Arsenal roll over West Ham in Premier League and prove club captains are overrated - The Warm-Up
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Updated 16/12/2021 at 10:09 GMT
Three points, a strong performance and a fun evening out for everybody except the opposition: Arsenal are finally starting to come good after overcoming West Ham. But the Premier League is now seriously rocking as Covid-19 flares up across the country. And Sergio Aguero has retired from football due to ill health.
"I'm so proud of chemistry between players & fans" Arsenal 2-1 West Ham
THURSDAY'S BIG STORIES
Here Comes The Process
It's a simple business, managing a football club. Sack your captain, win a game. Sack your captain, get back into the Champions League places. Sack your captain, and all of a sudden it looks like The Process might be turning into progress.
Arsenal are, of course, the least reliable football team of them all, a club with more false dawns than a French & Saunders convention. So let's not get too carried away. But last night's dispatch of West Ham was a good performance, and more importantly it was good in all the right ways. A proof-of-concept win. A functional plan applied with great intensity.
Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang's poor decision-making — ah, sod it, I'll get the morning train — may have done his manager a huge favour. Nobody drops a goalscorer when they are scoring goals; when they're not, and Aubameyang hasn't been recently, the whole team suffers. Plans are compromised. Players are shuffled around. And the goals still don't come.
Here, in Aubameyang's absence, Alex Lacazette delivered a masterclass in non-goalscoring forward play. He dropped deep, he pulled wide. He nosed around between the lines, he played little passes in behind the West Ham defence. He got right up in the referee's face at the slightest opportunity, and did some elite rolling around on the floor as well. Sure, he missed a penalty. But at least the other 89 minutes and 59 seconds offered something by way of recompense.
With Lacazette in the middle, with Aubameyang missing, Arsenal just looked better. You couldn't call them perfect. They still did that weird thing they always do: ramping the pressure up until they take the lead, then ramping it straight right down again. Perhaps all Arsenal managers have to swear fealty to the 1-0 win, the most Arsenal scoreline of them all. There's probably a ceremony. A little golden idol, arm raised for the offside.
And it helps when the opposition have a man sent off in debatable circumstances. But there was a definite sense of things clicking into place. The back four is more or less settled now, Aaron Ramsdale is already on his way to cult hero status, and Gabriele Martinelli adds a new dimension from the left. Those sweeping rat-a-tat passing moves from back to front are starting to become a feature, rather than a malfunctioning oddity.
And the crowd seem to be onboard. The great advantage of placing trust in young players is that if it works, and even if it starts to suggest that it might work, then everybody is into it. Watching a player come out of the academy and into the first team is one of the most wholesome pleasures that top-level football can afford, and Arsenal's fans have got some absolute gems to enjoy. And that in turn leads to patience, and optimism, and all the other sunny ways of being that are generally unwelcome at the Emirates.
It might even be enough to sustain the club all the way through the season. Or at least to the next inexplicable meltdown. Whichever comes first.
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'It's so painful' - Arteta on Aubameyang punishment
Knock Knock
Right then, here's where we are. Manchester United didn't play against Brentford on Tuesday and then, yesterday, announced further positive Covid-19 tests; reports suggest as many as 20 cases among players and staff. Burnley against Watford was called off just a couple of hours before kick-off, after an outbreak among the visiting team.
Brighton's game against Wolves did go ahead, despite a request from the home team for a postponement; perhaps we can understand why Brighton's finishing seemed even more distracted than usual. After the match, Graham Potter spoke to and for the nation:
I think the path we're on, I'm not sure how long we can stay on it for. We all want football to continue, want life to continue as best as we can, but health is the most important thing.
"We've got some issues ourselves, and this week has been a little bit disturbing in terms of how quickly we've been affected. If that carries on then we'll have to have some serious thought."
We have to assume that the Premier League's officials are already having some Serious Thought, because that's certainly a more comforting idea than Blind Panic and Making It Up As They Go Along. But the fact that Covid-19 positives doesn't lead to an automatic postponement is interesting. That suggests that the Premier League has a line, at least a blurry one. This much Covid-19 is okay, but that much is not. More than a Brighton, less than a Manchester United.
We don't know for sure, of course, because we don't get the information. Clubs don't reveal precise numbers, and the Premier League don't show their working. But we're guessing, based on how these things generally seem to go, that the Premier League's line was calculated before the Omicron variant. And so we're guessing, further, that they are watching the numbers with just as much concern as the rest of us.
At the time of writing, early on Thursday morning, Tottenham's game against Leicester is scheduled to go ahead. Spurs haven't played in more than a week, after their training ground was closed following a number of positive tests, while Leicester have some players absent with Covid and others with general knackeredness. If it does happen, it'll be an odd, unbalanced thing. The worry is that in a week or so's time, it will also look a deeply unwise thing.
IN OTHER NEWS
Six games, six wins. 24 scored, just one conceded. Barcelona Femení's progress through Group B of the Champions League has been almost perfect, and frankly terrifying. Here's Alexia Putellas celebrating her Ballon d'Or with a spot of improvisation.
RETRO CORNER
One of the most striking things about Sergio Aguero, one of the aspects of his greatness, was the cold-blooded certainty with which he went about his business. He didn't always score, though it sometimes seemed that way. But as he slipped into the penalty area he knew, for certain sure, how he was going to try and score: far corner or near, placement or power, low or high.
Everything else was somebody else's problem. He knew.
Or at least, that's how it seemed from the outside. If doubt raged within him, you could never tell. And so the sight of Aguero in tears as he announced his retirement wasn't just affecting, in all the usual ways, but categorically strange. The future was suddenly a mysterious place. Footballers are a long time retired, and Aguero, just six months into his time at Barcelona, was a long way from done.
His numbers at Manchester City were of course incredible: 260 goals in 390 games. He wasn't quite such a relentless goalscorer in his time at Atletico Madrid, a mere 101 in 234, but as you can see from this, all the pieces were there. Portrait of the assassin as a young man, when the commentators thought he might be the next Maradona. Instead, he turned out to be the next Romario.
HAT TIP
We're simple people, here at the Warm-Up. We see a headline that reads "The saga of the exploding inflatable MLS Cup trophy", and we click. Then we read, with great pleasure, about how MLS tried to have a bit of fun before the biggest game of the season, and it all went perfectly and beautifully wrong.
And then we offer our thanks to the Athletic's Matt Pentz, who has spoken to one of the volunteers on the pitch, and we come and tell you all about it.
We realised the crowd had already been following along with this saga. We were coming out and it felt like a victory. Maybe we could do this. I just remember we got it to the middle, we found our little spot and turned (the trophy) ever so slightly. It starts to go sideways and we heard this loud pop and felt all this wind come out of the balloon. I just kind of lost it at that.
COMING UP
Some more Premier League, possibly. Leicester vs Tottenham, Chelsea vs Everton and Liverpool vs Newcastle are all on at the time of writing. However the biggest game of the evening comes over in the women's Champions League: unless something weird happens in Turin, one of Chelsea or Wolfsburg will be going out this evening.
They're wheeling Andi Thomas out into the centre circle, the crowd's going wild … oh, he's popped. Hopefully we'll have him all fixed up for tomorrow.
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