Excellence- With a View to Perfection

They’ve started already. Just a couple of games into the new Premiership season and the ersatz experts are at it, bombarding us all with their screwy version of The Big Issue. Or in Arsenal’s case, ‘Issues’.

Are Arsenal in crisis? Are they paying too high a price already for their wonderful new Emirates Stadium? And is the real trouble with Arsenal that they’re always looking to score the ‘perfect goal’?

Unfortunately, questions like this tell us far more about the inadequacy of the people who pose them than they do about Arsenal. Can any club be ‘in crisis’ two games into the season – especially a club managed by Arsene Wenger? Or, if you prefer, are Champions Chelsea in crisis because they’ve already lost a game – or ambitious Spurs because they were defeated by the 10 men of Everton? And is the cost of the Emirates Stadium really related to performances on the field, or a burden on potential signings?

Then there’s the third question, the one we hear most often. The curious thing here is that it is never accompanied by a convincing explanation of what the ‘expert’ means by ‘the perfect goal’. There are mutterings about Arsenal tending to ‘overplay’ or be ‘too elaborate’ but that is as far as it goes. So what are they driving at? Do they mean Arsenal try to score all their goals from inside the box, don’t shoot often enough from distance, are obsessed with ‘walking the ball in’? If that is the case, they are implying that the ‘perfect goal’ cannot be scored from outside the penalty area. Bang goes Thierry Henry’s wonderful volley past Barthes, the time when he ran more than half the length of the field and beat any Spurs player who managed to turn up before scoring from outside the box, his magical Champions League solo effort against Real Madrid, and any number of goals by the likes of Henry, Pires, Bergkamp etc which are all readily available on dvd.

The truth is that Arsenal are not one dimensional. They want to win every game but they are not obsessed with winning, winning at any cost. Above all, they want to play beautiful football and to score beautiful goals. They are entertainers and they are concerned with both the product and the process. In two games to date this season they have dominated the opposition, played sparkling football and created a host of chances. And if they had converted no more than a third of those chances, the results would have been humiliating for the opposition, they would currently have maximum points and the ‘experts’ would be hailing them as world beaters.