Going out against Barça was a disspointment for everyone connected with the Arsenal, while it was widely acknowledged that Barça was the better team by far. The performances and reaction of some players left me a bit worried about their mental approach to football.
Sol Campbell believes that Barça has showed the the true level of Arsenal.
Now I’m in no position to pass judgement on the psychological state of players, but what bothers me is the eagerness in which the players accept that Barça is on a completely different level to us. While it shows good grace to be magnanimous in defeat, I am left with a slight suspicion that there may be some element of self doubt in parts of the squad.
When it comes down to it Barça was indeed the better team, beating us in every statistical measurement, and the performances over the 2 legs may have been their best ever. Looking at it that way it’s easy to put your hands up and say, yes we were beaten by a better team. Sol Campbell sums up my feeling when he says.
People have to realise that you have to keep on moving, to keep on stretching yourself. It means stretching yourself in training every day. We have to look back at this game and say, “This is the benchmark. This is where we have to get to.” We need to take on board lessons from this game, be honest about it and ask, “Where do I want my career to be going?
I had high hopes for Arsenal in the second leg, simply because I didn’t think Barça could play much better than they did at the Emirates, whilst Arsenal had a lot more room for improvement in the return leg. As it happened I was partly right, Barça didn’t play much better , sadly the same went for Arsenal.
Individually to many players had below par performances, something that shouldn’t happen at this level of football. You have to bring your a game in situations like these, this season it has happened time and time again in the big games. Losing those games is less about physical ability and more about your mental approach.
The mental toughness of this team has been proven to be of a very high level. Time and time again Arsenal has come back from seemingly impossible situations, scoring in the dying minutes of games, coming from behind to in games, has showed us that the players have that ability to dig deep.
This takes me to the main point of the article. While we have the ability to dig deep and come back from the grave, we shouldn’t have to be fighting back in the first place. We seem to have the attitude that our technical superiority will prevail consequently we don’t go into into games with any sense of urgency.
While it is wonderful to have that belief in your game, the lack of urgency has been a hiderance. What happens then when our techinical ability is infact inferior to the opposition? What do you have to belive in then? What happens when your technical ability cannot overcome the physical strength of the opposition? This is where we run into problems, this is what Bacary Sagna meant when he said
Sometimes I think we play too much, we just want to do that and do not think about what is good for us – sometimes we just need to cut out the football, stop playing for a bit and just consider what will help us achieve what we want.”
We should be able to win most of our games by playing wengerball, but inevitably we will come up against teams where we will need something different. Whether it means a different approach to the game tactically, or a different approach mentally, it is clear that taking the exact same approach to every single game will fail at some point.
