that both Szczesny and Fabianski were just lazy and then both suddenly had a change of heart and became hard workers who were taking on advice, which they were steadfastly refusing up to that point.
We know objectively, however, that the only keepers who succeeded at Arsenal came ready-made to Wenger. His track record trying to make keepers was extraordinarily poor.
Mate not saying anyone is lazy. I am just saying Keepers tend to develop later and need a certain maturity. Some people get that maturity later in life where they are able and prepared to focus more on their career or job, do less of the childish things we all did.
That’s not even really true. Most top GKs in the world where first teamers in their teens, Neuer, Buffon, Donnarumma. Leno made his name because he was somewhat of a prodigy. Maybe you take the layers by their word, both made significant jumps after they left Arsenal. Our GK position has been a car crash for years, I mean, we wasted Cesc’s peak years with Almunia in goal…
Good point regarding age of keepers.
Jens Lehmann probably didn’t care about Peyton since he was fairly senior and well coached in Germany. Almunia – maybe affected since he was 27 when he moved to Arsenal. But Mannone, Fabianski, and Szcesny assured were screwed over by Peyton.
15 years!
Really appreciate the fact that you doggedly source and credit the work of others, Tim.
I read what Szczesny had to say elsewhere. Didnt know whether to laugh or cry at Peyton’s advice on saving penalties. He sounds like a dinosaur.
I really like Leno. Said sometime ago that the thing I like most is the sense of calm he transmits to the back line. Shame that there are 2 really good players in front of him for Germany.
What is it about Germany and producing goalkeepers? Besides the obvious ones, and yes I know he’s technically Brazilian, but Allison Becker might as well be from Gelsenkirchen with that surname name and Hasselhoffian jawline.
“Hasselhoffian” 😀
You made my week, Doctor.
Great! Btw Wikipedia reliably informs me that Mr. Becker wohnt in “Novo Hamburgo” which is obviously Portugese for “Indigenous peoples of Brazil”
😀 😀
Yeh but his name is Alisson.
All the more reason not to mess with him.
I am as big of a Wenger supporter as you’re likely to find but this kind of thing is a regular occurrence when one blows the dust off his copybook and rifles through the pages a bit. Let’s not forget his unwavering loyalty to his staff and his players may have cost him Szczesney but likely it also bought him plus years he might not have otherwise had from talents like Fabregas, van Persie and others. Towards the end it all went sour but there was a middle period there between the glory years and the final dysfunctions where his loyalty slowly slipped from net positive to net neutral before it became a net minus. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when but steadfastness became stubbornness, stylishness went from a means to an end to an end in and of itself, and too much trust was placed in players and staff who, for various reasons, consistently couldn’t live up to what was being asked of them. Clearly the goalkeeping coach was one of these. Arsene was famously loyal to all of his coaches. Remember when Pat Rice retired? We were all agog about what new changes Steve Bould might bring to the squad as the new #2. Change happened slowly under Arsene in the latter half when it happened at all and goalkeeping was just never really that important to him. Somewhere during that latter half he lost his touch with the youngsters as well. Not only were we not recruiting good young players anymore (from France or anywhere really) but the ones already at the club stopped developing too. We all remember when Ashley Cole, Kolo Toure and Cesc Fabregas broke through and became world class seemingly overnight one right after the other. It seemed like he could just sell Henry because he could buy another winger from Monaco for 3M pound and make him into a 20 goal striker too (and he did, then he sold that one for a huge profit too). He could let Pires move on to Villareal before he was ready to go because he bought Rosicky, who was instantly good, for less than market value. He could seemingly find a competent fullback from anywhere without spending barely anything. Arsene had the Midas touch with young talent or any talent really (GK and CB aside) and then suddenly, at some point, he lost it.
It was like falling off a cliff. Suddenly his buys weren’t working out, and not just a little bit off but way, WAY off with the benefit of hindsight. Somehow Arsene still mustered something from Maruane Chamakh, Lukas Podolski and Olivier Giroud but none of them were realistically of the standard required of an elite club’s center forward, the kind of forward Arsene almost magically found and helped make great for almost nothing again (Anelka) and again (Henry) and again (Adebayor) and again (Eduardo) and again (van Persie) during his first 15 or so seasons. It’s an amazing record and even more amazing when you contrast it with the strikers he bought and tried to develop after 2012. His record with young players is even more dire after that date. Even early success stories like Wilshere and Ramsey (and yes, Szczesney) hit roadblocks and never really lived up to their potential. It’s not all Wenger’s fault, far from it, but his shadow looms so large over that period that it’s impossible to extricate it from any aspect of player development. It was as if he was snakebitten after all his early career success. Even when he had a real gem of a player (like Diaby, van Persie before 2011, Wilshere, Rosicky, Cazorla, Eduardo, Ramsey, Vermaelen) something terrible would happen and the player would be out injured for like 3 years, and that’s only a slight exaggeration. In fairness to him we were specialists in double leg breaks and medical mysteries like plantaris tendonitis and borderline or actual medical malpractice in the cases of Cazorla and Rosicky. But it could and should’ve gone a lot better with plenty of other players who had a chance to contribute more to the squad given their talent and just faltered or plateaued too early.
All of that is to say Emery and his coaching staff with their no nonsense modern approach to the game is a welcome wind of change for all, especially the players coming through now, and I think we can see the benefits of a new regime even after a few short months on their confidence and development.
Part of the problem was probably that he was equally loyal to his scouts and his network. But after 20 years especially in an industry with such a high turnover contacts just dry up. But there were similar stories like Peyton’s floating around about a lot of Wenger’s team that were kept on regardless.
Gah, moderation… akismet is ruthless
I approved it.
https://twitter.com/SkySportsNews/status/1067805361787285505
Uh oh, oh no.
Why do you hate Wenger all of a sudden? Why would you post this?
Seriously, that transcript is one more proof point of how something can be both sad and funny at the same time.
Some of this kind of information is kind of already baked into my admiration of Wenger and I am not blind to his failings. How surprising is this from a club whose manager purportedly did the wolf outline on the chalkboard thing?
That being said, even the most talented of players (unless you’re visiting from another planet like Leo Messi) need strong, active coaching and not just just blind loyalty.
Respect for a person need not stop an objective analysis – which is what Tim has done here IMO