New Season, Same Old Arsenal

When the 2010-2011 Premier League schedule came out, I circled the season kickoff between Arsenal and Liverpool. You see, if there's one set of matches I will always make time for at the George and Dragon (rather than my own couch) it's the two Premier League ties between the Gunners and the Reds. It's a way for me to enjoy the beautiful game with one of the guys who got me into the sport, and he just happens to be a Liverpool fan.

I say "make time for" because most Premier League matches are on the weekends - when I have my children from my first marriage three out of every four a month. It's not right for me to take time away from them, and you can imagine it is very difficult to find a babysitter for that time of day. So, on these two weekends a year, I call on my now-wife (then-fiance) to watch the children while I enjoy some Premier League action early on a weekend morning.

A lot has changed since I last watched my Gunners at the George for last year's second win against Liverpool. I've made it through my first World Cup as a dedicated fan. I also got married this summer. Too bad my team hasn't changed much during that time.

As I showed up at the George this morning I was greeted by a starting lineup with no van Persie, an active squad without Fabregas, and the painful reminder of no goal keeper upgrade by seeing Almunia's name over the goal. It didn't take long to make this reminder of 2009-2010 turn into a painful reality.

Almunia gave up another early second half goal that any other goal keeper would have turned into a picture perfect save. Why Arsene Wenger refused to make a keeper his top transfer priority this offseason is beyond me. Arsenal has plenty of defensive holes to worry about, but the squad has absolutely ZERO confidence in the goal keeping squad. Watching that early defensive collapse and Almunia failure had me muttering, "not this again."

On the offensive side, it was yet another match with no van Persie and no Fabregas in the starting lineup. This translated to a lot more passing than usual, even for Arsenal! Passing statistics for both teams were:

• Arsenal: 451 successful passes out of 511 attempts
• Liverpool: 193 successful passes out of 263 attempts

This translated to a total pass differential of 248 in favor of Arsenal, a total pass ratio of 1.94, and a successful pass percentage difference of 14.9%. Comparing these to the distribution of the same statistics from Arsenal's 2009-2010 campaign, one finds that these rank in the 65th, 63rd, and 85th percentile, respectively. This means that Arsenal passed a little bit more frequently than last year's average, but had a far better pass accuracy than the opposition compared to their performances last year.

A graphical representation of all that passing can be seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Passing Chalkboards for Arsenal vs Liverpool (Aug 15, 2010)

The benefit of all this passing showed up in the number of opportunities for Arsenal, but not perhaps the quality of them. They had double the shots (18 vs 9), with Liverpool benefitting from a higher proportion of blocks (6 for 33% vs. Arsenal's 2 for 22% of the shots). Watching the match, I am sure many of those Arsenal shots came in that flurry of action 10 minutes from the end.

The frustrating reality for an Arsenal fan like myself is that without van Persie or Fabregas on the pitch, teams are not fearful of all the passing. Arsenal has no real finisher under those conditions, and they truly look like a team just happy to keep passing for passing's sake. In reality, they have a bunch of role players on the pitch that are used to passing to set up someone else. Arsenal is in real trouble if they have to go through yet another season with such a situation being the weekly reality. I hope that is not the case.