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Safe Harbor

I am not a huge fan of turning sports into simplistic allegory. Indulge me, though. This Arsenal team us set up to be conservative, and conservatism – in most walks of life – is a philosophy of control, of limits, of non-expression, of comfort borne from predictability and familiarity.

We see it in art, in architecture (my chosen field). Systems are followed. Rules are adhered to. Ordering. Known-ness. Sometimes that order can be comforting, thanks to the aforementioned familiarity. We recognize something, we thus feel safer within and around it. But familiarity can also become too predictable and veer towards the authoritarian. And there’s no room for the improviser in such an authoritarian system. It’s too risky. Too much is unknown.

If one is uncomfortable relinquishing control then forget it, having a player who might not do exactly what you want or expect isn’t an option. Because they aren’t in control, or under control. And I am realizing that’s where we are – all other factors acknowledged (like an imbalanced squad, or players on expiring contracts, or injuries, or just plain sub-standard talent). We have a manager who seeks control, who asks for and basks in the familiar.

We have a manager who wants roles played with predictability, who is fundamentally conservative. And I am not that, politically or otherwise. I don’t prefer that kind of sameness, especially not in sports, entertainment, and in my own work. I don’t prefer rote repetition. Invention is difficult, brings risk, but also reward in the new, unexpected. It can often result in artfulness.

So I don’t believe in the world (or, at least, footballing) view that seems to be Unai Emery’s. One can surely argue that conservatism is what we need in this moment, with the team in this state, the talent below what we’ve come to expect, and with the squad turning over.

But yesterday, and against Brighton, and Huddersfield, and West Ham, and others, it seems the evidence is mounting that this just isn’t the time for a manager who prefers a safe harbor.

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Grow a Spline!

In the aftermath of our first day loss to Manchester City, I revert to architecture (since that’s my chosen profession). Or, at least, to the terms of architecture for which I have a greater ability to explain the words of a visual language. With a fresh manager, calls for patience for the team to become familiar with a new system, and a sense that the club will need many games (if not an entire season) to un-learn previous habits while automating new ones, I thought of a particular architectural term: “spline”. Wikipedia defines “spline” thus:

In the computer science subfields of computer-aided design and computer graphics, the term spline more frequently refers to a piecewise polynomial parametric curve. Splines are popular curves in these subfields because of the simplicity of their construction, their ease and accuracy of evaluation, and their capacity to approximate complex shapes through curve fitting and interactive curve design.

More simply, a spline is like a piece of spaghetti, curving smoothly in a number of directions around specific inflection points. Up, down, around, back. A spline is not a ray. It’s not a mono-directional vector, or even a jagged set of vectors (like what an EKG looks like, connecting point-to-point). It’s a smooth curve, rising and falling, moving in and out, bending around nodes where direction changes with some smoothness. I expect Arsenal’s season to track more like a spline – with accomplishments and stumbles, happening not in sequence but in simultaneity. I expect to see a path – not of direct, linear improvement – but of fits and starts, of growth and setback, also happening in the same time and space. While game results can offer one important measure of “success”, that measure is binary.  For many, wins and losses are all that matters – quite understandably. But the broader, longer-term changes in our team are not evident in the measurements of a binary system. They come in more subjective assessments of our growth and adaptation, and they will need to be viewed in the context of a much wider window of games and performance. Our path of improvement is going to wrap itself all around, not simply in the binary system of good and bad, win or lose, it will be like a snake with a terrible sense of direction. That’s a spline.

I was also reminded of Manchester City’s 2016-17 season, the first under Pep Guardiola, in which that squad finished third, a work-in-progress stepping-stone of a season whose benefits would be reaped in 2017-2018. And that season tells me a really intriguing month-to-month story which we ought to take into deep consideration as we anticipate how Arsenal may grow in to Emery’s coaching. It reminded me that the longer game is critical, and that some of what he tries may not work at all, and that may not necessarily be a bad thing. City began that season with six consecutive wins – and did not lose until early October. It wasn’t really until December that things went south. 13 of 27 points in the dead of winter, perfection in February and May (21 of 21 points) sandwiching two other dreadful months (March and April, where City only took 14 of 27 points). That season was all over the place, a bit all-or-nothing (5 near-perfect months, four terrible ones). I don’t need to situate it “in the long run”, since we all know what happened this past season and what might seemingly repeat itself this year.

There isn’t likely going to be a straight line improvement of Arsenal from month to month, as the players learn Emery and his system. There will be stretches of improvement, and stretches of regression. There will be noticeable gains in performance and successes on the field. But there will also be stinkers, swaths of time within and across games where nothing goes right, where we can’t press effectively and where we can’t hit the back of the net.

I am doing my best to accept that this season is much more likely to take the form of a spline, and not a line vector.

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Emery: Bored?

Some gathered thoughts about the recent changes at Arsenal. Not sure why anyone cares what I think (likely nobody does) but here goes.

I favored Arteta, partly for the freshness of it all. It was attractive to think we had identified the next guy, and that he had a legacy at Arsenal. It was romantic. Add in that he is working for Guardiola and we’ve got some gilt-by-association, with seemingly limitless potential. But that’s dangerous thinking, it’s a container we size ourselves, and it likely leads to disappointment. It’s hugely unfair to the next hire, whomever it might be. Thinking that we might have missed out on the “next Pep” is hyperbole, inflating expectations to a point where there’s sure to be disappointment in any managerial hire, whether Arteta or not-Arteta. It sets too high a bar, one which is unrealistic to reach.

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I’m frustrated. Not with Arsenal. But with the atmosphere that causes people to instantly buy all the tales being floated by the media about how things went down, and those who use the tales to fit the narrative they want. The media can’t have zero credibility and then suddenly have total credibility. There’s a breathless drama played out as we devour these transfer rumors, stories about slide presentations, and crafted images of jilted lovers sitting by the phone in anticipation of their suitor calling. And there’s simultaneous dismissal of the print hacks who peddle any cut-rate rumor that comes into their messaging app from a tight “source”.

We can’t have it both ways. We can’t believe everything they say that we agree with and nothing they report that we don’t. We can’t be even less critical of their reporting than they are of themselves, based on how things typically play out. We know very little. The chaos of the reporting doesn’t necessarily reflect chaos within the team (though it may exist, we don’t know). But we get people proclaiming about the mess that Arsenal is, stated with authority as if it’s open and obvious that there’s drama and indecision and waffling and reversals of decisions behind the executive doors. And we have zero ability to prove this. There are way too many false, or at least highly speculative, conclusions being drawn.

And on to us. As I see it the Arsenal fan base is somewhat conventionally splintered – and has been – despite an asymmetrical volume that amplifies certain voices. Some wanted Arsene out. Loudly and rudely. Many wanted him out, respectfully. And a silent many were content for him to continue. Pretty typical if you ask me. For those who wanted him out respectfully (myself included) it fell to this kind of reasoning:  the game has passed Arsene by, he doesn’t change his tactics quickly, if at all. He has too much control over everything. We need something new, different.

Then Arsenal hire a young-ish, obsessive researcher of a coach with tactical rigor. Perhaps not the former captain, the legacy guy, perhaps not the 30 year old wunderkind, the hipster German, perhaps not THE guy that even I wanted. Maybe they hired a guy who will fail (in fact, it’s likely that he will fail relative to the expectations we all have for our team). But he is most certainly a change, and a big one: Emery is a man of tactical attentiveness, a man of logistics and discipline, a man of a different generation, a man without consolidated power and a scouting machine behind (ahead of?) him. Almost everything that a lot of us asked for, at least in theory.

But we get a lot of this, in the reactive moment:

“Arsenal leadership is too boring, safe. Arsenal is without ambition, maybe even rudderless and chaotic. Arsenal was perhaps even duped by a slide show”.

There really seems to be very little room for reasoned response. Why not say “well, I preferred Jardim, but I can understand that they see very specific and similar qualities in Emery”? Or “the exciting enigma of Arteta, his growing intellect and educational pedigree under Pep, would have been my choice but I can understand that at this time there is too much unknown about him”? Or “it’s nice to want Nagelsmann, but he would have cost us money on top of his new contract, and while that’s where I would have spent the money I understand why the club did not”?

We react quickly, emotionally. Understandably. And often entertainingly (and thank goodness for that). But we might be better served to wait, to critique constructively, to analyze, to learn, and then wait again. To see what happens. And then to see what happens after that.

I, for one, am excited to wait, to see what happens. A bunch of times. Because it’s going to take waiting.

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Ok, that’s it. Off to scour Twitter for reliable ridiculous transfer rumors.