We’re told the world works best when the elderly plant trees for shade they’ll never enjoy. We’re told to return the wallet, tidy up after ourselves, put things back where they belong. Especially when no one’s watching.

Danusha Laméris wrote a poem about these small kindnesses.

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
[…]
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”

Feeling responsible for others is a worthwhile, even a beautiful, thing. A society requires it. At least, a functioning one does.

But how much is too much to carry?

In football, and maybe in life, teacher’s pets have usually earned their title. Every manager is after the hardest runners, the best communicators, the gesturing pointers, the subtle coverers. For the individual, the benefits of this go beyond altruism: feeling a sense of duty gives us motivation, resilience, and better performance under stress.

But I’ve always been interested in decision fatigue as a footballing concept. We see how it manifests in our everyday lives:

“The more choices you have to make, the more it can wear on your brain, and it may cause your brain to look for short cuts,” said Dr. Lisa MacLean. “There are four main symptoms: procrastination, impulsivity, avoidance and indecision.”

[…]

“If your brain is worn down, it may cause you to become more reckless with your decision making or not think things through,” she added. It can also “cause you to simply do nothing, which can cause even more problems.”

The world clatters in to remind us of our limits. Knowing my readers, or at least liking to think I do, I don’t doubt there are a few ‘over-responsible personality types’ among you. The result is So Many Fucking Decisions: good intentions, even some good deeds, and the reliable hum of overwhelm. Clinical psychology studies link it to anxiety and perfectionism, the natural byproduct of people feeling personally responsible for every outcome they might be loosely connected to, even when they aren’t the main character.

This is no excuse to detach. We should do everything we can to help our distant cousins when they struggle, even if we know they’re ultimately responsible for themselves. We should recycle, even if we know the ones doing the real damage don’t give a shit. We should read the news, despair, and still try to do something about it. Maybe we should acknowledge our limits, or maybe we should deny their existence, but regardless, we should reset and go again.

Easier said than done. In a sporting context, this feeling of “over-responsibility” can become cognitive overload. If you try to track every runner, give every instruction, and execute your own role, it may work. Some superhumans do pull it off. Often, though, your abilities may naturally hit an outer boundary. Accuracy and decision speed collapse.

We still love such players. One of the clearest examples right now is also a personal fave: Fede Valverde. The 27-year-old Uruguayan legitimately has almost every quality you’d want in a player: fast, agile, two-footed, athletic, physical, tireless, tactically sharp, disruptive, flexible, and selfless.

But he often feels too selfless. Overburdened is another way to put it. He’s made so many starts out of position, at right-back and right-wing and beyond, running and running and running. He famously won a begrudging admirer in Diego Simeone for his last-ditch, red-card tackle in extra time to save a result.

He played more minutes than literally anyone last year, featuring in LaLiga, the Copa del Rey, the Champions League, the Intercontinental Cup, the European Super Cup, Copa América, World Cup qualifiers, friendlies, and the Club World Cup: 65 starts in all, by my count. It’s more of my groundbreaking punditry to suggest that if he had a breather, and were stationed in his best zones, in a system built to his strengths, he’d have more goals in him. Instead, he plays everywhere. For example: back in 2021/22, he made 31 league appearances as a prime 23-year-old, as one of the more thunderous ball-strikers around, and scored zero goals.

His challenges have reappeared this year. He has struggled early in Xabi Alonso’s system. It’s hard to picture a more rested, less burdened, freer, sharper Valverde making a pass like this, which resulted in a fifth goal for Atlético Madrid.

He’s even pleaded his case publicly.

“I have read several articles damaging my reputation,” he said. “I know I have had bad games, I am aware of that. I am not hiding and I am facing up to it. I am really sad. People can say many things about me, but under no circumstances can they say that I refuse to play … I have left my soul in this club and I will continue to do so, even if sometimes it is not enough or I am not playing as I would like, I swear on my pride that I will never give up and I will fight until the end playing wherever I am.”

These overlapping topics, those of responsibility and fatigue and burden, feel especially important to consider now, when football never stops, and neither do the players.

Mikel Arteta has built an Arsenal side where everyone feels maximally responsible. Many of the new signings, including Kepa, have captained their clubs; others could easily do so.

That weight of responsibility is evident in the barked instructions, the last-ditch recovery runs, and the collective will to keep things together. But it can also get complicated.

Set plays aren’t a monolith. While the traits of good attacking and defending set piecers overlap (physicality, size, timing, awareness), the intentions are wholly different. The math is flipped: if ten defenders do their jobs, but one fucks up, you may concede; if nine attackers fuck up, but one succeeds, you may score.

Defending a set play is a team act. There’s usually a mix of zonal and man-to-man duties, all dependent on communication and trust. Despite talk of dominance, Arsenal aren’t huge outliers in aggregate: last season, the team scored 11 goals from dead balls and conceded eight. That balance looks even less impressive when you consider that Arsenal allowed the fewest corners in the league: 118 total, or 3.1 per 90.

With injuries and rotation, defending set pieces is one of the hardest things to do. You’re often turned away from your teammates and have to foresee their movements, essentially blindfolded. If you can’t predict that, gaps appear. There were plenty of small miscommunications last season.

At St James’ Park, Arsenal started strong, with the early penalty that wasn’t, and the Pope saves. But after Mosquera’s mishit led to a corner, one of those responsible types, Gabriel, the vice-captain, took charge. He would go on to win 12/15 duels, including 4/4 on the ground and 8/11 in the air.

Gyökeres, Zubimendi, Eze, and Mosquera were new faces in a tough moment. Nick Woltemade started the play in a sandwich between Gabriel and Raya. As soon as the ball went short, the dominoes fell.

Gabriel turned his back, gesturing frantically, paranoid about coverage at the back post. In the meantime, Woltemade ran a button-hook behind him to position himself far post, ready for a more typical cross.

And it was in that moment of pointing for others that Gabriel lost touch-distance from the man on his own back. Waiting in no man’s land, knowing the jig was up, he went down hoping in vain for a foul, and Woltemade rose and drove it home. Here it is with that diagram overlaid:

Does anyone doubt that if Gabriel had a simpler portfolio, if his only job were to own his zone and clear everything in sight, he would have prevailed?

Now look at how responsibilities shift in attacking set plays. After pushing the battle plans through the attack in a quick game of telephone, his whole vibe changes. He becomes a predator. A heat-seeking, single-minded vessel for goals.

With the ball in flight, his brain isn’t concerned with Mosquera’s positioning, whether Calafiori saw a runner, or anything else. He wants a goal. He wants the win. And so he gets it.

Florian Wirtz, who was a British transfer-fee record until Alexander Isak usurped that moniker, has had a checkered start to his Premier League career.

It’s not for lack of trying. He’s been at the top of the running charts, pacing the field from the first week.

That same try-hardness may be limiting him. Wirtz discussed how Slot was helping him through it.

“He said it could be because we press a lot and I run a lot. For example, the running stats: I’m always at the top there because I try to push hard and do what the coach asks. I need a lot of strength and energy for that. When I have the ball, I might be lacking a little bit.”

Contrast that with another kind of calibration. Last year, Mo Salah credited his updated responsibilities with his output explosion.

“You can see the numbers. Now I don’t have to defend much. The tactics are quite different. I said ‘as long as you rest me defensively I will provide offensively’, so I am glad that I did. He listened a lot and you can see the numbers.”

This story is not new. Messi, of course, is a famous walker.

LeBron James, one of the greatest athletes of all time, and an elite all-around player, not just an offensive one, has also been one of the more prolific strollers in his sport. At his peak, 75% of his time on the court was spent walking, which was top-10 in the league. He’s now embarking on his 23rd season in the NBA.

“It’s just trying to save pockets of energy throughout, especially the second half, when I know it’s going to be a possession game,” James said. “I try to save pockets of energy when I know I’m going to be needed [later].”

You can take this too far. Vini and Mbappé assuredly have at points in their careers, considering the surrounding team dynamics. Thanks to frailties elsewhere, their team needed some help that they weren’t providing.

Responsibility takes different shapes, and this isn’t some convoluted argument for shirking it. It’s to broaden the definition, to see it clearly as both virtue and burden. Yes, Gabriel should continue to yell and direct during defensive set pieces. It’s mandatory for Arsenal’s identity for all players to defend for 90+ minutes, to duel, to give maximum physicality, to feel responsibility. I’ve been thinking about this topic as we see Ødegaard out again, and as some of the injuries have piled up for players like Saka, Havertz, and Madueke, who was playing like a man possessed. I thought about it when Gabriel Jesus ruptured his ACL defending in his own box; I thought about it after seeing White limp through half a season, before paying the price now.

Messi, LeBron, and Salah don’t shirk responsibility. They fine-tune it to where they can make the most impact. You only need to run around and fix everything when there are things to be fixed. The beauty of depth, the beauty of having other world-class players to play with (as Messi, LeBron, and Salah all have), is that they can be relied upon to free up some of your mental load. You don’t need to look over your shoulder when Busquets is there.

The banter years are over. Once others bed in, Gabriel can continue to scream and direct, but perhaps with less suspicion in his mind. Ødegaard has Rice, Zubimendi, and Saliba behind him. Saka has all that, plus Timber.

Now, instead of “how do I cover my teammates?,” the question can become something simpler and more inward: how can I inflict the most damage?

💠 Cutting off the corners

Thomas Tuchel encountered a problem early in his coaching career, one that may sound familiar to viewers of Arsenal, particularly last season.

“My team had it coded in their heads to play through the side corridors, right next to the sideline,” he said. “It was safe and comfortable for us. We could observe what others were doing with the ball in front, and didn’t need to get involved.”

He came up with a novel, if brute-force solution.

“We didn’t want to play this way. I wanted us to play through a higher number of sharp, diagonal passes, from back to front and back again.

So what did we do? We cut off the corners of our playing ground.”

The result is that Tuchel’s small-sided games (SSGs) often look like this.

With goals, it looks like this.

He wanted to provoke his team to problem-solve centrally, and to play diagonally and flat. More than that, he wanted to encourage this kind of play naturally, without having to whistle his team over and over again to stop playing so straight. The added benefit is compactness: players in those high corners generally aren’t good “rest defenders,” and can be caught out of the play on the counter.

In many ways, this has been the transformation afoot at Arsenal.

Another German coach, Julian Nagelsmann, has expanded on these ideas, perhaps with a more idealistic, artistic bent, and one that, frankly, plays to my sensibilities.

Nagelsmann’s designs bend our conceptions of “holding width.” His teams stretch the opponent’s backline during buildup, pulling at that chain before suddenly collapsing through the middle. At Hoffenheim and Leipzig, his sides often looked like a fist opening and closing: five players might span the full width of the pitch one moment, then cluster into a 15-yard pocket of give-and-go combinations in the half-space the next.

You can see those intentions even in a simple movement like this one: a sequence that didn’t lead to a goal, but revealed some of the logic.

By clustering his most technical players centrally, Nagelsmann turns it into both a numbers game and a qualitative one. He wagers on his best players to figure something out, to make their own luck when they’re close to goal.

You can see that luck being manufactured here: the team begins with typical width, stretching the shape, but then as the play picks up steam, almost every player angles toward the middle, flooding the most dangerous area. With sheer numbers and pressure in the zone where goals are scored, Germany force their breakthrough on a loose ball.

This reliably creates what Nagelsmann calls a “second wave.” When Germany are ready to strike, they have numbers streaming through the middle.

Done right, the shape is both maximally aggressive and perfectly prepared to smother the counter. Anyone who’s heard Nagelsmann speak knows how obsessive he is about rest shape. You don’t prevent transitions by the opponent’s corner flag; you do it through the middle.

In buildup, Nagelsmann teams often overload the midfield to keep the opponent burdened in the middle; the ball is then moved wide so the backline has to jump out. Once a defender bites forward, the team floods the middle.

This diagram from The Coaches’ Voice shows how it starts: calculated asymmetry through a leaning double-pivot.

This strategy is also highlighted in moments like the below, from the same piece: the entire formation carried a deliberate lean, tilted toward the ball side. It’s one of Nagelsmann’s signatures.

From that point on, the approach often revolves around wide players feeding runners on the underlap, like this. The widest player draws out the full-back, the lane opens between defenders, and a dynamic player bursts through it, as we see here, from The Football Analyst:

Look further up the pitch and you can see how every runner angles toward the middle, each movement calibrated to disrupt the line. Underlaps are lethal because they distort the defensive picture and force the line to bend.

When a runner breaks the seam between CB and FB, it collapses the opponent’s reference points: the back line has to twist, the midfield has to drop, and the defensive block loses its orientation for a full second.

From there, it’s game on: numbers in the box.

👊 The evolving Arsenal attack

These ideas kept popping into my head when rewatching Arsenal this year. Much of the attacking play last season shared the same tension Tuchel once identified: the tendency to work safely up the flanks. Arsenal, like Nagelsmann’s best sides, are now showing when to stretch and when to swarm.

The critique of Arsenal’s attacking play was that it had become too player-dependent, too predictable. Saka would receive the ball wide, often while doubled, link up with Ødegaard and White, and hope to carve out an opening. If that failed, a corner would suffice, and Arsenal would look to convert. Otherwise, the Plan Bs rarely inspired as much confidence.

We got all too familiar with sights like this.

(Saka created a good chance out of that, by the way.)

The compactness of the opponent’s defensive shapes could trace its roots to earlier phases. Arsenal would often settle for “easy progression,” advancing the ball upfield on a midspeed carry without creating a genuine advantage. Once the opponent dropped in, the rhythm slowed, and possession turned into patient but predictable circulation: side to side, waiting for a crack that didn’t necessarily come against your Fulhams and Newcastles.

In What’s the Difference, we also probed for answers, looking for the ways Liverpool was more able to generate space than Arsenal. One of the takeaways:

I do believe that Arsenal can recycle back some more, and be a little more patient about advancing to the final third. Teams basically allow those advancements to happen anyway, so Arsenal should wait for more tangible advantages to accumulate to push it forward. This will help maintain the space to shoot when the final action is nigh.

Against Olympiacos, Arsenal faced a team that was well-drilled and came to play football instead of just sitting back. This is likable, yes, but it usually doesn’t end so well for pressing teams against Arsenal, as the likes of PSV can tell you. Martin Zubimendi only furthers this advantage from years past.

Within two minutes, we saw two things: Arsenal tearing apart an overmatched press, and Arsenal pushing the advantages we may see from a Tuchel or Nagelsmann attack.

Here, at 2’, Saliba helped win the ball back and set the team up on a full recycle back to Raya. White held width on the right side, and three pressers met three players. Raya wrapped it around his mark:

And Ødegaard (who had a world-class, all-action performance) dropped into the soft spot and broke the press with a single touch. What’s most important for my point is to watch the runners from there:

White made a very perfunctory show of holding width. What really happened was that Martinelli stormed through the middle, following Gyökeres as closely as he could, and wound up with a free header for his troubles. This isn’t our clean, five-channel understanding of rigid lane occupation. This is attacking the space where goals are scored.

Not long after, Martinelli scored by following a Gyökeres run through the middle, and delivering on the rebound.

We kept seeing such things. Here, Trossard dribbled through the middle in an attempt to unsettle the block. A little box was formed, but if you look at the setup holistically, you’ll see that high width has been abandoned for the moment.

Another way to say that? The corners have been cut off, as Tuchel would have requested.

The resulting play led to a four-man, central attack on the box.

These plays were no aberration. The uproarious late Martinelli goal against City was also scored by him dissolving into the LCB’s blind spot, abandoning the wide remit, and sprinting in behind.

…and for good measure, he just scored for Brazil with a similar half-space dart.

Martinelli is not the only one who has been sprinting through these areas with success.

Watching these games back, it was striking how many opportunities originated in the half-space.

At 13’, West Ham got a proper warning shot. Ødegaard had gone out wide, and Saka had floated into the half-space. Saka slipped through the blindspot to receive. Now that it’s time to strike, the width is compressed.

Saka then provided a cutback for Gyökeres, which created some awkward bounces and a golden opportunity for Eze. It bounced high on him.

That’s a good example of what I was talking about with responsibility. For years, Saka has had to cover at right-back, carry the team up the pitch, get maximum touches, dribbles, and crosses, and be a primary playmaker and goal-scorer. Teams have a simple response to this: double (or triple) him, and foul the absolute shit out of him.

Now, he’s marauding.

What feels much more likely this year is a run like this, which historically has been made by Ødegaard.

Next, watch how Arsenal broke through. With Zubimendi on the pitch, Eze drives through the half-space, making a diagonal run for a straight ball.

He rips a shot across the face of goal, and because Rice (like Eze before him) was waiting around in the golden zone around the penalty spot, he was able to nail this one home.

Eze, of course, has found joy on the other side as well. You can see the attack collapsing on the net.

The most notable presence in these areas may be Jurrien Timber, who has noticeably stepped up his attacking game this year.

To wit:

• He’s already exceeded his xG total from last year (1.8 in 7 apps, vs 1.2 in 30 apps).

• His per-90 xG has risen from 0.04 to 0.31.

• His per-90 passes into the pen have risen from 0.63 to 2.07.

• His per-90 touches in the attacking third have risen from 18.8 to 23.1.

I’ve been a big admirer of Gradient Sports’ work for a while. Recently, they were kind enough to give me access to their excellent platform, which I can’t recommend highly enough if you’re a professional type.

Through their methodology, you can see how Timber has scaled up his game into a genuine attacking threat.

This also tracks to his passing output.

…and even his crossing numbers look good nowadays.

Much of this underlying performance has come, you guessed it, from the half-space. Here he is slipping in behind, a movement he repeated several times against West Ham:

And we can notice three things in that sequence:

• The width has collapsed. When it’s time to strike, everyone’s in the mixer.

• Three runners start from the back post. Each one is ready to attack the cutback or crash the rebound.

• A counterpressing net remains intact. Three players hold their positions behind the ball, keeping the play pinned and the opponent trapped.

…and do you remember that Nagelsmann example we looked at, where the whole attack collapsed on goal, bodies flooded the box, and a “second wave” runner pounced on the rebound to bury it in the corner? This was almost a carbon copy of that sequence.

Game state, tactical intention, and performance quality all converged to make the field tilt against Newcastle look like this (via CannonStats):

It became a numbers game. In one of the best passages of play in recent weeks, Arsenal occupied all five attacking lanes, with a three-man second line and the CBs stationed behind that. It wasn’t far off a textbook 2-3-5, just higher up the pitch, with a ball-side lean.

The magic comes when Timber drives at the front line and effectively becomes a sixth attacker. The shape tightens, Zubimendi steps in to link, and the two combine for a quintessential block-breaking pass. It nearly ends in a goal.

It’s worth zooming out again to appreciate just how many players were involved, and how “central” the setup was, in creating that chance.

Timber has kept up that work in the half-space throughout.

In How to Make a Mid-Block Mid, we looked at another way to unpick settled shapes: have the widest player pin their marker, drop a few yards to draw them out, and then send a runner darting into the space that opens up behind.

Here’s an example from Aston Villa.

That’s essentially what we saw in the buildup to the penalty against West Ham.

I often say that much of football comes down to counting. It always sounds simple, but rarely is. As the ball circulates at the back and Timber pushes forward, Arsenal quietly create a 3v2 pod on the right side.

Once the ball reaches Zubimendi, he spots it instantly. Summerville hesitates to recover all the way to Saka, and two new players (Mateus Fernandes and El Hadji Malick Diouf) end up in that classic pointing exchange, each gesturing for the other to pick up Timber. It’s the kind of “new connection” moment that often goes underreported as a reason for a team’s struggles.

Zubimendi clips the ball over the top, and while Fernandes is still mid-gesture, Diouf scrambles back to clean up the mess.

This results in running him over.

2-0.

Do I expect Timber to finish the season as Arsenal’s leader in npxG per shot (0.21/90)? Nah. Some of that is just sample size noise. But a lot of his half-space work looks genuinely sustainable. And it’s worth remembering that the fixture list has been unusually tough so far.

🔥 Final thoughts

Here are a few other things on my mind.

• It’s difficult to talk about Viktor Gyökeres without it turning into a full deep-dive, which I’m sure I’ll write at some point. As of now, I’d say it’s gone about at the 50th percentile of outcomes: roughly where you’d expect, given that he’s been thrown into the deep end. I haven’t moved off my priors from Scouting Strikers much, which had some positives and some doubts. The new nuance: he looks a touch slower than last year, even if that’s hard to isolate in a league jump, but has also adapted pretty well to his pressing responsibilities. It’s also true that he’s garnered plenty of attention from opponent backlines, and is part of those numbers in the box. He, and everyone else, will benefit from Kai’s return.

• Roughly half of the variance in team performance can be explained by who got better shots. Not possession, not passes completed, not pressing actions or field tilt. Just: how good were the looks you created, and how good were the looks you allowed? And yet, the pursuit of good shots can be oversimplified. If you spend all game waiting for the perfect one, you’re not taking enough of the imperfect ones that create it. It’s a bit like somebody who desperately wants to find love, but in keeping unreasonably high standards, is keeping themselves from meeting people. A few “lower-quality” shots are the price of admission: they create rebounds, loose balls, deflections, second waves. They make defenders jump when they shouldn’t. I thought Arsenal were too “tight” in shot selection over the last two years. To keep up with that tired analogy, the more you put yourself out there, the more the ball starts to bounce your way.

• I also think more specific shots should be created for specific players (the “Ø-zone,” the Nwaneri Special, etc), and this can be done with rubs and picks. One shot mode that was expected, and has been paying dividends, is Eze’s ability to make good contact in second phases off of corners.

• With the entrance of Zubimendi, I’d hoped to see Arsenal play a little bit more on the ground, ripping teams apart in deep build-up to generate advantages in the final third. Instead, he’s been one of our more YOLO players. In keeping with the trends throughout the league, Arsenal’s short pass attempts have dropped (down ~28 per game) while medium and long pass attempts have increased (long passes up to 64.7 per game from 53.2, with completion rate improving to 53.4%).

• One of the benefits of “pinning” teams is that you run less, it should be said. This quicker style may present more injury risk.

• Something I’d like to investigate, especially with play getting more end-to-end: I wonder if mid-table teams can match the intensity of top sides more effectively at the beginning of the season, and then the differences in depth become more pronounced as the year goes on. In other words, are things more even now than they will be? This may be augmented by the fact that top sides usually play in more competitions.

• The most interesting thing about the lineup against West Ham wasn’t the lineup itself, but the intention from Arteta: he was willing to sacrifice something out-of-possession (Eze being in the double-pivot of a block) to try and overwhelm a team with “twin-10s” in Ødegaard (right) and Eze (left). We didn’t get a great chance to see how that would have worked; exciting as it was, it could have gone either way. In the near-term, a Zubimendi/Rice/Eze midfield is superbly balanced.

• We’ll see different options, but we’re likely to be entering a period where Eze will be running the #10 in Ødegaard’s absence. We’ll see a couple of impacts there:

  • Eze and Gyökeres have both done a solid job in pressing, but they’re no Ødegaard and Havertz. With weaker opponents coming, it probably won’t matter much, but we’ll see.

  • Ødegaard was back to being completely cracked as a lower-build-up orchestrator. There’s a higher chance of things feeling static deep without his floating and fixing.

  • …but Eze can generate more unexpected opportunities, better transitions, and more shots. It is simply fun that he, Saka, and Timber will be combining in a triangle together.

• Hincapié is back in action. With that, it might be a good time to dive into his scouting report, if you haven’t yet. He woulda been great for our Newcastle game: pushing LW in (Trossard, in that case), then doing big recovery sprints against Murphy/Elanga. I’m also interested to see if this affects the usage of Lewis-Skelly, who has yet to see time in the midfield yet.

• Calafiori also deserves a piece of his own. He is our joint shot leader, with 14.

• I used to get #triggered when Arteta would really stew on missed chances back when we’d create, like, three shots a half. Lack of chances, not missed chances, was the story then. He’s fine to do it now.

• Depth is more than fitness. Above all, players just want to play, and they tend to iron out things more quickly if it gets them on the pitch. For example, Trossard knew he needed to close the work-rate gap to Martinelli, and has become a maniac, almost going too hard at times; Calafiori knows he needs better defensive angles to play over MLS; Timber knows he needs to close the attacking output gap to White. It puts healthy pressure on everyone to perform.

• As comfortable as we can be in depth, I don’t think we should be overly blasé about it: missing Ødegaard, Havertz, Jesus, and Madueke still sucks. Availability issues (like those from White) can put more pressure on the remaining players; Timber and Zubimendi are feeling indispensable at the moment. It’s not unlikely that we really feel the void of certain players in upcoming fixtures.

• I’m generally quite pleased with the role update for Declan Rice.

• Don’t forget Max Dowman. Ah, I’m sure you haven’t.

• Underlying metrics would suggest, simply, that Arsenal are the best team in England. The xGD/90 is +1.08 through seven games, with one of the toughest fixture lists around. I don’t think things are fully firing, either.

• Health permitting, everything is possible this year.

Well, it’s Friday and past time to publish. Thanks for hanging tight on this one. After a maze of customer service tickets and circular chats with AI bots, I lost access to my video scouting platform for a couple of weeks. That story’s dull, but the important thing is we’re back in business.

I just read a tweet (kill me) that went as follows:

I remember my high school band director running us ragged in rehearsals on a difficult piece, and finally we were relieved that we thought we had a handle on it, as we played the whole movement through. ‘Finally we’re done & can move on.’

He said ‘okay you have the notes & rhythms down. Now we can start to make music.’ And he proceeded to hammer the craft into art from there.

I have never forgotten that distinction, & I’ve applied it myself on various things, not just music, ever since. Soul is a level beyond mechanics.

Soul is a level beyond mechanics.

What we’ve seen over the opening stanza is a deeper team with more ways of attacking the opponent. We’ve seen probably the best defensive side in Europe. We’ve seen some injuries and misfortune. We’ve seen adjustment periods.

Now, with more shared responsibilities, not to mention more time together, the hope is that the team can wrap up this round of rehearsals, look at each other, and say: we’ve got the notes and rhythms down. It’s time to make music.