‘When the enemy is relaxed, make them toil. When full, starve them. When settled, make them move.’ This is a section from Sun Tzu’s legendary text ‘The Art of War.’ A lot of Sun Tzu’s observations in the Art of War relate to war as a form of theatre and deception of getting inside the head of your opponent and filling them with doubt. Very little of the text covers the actual act of combat (as implied by its title, in fairness).
Back in October, The Athletic recorded a podcast entitled ‘How Arsenal mastered setpieces’. With the increase in setpiece coaches across the elite level of the game, dead ball situations have become defined by strategy as much as combat. The devil is in the design just as much as it is in the brute physical force of the players competing for the ball.
Former Manchester City defender Nedum Onuoha forms part of the panel on the podcast and, in it, he lucidly talks about Arsenal’s rich vein of setpiece productivity over the last two years. He talks about some of Arsenal’s routines, not so much in terms of their design, but in terms of the sense of theatre and deception from the point of view of someone trying to defend an Arsenal corner.
‘You see all these big guys walking over to the back post in a line and you think, ‘they look like they know what they are doing, they know what is coming and we don’t.’ Or, as Sun Tzu put it, ‘Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.’ Because while a great deal of Arsenal’s output from setpieces comes from Arteta’s relentless appetite to push every single marginal gain as far as he possibly can and the intelligent design of Nicolas Jover, a lot it is theatre too.
Arsenal’s reputation from set plays precedes them now, which creates an aura around corners and Jover and Arsenal, undoubtedly, seek to tap into the psychological aspect of the routine. Clearly, there is lots of clever tactical foreplay to these small menageries of chaos. Blockers, decoy runners, consistently quality delivery and having a load of blokes over six feet tall in the area.
But dancing around the edges of the synchronicity is a sense of drama. The length of time that Arsenal take to deliver a corner is starting to come to the attention of even the most inattentive pundits (Gary Neville). This is all part of the dance. To create doubt and anxiety in the minds of the opposition defence, for them to untense for a second, drop their concentration, maybe even feel a little scared about the inevitability of the ball meeting Gabriel’s forehead in a totally unforeseeable way.
Every Arsenal corner is an ‘event.’ If this were American sport, Bukayo Saka’s slow trot to the corner flag would see ‘We Will Rock You’ sounding over the stadium tannoy with Arsenal fans clapping and stamping their feet in unison. Back in September, when Arsenal beat Spurs thanks to a Gabriel header from a Saka corner, Saka’s staggered run up to take the decisive corner was even marked with a small ‘woooooah’ from some Arsenal fans in the away end moments before Gabriel catapulted himself through the enemy barricade.
And who better to illustrate the Vaudevillian edge to Arsenal’s corner routines than Ben White? His acts of court jestering in the penalty area became so legion that the stuffed shirts at the PGMOL felt the need to become involved with another one of their pointless ‘directives.’ White’s penchant for tickling goalkeepers and tying defenders shoelaces together became a form of moral panic in the Premier League.
To their credit, Arsenal adapted and so did White to stay one step ahead of the bureaucrats. At the Tottenham Hotspur multipurpose entertainment arena, instead of giving Guglielmo Vicario a wedgie, the pieces on the chessboard were shuffled and White ended up taking James Maddison for a walk into the hapless Spurs goalkeeper. It was football’s equivalent of taking someone’s hand, striking it across their own face before asking, ‘why are you slapping yourself?’
The sense of dread when facing an Arsenal setpiece is spreading too. Just before Gabriel’s coup de grace in September’s North London derby, cam fan footage from the Spurs end showed supporters looking away as Saka bowled the ball into the area. When the same player opened the scoring at West Ham on Saturday, Sky Sports commentator Rob Hawthorne exclaimed ‘who else but Gabriel?’ making him surely the first centre-half in football history to be deemed worthy of a ‘who else?’ immediately following a goal.
Through a mixture of productivity, careful planning and plain old theatre, Arsenal have built themselves an aura around setpieces, much like the ‘aura’ that Ferguson’s Manchester United built that saw referees afflicted by temporary blindspots every time a United defender committed a foul in their own penalty area.
The delayed delivery to create a sense of occasion, the shithousing of opponents, Ben White’s custard pies and the inevitability of Gabriel emerging, teeth gleaming, neck veins bulging as he sprints to the corner flag with his opponent’s head resting on his joust, it’s almost camp in its execution. In fact, if you sped the footage up and gave it a jaunty piano soundtrack, it would look like a Charlie Chaplin movie.
Sun Tzu also wrote that ‘the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.’ Don’t get me wrong, there is plenty of ‘combat’ in the temporary battlefield of the opponent’s penalty area when Arsenal take a corner. There is courage, strength, strategy and unerring execution. But, at the heart of it all, there is a sense of performance in the dramatic sense too.
