Anyone wondering how long it would take Unai Emery to fully understand what it means to be Arsenal head coach need wonder no longer. All it took was one game to anger Sam Allardyce by having the temerity to play short passes along the ground.
“This is the manager’s fault. It’s his fault,” he said of Arsenal’s 2-0 defeat to Manchester City on Sunday. “We are getting obsessed with this stupid ‘let’s play out from the back’… (it’s) utter rubbish to play like that all of the time.” To which the obvious reply is: if you are trying to implement your style with a brand new team, abandoning your principles in the very first game is not a very effective way to go about things.
Same old Arsenal? That was the accusation facing Emery after his first 90 minutes in charge. Allardyce was already dredging up hoary old tropes about tippy-tappy football. Clearly the scoreline and the weight of chances in City’s favour were not to Emery’s liking but let’s have some context here. This was his first competitive game in charge of Arsenal after just five weeks of training. He had the misfortune to come up against a team who won the league with a record 100 points last season, signed a former PFA Player of the Year and possess a singular genius as their coach.
If anything, Emery deserves credit for not compromising his principles in his very first test. Playing out from the back was a high-wire act, most alarmingly when Petr Cech short-circuited under pressure and almost passed the ball into his own net, but a template is being laid down. The chances of Arsenal managing to get anything from City were minimal and there are bigger problems than would be solved by hoofing the ball long to escape the City press. That is something for Allardyce to bear in mind, but also any Arsenal supporters murmuring discontentedly.
In any case, if Emery needed any reassurance that hard and fast rules should not be drawn from managerial debuts, he needed only look at the man who stood adjacent to him on the touchline on Sunday. Coincidentally, Monday marks 10 years since Pep Guardiola managed his first league game at the top level. Barcelona were embarking on a brand new era and promptly lost 1-0 to Numancia. When they followed that up with a 1-1 draw at home to Racing Santander, many were wondering if Barca had made a horrendous mistake.
