THE PATTERN IS BECOMING disturbingly familiar for Arsène Wenger. Arsenal journey from their Highbury comfort zone and fail to cope with more robust opponents, triggering a response from their affronted manager, who is left bemoaning another victory for pragmatism over style. The difference on this occasion was that, while still dismissing Everton’s commendably determined performance as “physical combat”, Wenger chose not to overlook his team’s glaring deficiencies, conceding that his players must reacquaint themselves with the more basic arts or risk failure in their efforts to qualify for next season’s Champions League.
The bare statistics illustrate perfectly the problems confronting the Frenchman. Arsenal have suffered six of their seven league defeats away from home and only struggling Birmingham City and West Bromwich Albion have scored fewer goals on their travels. Indeed, it is more than a decade since the London club lost seven league games before February. The breathtaking, unbeaten title triumph of two seasons ago already seems a long, long time ago.
Crisis may be too strong a word, but with a hideously expensive new stadium to fill next season and Thierry Henry apparently wavering over his future at the club, Wenger is all too aware of the consequences of failing to finish in the top four and, to that end, admitted that his team can ill-afford another loss such as this one. The cerebral Frenchman rarely resorts to tub-thumping rhetoric, but even the most finely tuned of tactical brains cannot ignore the fact that Everton, as so many others before them, demonstrated that the game can be won with the heart as much as the mind. And the simple fact is, the home team’s well-planned and superbly executed game plan notwithstanding, Arsenal failed to show enough heart. Wenger acknowledged as much when he accepted that his team must toughen up. “We need to be much more muscular away from home,” he said. “T oday we were bullied. It becomes a psychological problem, for sure. This team is not as confident away from home, but football is football. We have to accept that that is not an excuse. We have to cope with the situation.” And the manager tellingly admitted: “Of course I’m concerned that we might even miss out on a Champions League place. That is our target and we cannot afford to lose any more games away from home like that.”
Never was the difference between the sides more clearly illustrated than when James Beattie shrugged off two feeble challenges from Philippe Senderos and Sol Campbell to steer Tim Cahill’s pass beyond Jens Lehmann for the decisive goal in the thirteenth minute. The forward declared: “My fitness is now a weapon,” but, in truth, he needed only a fraction of his armoury to break down such flimsy defences.
Not that Arsenal’s frailties were restricted to the back four, and the sight of Francesc Fàbregas sent off after a clash with Cahill, and Gilberto Silva being overrun by Everton’s tenacious midfield quartet, provided further ammunition to those who believe that Wenger would have been better to have found a replacement for Patrick Vieira before committing £12 million for Theo Walcott, the 16-year-old striker.
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“You know when things aren’t going right for the opposition,” Alan Stubbs, the Everton defender, said, twisting the knife. “Players say things, you can see things aren’t going well. They have some of the best players in the world, but if you get stuck in, they don’t like it.”
If Wenger was left contemplating another afternoon of underachievement, David Moyes, his counterpart at Everton, was entitled to revel in a fourth successive win that confirmed that his team’s problems during the first half of the season are gone.
Beattie’s return to form typifies Everton’s turnaround. “On today’s form, you could see why James was selected for England two years ago,” Moyes said.
How Wenger must wish for a similar reversal of fortune.