Arsenal, 'Big Game Mentality' and 'Bogey Teams'

I sadly (or not) had to miss the Arsenal game yesterday, but it rather sounds like it was ‘one of those days’. Coquelin injured, a penalty missed, and a chance to go top of the table foregone for the second consecutive match day. In that last respect, it’s almost not surprising that we saw a poor Arsenal performance away to West Brom at the Hawthorns, as that’s precisely the kind of fixture that encapsulates two of our greatest enemies; teams that prevent us from playing ‘our brand’ of football, and high-pressured games.

Now, to be completely honest, I don’t buy into the whole ‘Arsenal always bottle the big games’ criticism, but there were certainly mentality issues to be addressed against the traditional top four sides, at least until recently. Sure, we still seemingly cannot find a way to get three points off Jose Mourinho’s Chelsea, no matter how poor they’ve been this season, but Manchester United, Manchester City, Bayern Munich, Liverpool have all been conquered in the last twelve months, suggesting something of a turn in fortunes.

Really though, this shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. For so many of those years that we struggled against those ‘big teams’ we simply didn’t have the resources to consistently compete at their level. Now, we undoubtedly do, and if we can go out and beat the teams that I just mentioned, then with the squad that Wenger has effectively had to rebuild since 2011 we are a title contender, there are no excuses anymore. But if this is the case, why were the Chelsea and Tottenham games such anti-climaxes this season?

Maybe then, there are some residual effects of that previous inferiority complex still lurking around the Emirates. It certainly seemed that way when we failed to beat David Moyes’ Manchester United in the two attempts that we had during a season in which United were significantly below their dominant best (to put it more than politely). We’re facing the same occurring against an underperforming Chelsea side this season, as already mentioned, but there is one matchup that’s concerning me even more at this moment in time.

The North London Derby, as I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, felt a fair bit more momentous an occasion this season than in many recently, and (like when we played our rivals in the Capital One Cup a few weeks prior) Arsenal put in something of a troubling performance, even when this time playing in front of their home fans.

Of course, Tottenham have (as much as I hate to admit it) significantly improved as a team since Mauricio Pochettino arrived at White Hart Lane, and are far better than the ‘best ever Spurs side’ that we beat 5-2 twice in a year. That is a large reason that we looked so poor against them twice this season (despite managing to win one thanks to Mathieu Flamini becoming the world class striker that we all suspected he really was), we were outplayed, but I think there might be something deeper behind those games too.

We haven’t beaten Spurs in the league in the last three attempts (two of those at home), and it seems that in this particular fixture, we have gone from being enthused and almost bitter at the suggestion that we had something to prove against them, to almost fearful and burdened by expectation.

I think expectation definitely has increased around the club in the past few seasons. With Mesut Ozil and Alexis in the side, Tottenham are another team who we ‘should’ be beating, rather than a ‘potential’ three points, especially if we want to be challenging for the title, as the players are constantly told. There’s nothing wrong with that, this squad is capable of doing just that, and has the best chance for a long time of finally bringing the Premier League trophy back to North London, but after a decade of being told that everything would have to fall perfectly into place for us to be at the top of the table in May, and that realistic aspirations were reaching the top four (which they were, and we did very well to do even that in some of those years), our mentality needs some adjusting.

It doesn’t help that off the back of an international break, and the North London Derby before that, we had to go to the home of one of our ‘bogey sides’ this weekend, in a fixture with potentially huge ramifications in the title race. Beat West Brom, and there was a good chance that City would drop points to Liverpool (which they did of course), putting us at the top of the table outright. Leicester are there for now though, so what does it matter that for one week out of thirty eight we would have been in first place?

Well, I believe that it does matter, because with the run of games that we have over the next few weeks, we could conceivably have maintained that position above City until December 20th, when we play them at the Emirates. In terms of the mentality going into that game, going in three points ahead of City might have been the extra incentive required to bring out the best of our team, and the loss yesterday in turn places added pressure on the next few games, in order to ensure that we don’t actually fall behind City before that crucial game.

When I first started watching Arsenal, I would probably have called Bolton our ‘bogey team’, where every time we travelled to the Reebok, it seemed as though Jay-Jay Okocha would give us the run around before Stelios Giannakopoulos scored a winner. In more recent times, Stoke, Swansea, and now West Brom have all been given the same label (with admittedly varying degrees of accuracy).

What do many of these teams have in common? Most prominently, it’s the way that they set up to play against Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal side. Whilst with most other clubs and their ‘bogey teams’, that trend tends to develop over an extended period of time, whereby (the Premier League being the impatient and treacherous place that it is) the teams will inevitably have seen managers come and go, Arsenal are fairly unique in this respect.

Arsene’s near two decades at the helm means that anyone who plays his side in the Premier League should have a fairly clear view of what they are coming up against, and Tony Pulis is one manager who has had plenty of opportunities to learn what works and what doesn’t. It’s been a criticism of Wenger’s Arsenal for so long that it’s now clichéd, but nonetheless not without substance, that if you stick ten men behind the ball and go into tackles hard, you can frustrate them into submission.

The tactics generally lumped under that category are in reality far more refined than they sound, and Arsenal have themselves often chosen to play a counterattacking game, but if they can’t learn to alter their style against teams that are going to dig in and prevent us the time that we require on the ball, then I’m afraid there are going to be a few more of these results to come.

With injuries continuing to loom large (see you in 2016 Francis), now is the time for Arsenal to prove that they won’t buckle under pressure, that they can deal with not having things their own way, and that, finally, they really have turned a corner. Yesterday’s result was tough to take, and tells us something about where we are as a team right now, but is just one game in the course of a season, so let’s hope that the team can use it to push on in the right direction, rather than letting it reaffirm everything negative that we are constantly told defines our team.