Five captains ... but Arsenal are leaderless
UNAI Emery says he wants leaders in Arsenal’s team and has named five captains for this season. That doesn’t mean he has five captains, of course. It means he hasn’t got one.
If a club have a great captain, they don’t need four others. There were plenty of strong characters in the Arsenal team led by Tony Adams, but only one captain. The same with Chelsea and John Terry. One imagines with Didier Drogba, Michael Ballack and Frank Lampard around they were not short of strong views in the dressing room. Just one captain, though. Gary Neville and Paul Scholes don’t appear short of opinions, either — but Sir Alex Ferguson did not create a management group at Manchester United. He gave an armband to Roy Keane.
When Emery made a player who will not feature in 2018, Laurent Koscielny, Arsenal’s ‘first captain’, followed by Petr Cech, Aaron Ramsey, Mesut Ozil and Granit Xhaka, it smacked of indecision and a dearth of genuine leaders.
How, for instance, is Ozil meant to inspire his team-mates, when he cannot even inspire himself to chase back on losing the ball? Having thrived, like all good clubs, with strong leaders, the rot set in at Arsenal with Arsene Wenger making a succession of injured players club captain. It meant that between November 22, 2014 and October 14, 2017, Arsenal went an astonishing 110 consecutive Premier League games without naming the club captain in their starting line-up. Maybe Emery thinks it gives Koscielny a boost to deliver an armband he cannot wear until January at the earliest. It doesn’t. It leaves Arsenal weak again.
EVERY referee agrees that Everton’s Phil Jagielka deserved to be sent off for his tackle on Diogo Jota on Saturday, and they know the rules. Questions remain, though, over context. What option was there if not to try to retrieve a heavy touch with a tackle? Jagielka got it wrong, he lunged, he mistimed, it was a foul, and certainly a booking. But if the alternative to this gamble was to benignly wave Jota through unchallenged, should we not factor in a little more appreciation of the game?