The Arsenal Stadium Mystery –Unbelievable

Strange night
By Boris Mellor
November 2 2006

How Arsenal failed to score against CSKA Moscow is a complete mystery. It will take Scotland Yard’s most astute detective to solve this one. Although Wenger does have a theory of his own.

There is little need to report this match, all that is needed is to list 24 missed attempts at goal, some better than others. I have never seen a team so dominated go home with a clean sheet.

CSKA should hardly believe their luck, it wasn’t great defending that saved them; it was just Arsenal’s inability to score that let them off the hook. In the first half Arsenal had 15 chances! These weren’t any old chances; these were gold plated, diamond encrusted chances. Chances where an empty net loomed, and defenders were absent. But somehow the ball was sent wide, miss hit, miss directed, or hit straight at the goalkeeper. Just one example will do – Rosicky six yards out with an open goal in front of him, and with the goalie well to his left, managed to skew the ball into the keeper’s arms.

These were not missed by any old players, these were missed by world class international player chances, by the third highest scorer in the Champions League, by a man who always scores for Holland, by a man who scored one of the greatest goals at the World Cup. On and on it went, miss after miss, one every three minutes.

Their own efforts wore the team down and in the second half they only managed nine chances, still two more than CSKA managed all match, but they were getting stretched and then Moscow struck, catching Arsenal too high up the field. Only a great double save from Lehmann prevented a fate Arsenal didn’t deserve. Mind you, in football deserve has nothing to do with it.

So the problem was not a dearth of chances, or trying to walk the ball in the net. The problem was an inability to get the ball in the net. This is Arsenal’s Tiger Woods phase; some strange pressure is undermining the precision they normally have in putting the ball away. The timing has deserted them, they are not quite striking the ball cleanly.

Wenger believes he can solve the mystery; he explained it as the fact that each miss put more pressure on the next player to take a chance. Thus the pressure on the subsequent striker’s shoulders grew as the match progressed. It was a strange night indeed, watching so many chances go to waste was unbelievable, and by the start of the second half it had all the feeling of one of those nights when the ball was never going to go in, and so it was.

Quite rightly Wenger praised his team afterwards; the last thing they need is any more pressure. Class is permanent, form is temporary. They played some great football but didn’t get the result. Sometime, soon they will do both things together. They are still second in the group, four points will take them through. That will not be easy, but their fate is in their own hands. The words of Arsene sum it up well:

"The team played exceptionally well - maybe the best Champions League game since I have been here - and it gives us a lot of encouragement for the future."

"What this team has shown tonight I have not seen in many years in the Champions League and we have to take that in a positive way and keep believing in what we do."