‘Make your enemies toil when they relax. If you are full, starve to death. Once it’s stable, let it move.’ This is a part of Sun Tzu’s legendary book ‘The Art of War’. Many observations about Sun Tzu’s Art of War relate to war as a form of theater and the trick of getting into the opponent’s head and filling him with doubt. Few texts deal with the actual action of combat (in fairness, as the title suggests).
Last October, The Athletic recorded a podcast titled ”.How Arsenal mastered set pieces‘. With the rise of set-piece coaches across the game’s elite levels, dead-ball situations have become defined as much by strategy as combat. The devil is as present in the design as in the brutal physical force of the players competing for the ball.
Former Manchester City defender Nedum Onuoha forms part of the podcast panel and speaks lucidly about Arsenal’s plentiful set-piece productivity over the last two years. He talks about some of Arsenal’s routines less in terms of design and more in terms of theatrics and trickery from the perspective of someone trying to defend an Arsenal corner.
‘When you see all these big guys lining up and walking to the back post, you think, ‘They look like they know what they’re doing, they know what’s going to happen and we don’t.’ Or as Sun Tzu said, ‘Let your plans be as dark and impenetrable as the night. And when you move, let it fall like a thunderbolt.’ Much of Arsenal’s set-piece output comes from Arteta’s relentless passion for pushing every marginal advantage possible and Nicolas Jover’s intelligent design, but much of it is also theatrics.
Arsenal’s reputation for set plays is now ahead of them, which sets the tone for the corner and Jover and Arsenal will no doubt look to capitalize on the psychological aspect of the routine. Clearly, there’s a lot of clever tactical foreplay in these little menageries of chaos. Blockers, bait runners, consistent quality deliveries and plenty of guys over 6 feet tall in the area.
But dancing along the edge of synchronicity feels dramatic. The time it took Arsenal to deliver a corner kick began to attract the attention of the most careless pundit (Gary Neville). This is all part of the dance. In order to create doubt and anxiety in the minds of the opposition defenders, causing them to relax and lose concentration for a moment, they may even feel a bit of fear about the inevitable fact that the ball will land on Gabriel’s forehead in a completely unpredictable way.
Every corner of Arsenal is an ‘event’. If this were an American sport, you’d see ‘We Will Rock You’ blaring through the stadium as Bukayo Saka’s slow trot to the corner flag has Arsenal fans clapping and stamping their feet in unison. Last September, when Arsenal beat Spurs through Gabriel’s header from Saka’s corner, Saka’s staggered run to win the decisive corner drew little ‘oohs’ from some Arsenal fans on the away side before Gabriel scored his own goal. I even screamed. Enemy barricade.
And who better to explain the vaudeville edge of Arsenal’s corner routine than Ben White? His on-court bantering in the penalty area became so much that the PGMOL’s stuffed shirts felt the need to engage in yet another pointless ‘instruction’. White’s penchant for tickling goalkeepers and tying defenders’ shoelaces has become a form of moral panic in the Premier League.
Fortunately, Arsenal adapted and White also stayed one step ahead of the officials. Instead of giving Guglielmo Vicario a wedge at the Tottenham Hotspur Multi-purpose Entertainment Stadium, the pieces on the chessboard were mixed up and White ended up taking James Maddison for a walk to the hapless Spurs goalkeeper. This is like grabbing someone’s hand in soccer, punching them in the face, and then asking them, ‘Why are you hitting yourself?’
The fear of facing Arsenal’s set pieces is also spreading. Just before Gabriel struck the final blow in September’s north London derby, Spurs side Cam fan footage showed supporters looking away as Saka put the ball into the area. When the same player opened the scoring against West Ham last Saturday, Sky Sports commentator Rob Hawthorn exclaimed:Who else but Gabriel?‘ Makes him definitely the first centre-back in football history to ask ‘Who else?’ Right after the goal.
Through a mix of productivity, careful planning and plain old theatrics, Arsenal built an aura around set-pieces. This is very similar to the ‘aura’ built by Ferguson’s Manchester United, which saw the referee suffer from temporary blind spots whenever a United defender committed a foul. Own penalty area.
Delayed deliveries to set things up, the opponent’s butthole, Ben White’s custard pie, Gabriel’s inevitable appearance, teeth shining, neck veins running towards the corner flag with the opponent’s head resting on his joust, that’s pretty much the point of camp. Execution. In fact, if you speed up the video and add a cheerful piano soundtrack, it will look like a Charlie Chaplin movie.
Sun Tzu also wrote, ‘The best art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.’ Don’t misunderstand. When Arsenal take a corner kick, there is a lot of ‘battle’ on the temporary map of the opponent’s penalty area. Courage, strength, strategy, and sure execution. But at its core, there is also a sense of dramatic performance.
