- 7 hours ago
Arsenal’s took another huge step towards a first Premier League title in 22 years this weekend, with a 4-1 demolition in the North London Derby. But with Thomas Frank’s men putting 11 behind the ball, how did the Gunners find it so easy to open them up? Adam Clery looks at Mikel Arteta’s tactics, and shows how they exploited a massive weakness in the Tottenham gameplan.
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00:00Right, hello everybody, welcome to the Adam Cleary Football Channel, Adam Cleary obviously,
00:04and by way of introduction, today we're going to show you how Arsenal came up against a team
00:11who set up like this, that's five at the back and two very handy defensive midfielders in front of
00:16them, and yet were able to routinely manufacture situations like this. Their very best striker
00:25of a ball on the edge of the box with both space and impunity, because this happening once against
00:32this sort of setup is pretty good going, but just to spoil a graph I'm going to be using later
00:37in
00:37the video, they did it eight separate times and scored from four of them. So yes, just in case
00:43that wasn't immediately obvious, this is how Arsenal f***ing destroyed Tottenham.
00:54And as an aside, today we are being sponsored by Surfshark.
00:59Right, so these were your respective starting 11s for this match, and I will tell you now,
01:04as a neutral, right, that this was one of the most one-sided derby games relative to the strength
01:11of both squads I have ever, ever seen, because Tottenham, going into this, were the Premier League's
01:18best away team. And I'm not making that up, this is the away table from before the match. They're on
01:24the same points as Chelsea, with a game less, only three goals conceded, the joint best goal difference,
01:31but you would never ever have thought that if you were watching this game. They looked repeatedly like
01:35they had no idea how to get at Arsenal, and Arsenal were just brilliant in terms of both their game
01:41plan
01:42from the start and the way in which the individuals then went and executed it. Now we're going to talk
01:47about both of those things in this video, right, but I'm just, I'm going to do Spurs first to get
01:52them out of the way, because what I really want to talk about is how good Arsenal were, but I
01:57think
01:57there is still some important context in just how bad Thomas Frank got this wrong. And even just before
02:03this match kicked off, the vibes were coming off the Tottenham team sheet in big, wavy, green lines.
02:10And don't get me wrong, five at the back in a game like this, I don't actually hate that,
02:14if you do what they did against PSG, which is have three players in the middle, two up front,
02:19Kudus as one of the central out balls, and just really get in their face with it. You'd see right
02:24from the start, that was not what was happening here, it was another flat four in front, and
02:29Richarlison all on his own against two centre-backs. Like, I audibly went,
02:36like five minutes into this game, when this loose ball goes back to Vicario, and he does
02:41the classic 93rd minute, I won't pick this up unless you make me trick. We have barely kicked
02:48off here, and you are trying to slow the game down, and by a couple of seconds, you are treating
02:52a 0-0 in the fifth minute, like it's a 1-0 in the 93rd. Don't get me wrong, frustrating
02:59Arsenal, shithousing them, congesting the middle of the pitch, all very smart. I like
03:04that, but you do need to have something, anything, going the other way, and here, they quite
03:12categorically did not. And what's weird is it almost felt deliberate, because the handful
03:15of free kicks they picked up around the halfway line, they loaded the box with their centre-backs,
03:21and had Vicario take them. And that might not look that unusual, goalkeepers take long kicks
03:26into the box all the time, but it's normally very late on in the game, not from the very start,
03:31so it sort of smacked as it having been discussed as their best or only route to goal.
03:37But given they didn't have a single shot on goal until Richarlison did his best Kenny
03:40McLean tribute act, I think it's fair to say that Thomas Frank got this assessment of
03:45the match, got his setup really badly wrong. He did not give his players a chance to go
03:51out there and get anything, I think. In fact, what I really could not get my head around was
03:56the way in which Tottenham wanted to press Arsenal, because on the rare occasions, right,
04:01where you'd have Kudus or Odebeer jump out to try and support Richarlison, disrupt Arsenal's build-up,
04:07at best, they were finding themselves in a three versus five situation. And at worst,
04:14doing that leaves Arsenal these little areas here, the spaces either side of Paulinha and
04:20Benton Kerr, which is where Arsenal do all of their best rotations. That's where they tend to be
04:26at their strongest. So none of this, to me, made any sense. I couldn't even see what they were trying
04:32to do. Like, arguably, Arsenal's two strongest areas are here in the build-up and here in these
04:37inside channels. So sending two lads to press a situation they can't do anything in, while opening
04:44the door for Arsenal to overload you behind them, just makes no sense. Thomas Frank even said after the
04:50game that the idea was for them to be really aggressive from front to back, press Arsenal
04:55really high and basically do what they did in the PSG game. But just, I don't know, I don't see
05:01how you
05:02can do that with this set-up. So either he's just said that because it sounds good, or there is
05:07a
05:07total disconnect between what he wanted his players to do and what they were actually doing. And yet,
05:15for 36 minutes of this game, you did start to think, they might actually get away with this, you know?
05:22Arsenal's only real chance before the goal looked a bit weird and awkward, but it was actually
05:27an indication of exactly what it was they were trying to do to Tottenham. And it ends up being
05:34a better bit of foreshadowing than you have seen in any single Marvel movie. The flick from Eze is
05:40brilliant, but he is squarely in the number 10 position. Not in the inside left where he is at
05:46his best, not in the inside right where he was allegedly starting, but squarely in the number 10
05:52position. And just take a second to look at the positions of Paulina and Benton Kerr. They are the
05:59two players who should be protecting that exact position, and yet they have been dragged out onto
06:05that right-hand side and then bypassed with a ball into the middle. And my God, is that going to
06:12be a
06:12theme of this video? This means that when Eze gets the ball, that is a wild amount of space to
06:18find
06:19yourself with against a team who are using a back five and have two defensive midfielders. And this
06:25very idea of clearing out Benton Kerr and Paulina by overloading Tottenham down this right-hand side and
06:32then moving it from there into Eze in the middle was Arsenal's entire game plan. And if we have a
06:40look, and I'll just clear out all of these, sorry lads out the way one second, at Arsenal's entire pass
06:47map from that first half, which I would not normally show you, by the way, because that is too much
06:52information. It's too many green lines. It's very difficult to see clear patterns, but I am showing
06:57you it here because it is nuts. The clear difference in how they were probing Tottenham
07:05down this right-hand side versus the left is absolutely staggering.
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09:07They were just constantly moving the ball down this side and if you look at the numbers of the
09:13players involved here, like obviously there's Saka and there's Timber because they were playing
09:17on that side, but we've also got Rice in there, Saliba, Zubamendi, even Eze himself. This is about
09:24as clear a picture of an idea being executed as I could ever possibly show you. This was how they
09:30wanted to probe Tottenham's block, which, yep, that does sound absolutely filthy, but just bear
09:37with me. Normally, you would try and do that centrally, wouldn't you? Like if, as in this
09:41example here, Mourinho drops out of the last line, that could potentially drag Romero with him, but he
09:48does not follow him because the space in front is so tightly guarded by Paulina and Bentonker. So
09:54without any obvious way to pull a centre-back out of position and get somebody in behind, what they're
09:59doing instead is adding more and more bodies to this area of the pitch until Bentonker and Paulina
10:05are forced to come over and support, at which point you bypass them by going this way instead of through
10:13the middle. And if you put all of those bits of information together, right, right-sided overload,
10:19centre-backs not dropping, bypassing the defensive midfielders, you get Arsenal's first goal. Arsenal
10:25have Saka, Timber, Saliba and Rice in this zone, right? Bentonker and Paulina have to come over
10:31to help. Mourinho drops off the front, the defenders do not go with him, the pass comes inside, he gets
10:38it and he has this much space. And obviously that alone does not get you the goal, like Paulina actually
10:45does get back across, but the point is there's not a single bit of pressure on the ball while Mourinho
10:51has got it and he, along with loads of other players in this Arsenal side, are good enough
10:55to hurt you in that situation. Which of course he does, the run from Trossard's really good, he floats
11:01a brilliant ball in and yes, okay, the finish is very fortunate, but they've just got in twice
11:07doing that exact same thing and those little deflections can just happen when you're panicking,
11:13trying to get a block in. And the second goal on first viewing does look a bit different because
11:17the cross gets cut out along the way and Paulina and Bentonker do get back in, but go to the
11:22replay, you've got Arsenal with four players down this side again and also again, where
11:28is the screen? One is on the touchline, the other is 15 yards away from Eze. So it does
11:33get cleared, yes, but when it goes all the way back to Rice, look at how much room Eze has
11:39on the edge of that box. Against a back five with two defensive midfielders, once again they
11:45have loads of space, 18 yards from goal. It's genuinely crazy watching this back, just how
11:51easy they found it to get the ball in here once they'd overloaded that side. The third
11:56goal here, and you're not going to believe this, but Arsenal have five players now down
12:01this right-hand side, Paulina and Bentonker, their highlight is here, Eze is in behind them
12:06with space in front and after it bubbles around a bit, stop it when the pass comes in. Against
12:12a back five with two defensive midfielders, I am almost sick of saying it at this point,
12:17he is completely free on the edge of the box. And none of these goals are tap-ins, by the
12:23way, like the two Eze finishes up until this point are both absolutely fantastic, but that
12:28is what players at this level can do to you if you turn up in a massive away game with
12:35the
12:35mindset of, we do not give them any space in the middle and when they rotate in front of
12:40us, we do not break the shape, but then end up leaving a player as good as Eze free on
12:47the edge of the box just because you're slightly worried about them having a man extra on the
12:52touchline. That doesn't work. Like, Eze's heat map in this game is just absolutely nuts,
12:57like he is starting as the right-sided number eight. Martin Odegaard's position, so he's picking
13:03up the ball loads in the same space as he would, but he's spending almost the exact same amount
13:08of time having almost the exact same contribution to this game from here. 18 yards from goal
13:15against a team who for that first 45 minutes at least barely moved from the edge of their
13:20own box. I am truly sorry to any Tottenham fans who are still watching the video at this
13:25point, right? But if you need like a graph-based laugh, then, well, first of all, you can just
13:30look at the momentum chart for this game. If these are new to you, they measure like combined
13:34factors of possession, passes, chances, all of that. And Tottenham, who would have gone
13:39fourth today if they'd won, by the way, are not even really on it. But mainly, it's this
13:45overlay of all of Arsenal's chances because you've got a few headers near the goal and a
13:50few why the hell not. I think that's Saka's free kick. But by and large, every single chance
13:55Arsenal managed to create, again, against a back five with two defensive midfielders, is
14:00from this exact area centrally on the edge of the box. It's the position on the pitch
14:06where you least want to give a chance up from. Tottenham spent massive chunks of the
14:11game camped out like this, and yet you could still throw a frigging beach towel over most
14:18of Arsenal's goals on goal. That's... I haven't got the words. But more than this, right, I think
14:25if I'm Mikel Arteta, the thing that pleases me the most about this match is not that you've
14:31got the game plan absolutely spot on or the players executed it really well, right? It's
14:35that the fourth goal in the 76th minute against an opponent who's done nothing but shoot from
14:42the centre circle, right, comes from the fact you are still working really hard and pressing
14:48them high up the pitch. You can see Arteta on the touchline here screaming at them to get
14:53up as Spurs play the ball back and Vacario now does not want to go long because they
14:58change the formation. But Eze, Mourinho, Rice and Saka all jump up, lock on man for man and
15:05stop him having any options. They prevent Tottenham from playing out from the back, they force it
15:09back to the goalie, force him to go long, then eat up the aerial ball. And if you just stop
15:16it, when it gets to Mikel Moreno, right, look at Trossard wanting to get up and support more than
15:23Spence wants to get back and cover. He was five yards the other side a couple of seconds ago but
15:28he breaks, he gets in, he leaves him behind, he finds Eze in the exact same space again and it's
15:35game over, hat-rick, see you later. And we mentioned before, didn't we, like this possible disconnect
15:40between what Thomas Frank was saying he wanted his players to do and what the reality was on the
15:45pitch? Well, look at Arteta at the start of that sequence and look at exactly what happens. That
15:52is night and day. So yes, my Arsenal supporting friends have asked me to stop saying this because
15:59I'm gonna ruin it apparently but I think it's their title to lose now. Like they're the best team,
16:07playing the best football, getting the best results. They're without loads of players,
16:11they're missing their best centre-back, their playmaker. Probably three lads who would start
16:15up front before Moreno and they scored four goals here and could have had more. Like I'm serious,
16:23Man City haven't had a bigger way win in over a year. The wheels have completely fallen off at
16:28Liverpool and if they beat Chelsea this weekend it would be their fourth defeat of the season already.
16:36And over the last couple of seasons that's about the most amount of games you can afford to lose
16:40if you want to win the league. And it would be November. So yes, not to put the ACFC kiss
16:46of
16:46death on all of this but this was the performance and the result of a team who are going to
16:52go on
16:52and win the Premier League, I think. But of course what is far more important than that is what
16:58you think, Arsenal fans. Is this your season? Was this just a very nice day at the office? All comments
17:04or thoughts or feelings, song, verse, poetry, however you like to express yourself, it's all
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17:39the Adam Cleary Football Channel. I have been Adam Cleary on his football channel and that
17:43was how you win a derby. Hoo boy! And such. Goodbye.
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