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The Independent
21 hours ago
- Sport
- The Independent
Arsenal's biggest weakness is clear – here's how Viktor Gyokeres can solve it
Arsenal 's history could have been very different without Harry Woods. Without him, there may have been no Herbert Chapman, no trio of league titles in the 1930s, no status as London's biggest club. Arsenal narrowly avoided relegation in 1923-24. They only won 12 league games that season. Woods scored in six of them. He was Arsenal's top scorer. He also got a mere nine league goals. Which had a renewed pertinence more than a century later when Kai Havertz emulated him: for the first time in 101 years, Arsenal had no player in double figures for league goals. Sporting CP did not have a similar problem. Viktor Gyokeres, who has been pushing for a move to the Emirates, hit 39 league goals at an average of one every 72 minutes. That was one more than Arsenal's top five scorers – Havertz, Gabriel Martinelli, Leandro Trossard, Mikel Merino and Bukayo Saka – got between them. A different club in a different league makes for an inexact comparison. Injuries to first Martin Odegaard and then Saka affected Arsenal's supply line. But for three months on the sidelines, Havertz would probably have ended with around 14 league goals and more than 20 in all competitions. And yet the numbers presented an irrefutable case for Arsenal to finally do what their fans had been urging them to: sign a striker. Mikel Arteta had accumulated an extraordinary array of left-backs, ventured into the goalkeeping market on an annual basis, and continually sought solidity from central midfielders. His model of sharing goals around the side had largely worked well in 2022-23, when Arsenal scored 88 times in the league, and 2023-24, when they struck 91 times, but not as their return dropped to 69 goals last season. Enter Gyokeres. Expectations could be both simplistic and demanding. Make Arsenal score at the rate of Liverpool or Manchester City. Make Arsenal champions. So, no pressure there. Comparisons could be drawn – and no doubt will be when they face City in September – with Erling Haaland, another out-and-out No 9 signed by a manager who had tended to favour false nines. Which, once again, could feel a steep ask given Gyokeres's last taste of English football was to score 22 times in a season when Coventry reached the Championship play-offs. He is a better player now, but one question is how his goal-a-game return in Portugal (68 in 66 in the Primeira Liga) translates to the Premier League; a tally of six in last season's Champions League offers encouragement. Another is if Arteta can recalibrate his team to play to the strengths of a specialist goalscorer. A trademark Gyokeres strike often involved him running in behind the opposition defence. It isn't really a typical Arsenal goal, though that reflects on the relative strengths of Havertz, Trossard and Gabriel Jesus. If a criticism of Arteta's Arsenal is that they can be too slow and structured, Gyokeres may prefer them to get the ball forward quicker. Certainly, he should add more of a threat on the counterattack, but if part of Arteta's preference for forwards who could drop deep was to add an extra body in midfield, that – along with the arrival of Martin Zubimendi – should necessitate a shift. Arsenal may expect an early return. Given the saga – albeit one stripped of drama in the long periods when absolutely nothing happened – of whether they would sign Gyokeres or Benjamin Sesko, there was always a fundamental difference between the Swede and the Slovenian. Gyokeres, now 27, is five years older. He comes for a decent price, at £63.5m, but with far less resale value than the RB Leipzig forward. Arsenal's eventual preference for Gyokeres may suggest a sense that Sesko has not kicked on. That Gyokeres failed to report for training at Sporting in a bid to force the move indicated his preference was for Arsenal. If Havertz, by and large, did a fine job in attack, it will be instructive if he is reinvented as a midfielder or if he has a job-share in attack with Gyokeres. There may well be types of fixtures when Arteta prefers the German. Yet there are also sorts of games that explain the need for a specialist scorer. When Arteta's model otherwise worked well in 2023-24, Arsenal drew a blank in five league games. That number remained the same last year, but there were 18 when they scored one or none; for Liverpool, the corresponding figure was just seven. They were the occasions when they required the professional predator, the scrappy goal. It hasn't really been their way. But then perhaps there has been a belated recognition that, as Arsenal came second, second and second, that another dimension is needed. No Arsenal player has scored 20 Premier League goals in a season since Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang in 2019-20, which the Gunners ended with Arteta in charge, but started under Unai Emery. Indeed, in all competitions, only Saka, in 2023-24, has reached the 20 mark in a full campaign under Arteta. Stay fit and Gyokeres ought to improve on that. Maybe moving to focus on one striker will come at a cost to the goal returns of others, but, in the 35 seasons since 1990, there are only six in which no Arsenal player has reached 18 goals in all competitions. Four of them were under Arteta. His methods have worked up to a point. Now Gyokeres is the face of a change in approach.
Yahoo
26-04-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
95 years ago: Arsenal's first FA Cup final win
It has been 95 years since Arsenal lifted their first FA Cup, a historic moment that laid the foundation for the club's dominance in the competition. Today, Arsenal stand as the most successful team in FA Cup history with 14 titles, but their journey to that first triumph in 1930 was anything but straightforward. Photo by J. Gaiger/TopicalAt the time, Arsenal had existed for more than 40 years without winning a major trophy. Under Herbert Chapman, they had begun to show promise, finishing as FA Cup runners-up, semi-finalists, and quarter-finalists in previous years. Advertisement Yet, they still needed to take that final step. In 1930, the FA Cup provided the breakthrough. Entering in the third round, Arsenal dispatched Chelsea 2-0, with goals from Jack Lambert and Cliff Bastin. A hard-fought replay win over Birmingham City followed, before Middlesbrough, West Ham, and Hull City were eliminated in the later rounds. The semi-final replay victory over Hull sent Arsenal back to Wembley for the second time in four years. Photo by E. F. Corcoran/TopicalOn April 26, 1930, in front of 92,499 spectators, Arsenal faced Huddersfield Town. Alex James, signed at the start of the season, opened the scoring after a one-two with Bastin before turning provider for Lambert, who secured the 2-0 victory. Advertisement The celebrations lasted long after the crowd had gone home – Arsenal had their first major trophy. The win marked a turning point. Arsenal dominated the 1930s, winning five league titles and another FA Cup in 1936, cementing themselves as England's premier club. Photo byFast forward to the present, and Arsenal's FA Cup fortunes have wavered. Since Mikel Arteta's 2020 triumph, his first season in charge, the Gunners have struggled in the competition. They exited in the fourth round in 2021 (Southampton, away) and 2023 (Manchester City, away), and in the third round in 2022 (Nottingham Forest, away) and 2024 (Liverpool, home). Advertisement This season, they fell at the same stage, losing on penalties to Manchester United at the Emirates Stadium. Photo byDespite recent disappointments, the FA Cup remains deeply woven into Arsenal's identity, thanks largely to the seven that Arsene Wenger won, making him the greatest manager in the competition's history.
The Guardian
28-03-2025
- Sport
- The Guardian
The forgotten story of … Arsenal's wooden training shed
'The men are not deviating by one hair's breadth from the ordinary system of training. To alter that system even for a Cup final would be folly,' the Arsenal manager Herbert Chapman said, four days before the 1927 FA Cup final. A description of that system was provided by the London Daily News. 'Just before 10 each morning the players assemble and take ball practice,' it wrote. 'This is varied by sprints on the track, as well as a light programme of physical jerks in the dressing room. Lunch is a modest item. An underdone steak varied with a small fillet of fried plaice or sole, plus a light vegetable ration, is the diet chiefly fancied, and fruit, raw and stewed, is popular with nearly all the men. The liquids at lunch are mainly non-intoxicants.' But it was not exactly true that Arsenal's training methods had gone unchanged. The first hint of this came when they moved their sessions behind closed doors a couple of days before the final, leading to 'all sorts of rumours that they were training secretly with new and mysterious devices which would render them unbeatable', according to one newspaper report. And the rumours were half true: yes, there was a mysterious device; no, it did not render them unbeatable (in fact they lost 1-0 to Cardiff). The secret device was a largely wooden structure with one open end, a sloped floor, and internal surfaces with a variety of curves and angles. A football kicked into it would be returned in an unpredictable direction, forcing the player doing the kicking to improvise a way of controlling it. It had been installed at Highbury a couple of weeks earlier by its inventor, a Trevor Lowe of Sheffield, at a cost of about £60 excluding painting (the equivalent of about £3,000 today). Joe Hulme played for Arsenal in the Cup final at outside right. 'Roughly the idea is this: the player kicks the ball hard at some boards, which are so shaped that the ball comes back at different angles, as well as at different heights,' he wrote. 'The player has to keep getting the ball as it comes back, trapping it perhaps, possibly getting it under control, or as his fancy dictates, taking another quick shot. A moment's thought will serve to show that this sort of training should have the effect of making a player quicker on his feet, should decrease the length of time he takes to get the ball under control. It is meant to make us think and act more quickly. I may add that I believe it has benefited me personally, and the rest of the team are of the same opinion.' The trend in British football for some time – not one that Chapman ever had much truck with – had been to avoid training with footballs altogether, largely out of a concern that players would get bored of them. As the former Tottenham and Wolves coach Elijah Morse put it: 'There cannot be the slightest shadow of doubt that the trainer who gives his men too much ball practice during the week is heading for staleness at breakneck pace. As sure as fate, if fellows are given too much ball practice there comes a day when they lose their keenness. I have sometimes felt I would like to hide the ball away right through the week, because I knew full well that the fellows would be keen as mustard after it on the Saturday afternoon.' But not only was it felt that footballs could bore footballers, they could also drain them and injure them. 'When I was a member of the Aston Villa team and Joe Grierson was the trainer, we had little or no ball practice,' wrote Joe Bache, the former Villa and England striker who went on to coach in England and Germany. 'After the first three practice games the ball was put away for the season. He hated the idea of members of the first team playing about with the ball, and thought it added to the possibility of injury.' Grierson won six league titles between 1894 and 1910 and took Villa to second place on another six occasions, so clearly at the time his ideas were, at the very least, no sillier than anyone else's. Meanwhile others just did not believe that practising with footballs made much difference to anything. 'After the age of 22 a player is either a footballer or he never will be, and it is very doubtful whether practice with the ball will benefit him,' said Arsenal's Alex James, whose technique was famously masterful, in 1929. 'Personally I like to feel the touch of the ball during the week, and at the Arsenal we have it out every day. I know, however, that at some clubs the ball is rarely seen except on match days.' Lowe happened to introduce his device just as these attitudes were starting to unravel. Still, he initially found the game slow to embrace it. 'I offered my invention to the local clubs first, but they would not have it,' he said. 'I then asked other clubs to give it a trial, but they declined to do so and would not even look at it. One [top-flight] club said that it did not interest them because only one man could be trained at a time. That is one of the advantages of the device, because the ball keeps coming back to the same man and he has to return it, instead of leaving it to one of the other players. It teaches the players to be quicker on the ball. The Arsenal have only had the device three weeks, but I think it has already improved their play.' As he tried to promote his invention Lowe claimed, a little dubiously, that 'in one month this device will make any player – old or young – two-fifths of a second faster in ball control', and that 'any player can improve the accuracy of both feet in ball control, kicking and shooting 100% in one month by 10 minutes' thoughtful practice each training day'. It was advertised with a ringing endorsement from Chapman, who said that 'our management and players all agree it is the best device ever known for training footballers'. Wolves installed a training shed shortly after Arsenal and over the following years it spread around the land. A century later it is hard to know exactly which clubs bought one, but local newspapers report Lincoln City installing one in 1930, Birmingham in 1931, Manchester United the following February and Blackpool and Preston in the summer of 1932, the year the Sheffield Daily Telegraph reported it was 'so popular at some grounds a time limit for practice on it has had to be fixed'. Chelsea got one in 1933 and the following year one of Lowe's local teams, Sheffield Wednesday, finally succumbed. At all these clubs and many more, Lowe's training shed helped to bring balls back to training. Across the country coaches were reaching the same groundbreaking, gamechanging conclusion: players don't become stale because they train with a football, they become stale if training is boring. At which point all sorts of crazy stuff started to happen. Sign up to Football Daily Kick off your evenings with the Guardian's take on the world of football after newsletter promotion It was at around this time that head tennis was first described as a training tool. Tom Griffiths of Wales and Bolton praised Lowe's device in 1932, though his club did not have one. They did, however, include in their training regime 'what might be called, for lack of a better word, compulsory golf', as well as regular games of crown green bowling. At Wrexham they played baseball, and at Reading Billy Butler introduced games of netball, insisting 'half an hour of it is the equivalent of a 10-mile run, and far more enjoyable'. At Bradford City planks of wood would be placed around the training pitch, with players penalised for hitting them with their passes. Chelsea returned from a tour of Argentina in 1931 saying they had been astonished by the technique of their opponents and with details of how they had honed it. 'They got their good ball control through training with chickens,' Chelsea's chairman, Colonel Charles Crisp, explained. 'A chicken was allowed to run in front, and a player followed it, running, as did the chicken, from side to side, thus cultivating 'body swerve'.' It's hard to know to what extent this caught on in England, but two years later Everton's Warney Cresswell was enthusing about how 'an excellent form of training for football would be to work for a time on a poultry farm'. In 2000 Alex Ferguson would condense his outlook as a coach to this: 'All my life I've felt it is my job to create an environment where players are enjoying training, they look forward to it. If you get that right and if you don't allow the quality to drop then you will see the results on Saturday.' It is almost exactly what Sammy Crooks, the England and Derby winger, espoused in 1930, soon after winning his fifth England cap at the age of 22. 'Anyone who thinks of the matter carefully will realise that one of the snags about this training business is that it is apt to become a matter of routine,' he wrote. 'And routine work, as we all know, is boring. A certain amount of running and so much ball practice must of necessity be included in the training regime. But variety is the spice of the footballer's life when he is training, just as it is the spice of life in general. 'From what I have gathered in my talks with old players I have come to the conclusion that with the passing of the years training ideas have changed somewhat. And the changes have been directed at dodging the boredom. The player who turns up looking forward to his training will be a better footballer than the one who, going through the same routine every day, gets fed up with it all. You must train with enthusiasm to train with effect.' This was the time when players first prioritised training with enthusiasm – and, for at least some of them, with an odd, wonky wooden shed.
