Are Arsenal STILL the most exciting team to watch?

It is heard so often during football coverage that it has become a cliché: Arsenal are wonderful to watch, Arsenal play such great football; Arsenal, with Barcelona, are the most entertaining team in football. But is their short, sharp brand of play really as entertaining as we are led to believe?

Watching Arsenal over the past season or so has often been entertaining due to  comical defending and the inevitability of their collapse rather than for fluid attacking intent. Yet, they are always praised for the nature of their play whatever their other faults. I have no problem with this; they are far better to watch than Allardyce-era Bolton or most of John Beck’s teams. However, they are often lauded as the most entertaining team to watch because of their football style; this I do have a problem with.

Inherently, it suggests that other styles of play are less entertaining. No viewer of Spur’s or Blackpool’s direct, fast, swashbuckling style last season can argue it was anything short of thrilling, whilst Manchester United’s ability to mix it up depending on the opposition will always lead to goals. On the other extreme, great defensive play can also be a terrific watch; the way Inter hassled, harried, pushed, stretched the Barcelona attackers in their 2010 Champions League semi-final, all last ditch headers and desperate tackles, was invigorating and incredibly exciting as a neutral viewer; by the end I was rooting for them.

Recently, I have started turning off Arsenal games early (though not the one last week!) due to the inevitability of the result. After 60 minutes of both the Newcastle and Liverpool games it was clear that they were never going to score, and it was either going to end 0-0 or 1-0 to the opposition.

For all the probing, shifting, trapeze-esque movement of the nimble forwards, it was clear the ball was going nowhere near the goal and was unlikely to spoil the carefully arranged net. As the Spanish World Cup winning team proved, such passing and tactics are often better for enforcing clean sheets rather than for penetrative attacking play.

One of the reasons such an attitude prevails is the stereotype of ball on ground =good, high ball/anything else = bad. It is true that from an early age British youngsters are encouraged to blindly hump the ball in panic as soon as it appears anywhere within their half, and good play and thus good ability has often been associated with not resorting to this style. Yet Barcelona, the most lauded team on the planet, often utilise the more direct style.

Next time they play, watch how many of their goals come from either rapid, fast counter-attacks down the wing or from patient build-up resulting in a killer pass over the top once the opposition has been suitably shifted from their correct position. Arsenal, for reasons oft repeated, are not capable of this, so their play results in hundreds of little passes resulting in nothing but tedious boredom for the fan. This is not entertaining.

This is not an attack on Arsenal, far from it, but rather an evaluation on an often misguided assumption of what entertaining football is, or more precisely, what it is not. Next time a game involving Wenger’s men appears on your TV and the commentator pipes up the inevitable quotes, just think of Joaquin Phoenix in Gladiator – are you not entertained?

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