Emery gives ANOTHER interview

Good morning, quick post since there’s some Arsenal news today.

Unai Emery gave an interview to Sid Lowe in the Guardian and while I don’t think we need another exegesis of the Unai Emery era at Arsenal I do find it fascinating that he keeps giving interviews. Because he seems to be the living embodiment of the famous quote “better to stay silent and be thought a fool than open your mouth and have it confirmed.”

Before you say anything about “something might have been lost in translation” you should know that Sid Lowe is English but he lives and works in Spain and is a fluent Spanish speaker and writer. It’s possible that his translation of the interview is a bit off but this interview sounds a lot like every other interview Emery’s ever given: muddled logic, inconsistent, and full of blame for everyone with almost no introspection.

Before we get to the comedy stylings of Unai Emery I want to mention that Arseblog and I had a brief exchange on Twitter and the venerable Arsenal blogger made it clear he thinks Emery was Sanllehi’s man. This explains a lot: how he got the job when he didn’t speak hardly any English (Sanllehi must have been there to translate) some of the player acquisitions and links, and the very seriously rumored contract extension. I always thought it was Gazidis but Blogs makes a convincing argument.

This notion that Sanllehi picked Unai also jibes with my thoughts as expressed in an article I wrote back when Josh Kroenke started gaining power and pushing Wenger out the door. The basic gist is that the new system enshrined power in upper management. I worried that the supporters are so obsessed with coaches and so used to Wenger calling all the shots that, if things started to go wrong at Arsenal (say… we became a mid-table team), we fans could take a decade to realize that it’s not the coaches that are the problem, that it’s the management team and owners. We see this happen in American sports ALL THE TIME: General Managers hire and fire coach after coach and the fans keep thinking that the GM is one day going to find magic. Success in sports is rarely magical: it’s almost always the result of investment.

The first quote in the article that makes me cringe is this: “Below the surface were problems, but Emery believes things might have been different had they won and made the Champions League; had they reacted right.” Now, this is Sid Lowe writing and not a direct quote from Emery but this is Emery’s main problem: he was reactive.

To be clear: reacting to what your opponent is doing is perfectly normal but basing your system on reaction, watching film to train the players to react better, and blaming players for a poor reaction is not how top coaches should operate. Success requires a system which capitalizes on your own players’ abilities and maximizes their talents. Emery’s football was bad not just because “we played defensive football” but because we played reactive and defensive football. This is the same problem that Jose Mourinho has slipped into of late. At his best, Jose trained teams to take control of games but somewhere in his tenure at Real Madrid, he lost that and started obsessing over his own players not making mistakes. I’m not a world class coach but every one that I’ve read (and I’ve read plenty about the best coaches in history – in multiple sports as well) wants to control the game. Popovich, Phil Jackson, Arsene Wenger, George Graham, Tom Landry, Guardiola, all trained their players on their strengths and focussed on their game plan rather than worrying so much about the opposition. It’s not a zero-sum approach (though Popovich famously stated that he never trains his players on how the opponent plays because he had enough work getting his guys to play the way he wants) but you can’t focus most of your time worrying what the opponent wants to do because if you do, your team has 20 different playing styles and players struggle to succeed in that situation.

I think this problem even plagues Guardiola, especially recently. His teams are best when they play their style but he often overthinks things (especially in the Champions League) and switches up the style at the last minute, confusing his players and causing them to lose games.

My second problem is that he blames the players and their commitment.

“[At first] things went magnificently; there was a good spirit in the dressing room,” he begins. “[Aaron] Ramsey’s injury, when he was at his best, had a big influence: he conveyed positivity, so much energy. And playing a lot of important games in April without him, we needed 100% implicación from every player.”

Implicación. If there is a word repeated often over the hour’s conversation, it is that. In English it is commitment and it was missing.”

He goes to great lengths to blame the players’ commitment to the club and especially targets Ozil. The issue here, though, is that it’s really hard to be committed when you’re constantly reactive and playing bad football. Football players are like anyone else, they want to play football. PLAY. It’s supposed to be fun and what makes football fun for top professionals is when they are playing well, winning games, and playing a style of football that is expansive and in control. No one likes playing football where you just sit back and the opponent controls the game completely. You can get players to commit to that in one or two games or even in a few weeks or months but over 18 months that style of play will eventually sour in the team.

Just look at Real Madrid under Mourinho: they were too reactive, the players hated it and eventually revolted. And rightly! Under Mou: 1 La Liga title. After Mou: 1 la liga and FOUR champions League titles.

Another thing Emery complains about is transfers. This idea that what’s needed is just “better players” at Arsenal is undermined by the Real Madrid story. They had and have a collection of the most expensive players in the world and yet under Mourinho were unable to get to the next level. With a coach who got them playing a more proactive style they immediately saw success.

Transfers can help but throwing good money at bad coaches is a bad plan. And Emery shows how muddied his thinking was in that regard when he decries Arsenal buying Pepe instead of his favored player, Wilf Zaha. Now, I know I’m probably a bit of a Zaha pessimist but I will admit that what he brings to teams is an uncanny ability to carry the ball forward, win fouls, and drive a team forward. But if you compare their progressive stats (progressive passing, carrying) and look at the other offensive skills they offer, the clearly better player is Pepe. Like I said in my article in the summer when arsenal were bidding on Zaha – Pepe is a progressive player but also offers corners, big chance creation, and goalscoring. Zaha is incredibly talented but I just think Pepe is an all-around better player. And when you compare the two players this season they are oddly similar but Pepe has added a few more tricks that Zaha doesn’t have: corners especially stand out.

Now, I will admit that there can be a certain quality that some players have – a desire to win and relentless hatred of losing. And I will admit that I think Zaha has more of that than Pepe. At least what we have seen of Pepe so far. But what we need from a coach is someone who will nurture Pepe and get the best out of him; not wish that he’d never been bought.

One thing that Emery mentions which I empathize with is the whole “good ebening” stuff.

“When results turned, he was an easy target. A comedy one, even. Language made it harder to build a relationship with fans or a public persona that might have insulated him. His English became a stick to beat him with, grounds for dismissal. “I had a decent level, although I needed to improve. When results are bad it’s not the same. You lack the linguistic depth to explain. And take ‘good ebening’: OK, it’s ‘good evening’, but when I said ‘good ebening’ and won it was fun; when we were losing it was a disgrace.” “

I’ve long been a critic of this whole trope that exploded onto the Arsenal fan-o-sphere when he was hired. I think it started early on as a cute way to connect with the man. I don’t think there was any racist intent behind it.

But making fun of people’s accents is a slippery slope. I speak 4 languages, all of them comically bad. I struggle with grammar and sentence structure in EVERY language, especially English! But pronunciation in Japanese? LOL. I double-dog dare anyone who made fun of Emery’s v/b pronunciation to tackle Russian’s ы sound as in the very basic word рыба (fish) – or even train yourself in a few months to properly pronounce the various “sh/x/tsch/shsht” sounds. In Japanese you have the r/l problem and the fact that emphasis on syllables can be hugely problematic and even mean different words (written the same but emphasized differently). In Spanish rolling your rs properly (same with Russian) is a struggle.

Language is the ultimate insider/outsider marker. USA Americans can tell the difference between a Southerner and a Northerner or a Canadian and someone from Seattle. But even in my small hometown (West Chester, PA) there are different accents which delineate class and education. One of the smartest guys I ever met was named “Jerl Wayne” and no one took him seriously because his accent was so deeply “hillfolk”.

By mocking Emery’s accent people were putting him in the “outsider” category. This same stuff plagued Arsene Wenger, Arsenal’s greatest ever manager, and marked him as an “aesthete” and foreigner.

Overall, I hope we learn some lessons from Emery’s tenure. First is that we need a proactive manager. Second that we cannot expect transfers to save that manager. And third is that we don’t target the current manager (who also has an accent) as an “other”. But more than anything I hope we hold the owners and corporate structure accountable for the results. The buck stops there.

Qq