Arteta’s 10 year set-piece revelation : Long Throws : Fa-fa-fa-fa-Fashion

Morning.

Sorry it’s a bit of a late one this morning, but I needed to catch up some sleep. A few Saturday bits for you, and we’ll leave any Crystal Palace preview stuff until tomorrow.

At his press conference yesterday, Mikel Arteta spoke about set-pieces, and revealed it was something that first occurred to him ten years ago. He said:

I went to Man City with the best manager in the world and I could see where we could have improvements and it was clear, because at some point I was doing that and I wasn’t the best person in the world to do it, so if I’m not the best person in the world to do it and the best method to do it, there are ways to improve it.

I think this is all just connected to his over-arching philosophy which is about maximising every aspect of the game. He continued:

I’m not only obsessed with that, I’m the same with the defensive part in every transition, I want to be the best. When it comes to chaos, I want to be the best. When it comes to positional attack, the best. When it comes to low blocks, the best.

I assume he means breaking down low blocks, but ask any team who have faced Arsenal this season and that’s something they’ve had to deal with too. Out of possession, we get men behind the ball, we stay compact and organised, and it’s part of why we’re so hard to break down. The Premier League goals we’ve conceded this season have been illustrative in that regard. The first was Dominik Szoboszlai’s brilliant free kick, and the second was Erling Haaland against Man City when I think, in our eagerness to win the ball high up the pitch, we left ourselves open and he had the quality to expose that. Nick Woltemade’s header for Newcastle was one we could have defended better, but who are we to complain about a set-piece goal?

It wasn’t that long ago people raised their eyebrows at Liverpool hiring a throw-in coach, I don’t think that would faze anybody these days. Every manager is out to find the tiniest of margins to give them a better chance of winning games, and we know Arteta is always looking for any advantage he can get.

Which, speaking of throw-ins, leads me to an interesting observation. It’s something we’ve been doing a lot this season, with Riccardo Calafiori typically taking them from the left, and sometimes Declan Rice from the right. In comparison to some of the best long throws you see, I’d say ours are maybe 60-70% as good as those. Then, on Tuesday night against Atletico Madrid, Myles Lewis-Skelly took a couple, and while I think he’s got a lot strengths in his game, the long throw is not necessarily one of them.

His go quite high, not very long, and because of that trajectory, they’re probably easier to defend because you can read the flight of the ball more easily. I think we know Arteta is someone who has great attention to detail, so he can’t be blind to the fact that Myles’ long throws aren’t very long at all. And yet we still ask him to do it, so if I had the chance to ask the manager about it, I’d be curious to understand why we ask him to go long when it’s not that long at all.

Presumably it’s tactical, condensing all the players into a small space and perhaps focusing on the second ball, but it just stood out to me as a bit at odds with what you normally expect from a long throw in, which is to get the ball into a really dangerous area. You can see in the image below that it’s cleared before it even reaches the line of the six yard box.

Anyway, it’s just a small thing, and probably not that important in the grand scheme of things, but mildly interesting to me. I don’t think a long throw is something you can really coach into a player either, there’s an element of natural ability required, but let’s see how this tactic – which many teams are using by the way – develops over the course of the season.

Finally for this morning, some pictures emerged of the Arsenal players having a ‘night out’ during the week. At his press conference, Arteta jokingly insisted it was ‘dinner’, and then ‘early dinner’. He spoke about the importance of occasions like this, saying:

I love it because, I mean, playing every three days with the other international games, they spend so much time together. They came to me and said, we would like to have a dinner together. I was like, really? OK, go. Have fun and enjoy it. That means that they want to spend time with themselves and be sometimes away from the building and I think that’s something really, really positive.

Team bonding, team spirit, we all recognise those things are important, and you need more than spending time together on the training ground to copper-fasten those relationships. So hopefully it is a really positive thing. There were some pictures, and I don’t wanna go all Menswear Guy (if you know, you know) on the fashions, but there were some interesting outfits, as you’d imagine.

The one that stood out most to me was, unsurprisingly, Ben White, pic below. It’s a look I can only describe as ‘hidden panda’, and I expect this to be de rigueur by the end of the year. Get your furry black and white jumpers at the ready.

Ok, I’m done – there’s a Crystal Palace preview podcast on Patreon right now, and I’ll be back tomorrow to preview that game right here. Have a great Saturday.

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