Mikel Arteta must avoid one big mistake as ‘darkness on edge of town’

After another 3-0 win, are Arsenal the future or the outdated past already?

After 15 or more years of the high-pressing orthodoxy which washed through football from top to bottom which saw even local amateur teams play out from the back (often to the disgruntlement of the fans because only a few were good enough to do it consistently without giving the ball away 18 yards out), change is afoot.

The delusion is to think that any trend will last forever, that THIS is the way to play. The clever thing is to develop the latest trend or revolution ahead of the curve. After so long playing in one fashion, where else is there to go? It was obvious from the moment Manchester City signed Erling Haaland and won the treble that play would become more, in the modern parlance, vertical. Or direct or long ball.

City have done a good job of highlighting its weakness as a style, especially when you rely on one man to score most of your goals. And they’ve shown how lack of control means your defence gets decimated by fast transitions.

In Arsenal we already see the new style find its apogee. If you reject what we might call ‘fannying around’, the instinct is to play direct and rely on dead ball situations and long throws – all those dirty things that used to be outlawed in a delusional drive for some kind of illusory football purity.

Although it still allows for a modicum of fannying around, it is basically a rejection of everything Arsenal took pride in being in those Arsene Wenger years when they’d be offended by those brutes at Stoke and Bolton who didn’t ‘play the right way’. Their fans swore they wouldn’t want to watch such footballing depravity but it turns out they were sacrificing success for an overly precious approach. I even recall fans saying they wouldn’t want to win playing in such a way, like it offended their aesthetic sensibilities. Forgotten now, of course.

This journey has long roots more generally. Playing football ‘the right way’ has been talked about since just after the war. It was said to be the West Ham way and then Manchester City when Malcolm Allison was a coach and introduced many of the things wrongly ascribed to modern managers. He was one of the early adopters of using a sweeper in English football, a tactic more common on the continent at the time. He played 3-5-2 and experimented with a flexible back five and wing-backs and moved away from the rigid “W-M” formation that had dominated British football for decades, encouraging his teams to play a more flowing, positional game. Sound familiar?

His influence even extended to a young Jose Mourinho, who used to watch Allison’s training sessions in Portugal at his successful Sporting team and later cited him as a major inspiration for his own career, though presumably not going as far as getting into the communal bath with a * star.

Brian Clough was another ‘right way’ zealot, with endless aphorisms about playing passing football instead of just lumping it.

The point is that the waxing and waning of football tactical trends has always existed and as England’s teams repeatedly illustrated in the 70s, failure to change and be flexible was a terrible weakness.

So, I should think the new approach of relying on corners, dead ball situations and long throws will soon filter down to Hackney Marsh levels, probably just as it becomes passe at the highest levels and is replaced by another reworked historical tactic.

But at a time when the suits and fans demand a manager has a ‘philosophy’, that can preclude the required flexibility (see Ruben Amorim), showing the folly of clinging to any one approach for too long. There is no ‘right’ way, as much as some think there is. A smattering of football history knowledge tells you that,

If Mikel Arteta sticks to the current style next season, hoping to repeat the success, there’s a darkness on the edge of that particular town. The often fruitless and sometimes rather boring possession and pressing trend lasted much longer than most, though clubs play too much football now to have the energy to press with the required intensity for a whole season, which probably explains why Pep changed in the first place. This more direct approach won’t last anywhere near as long.

Arteta may have just stumbled across this style by accident, I doubt it was intentional, or it may be that Areta has an unlikely ability to see ahead of the curve, but having stumbled across it, sticking to it for too long would be a major error. Change and flexibility keeps everyone on their toes.

Players tend to become complacent and forget how to play, for example, the long ball, or a well-struck corner because they haven’t played against it for ages, so by the time they do get used to it, you should have moved on to play in a different way. But there’s always a tendency to stick with what has been successful. Liverpool could tell you about that particular folly.

If Arsenal played like this 50 years ago, they’d be repeatedly beaten because everyone could defend against such play. Arteta’s lesson must be that no, you haven’t cracked it, this is just a phase that coincides with other contenders transitioning to a new style. Can you come up with something new? The work towards that should start now.