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.