Arsenal: Winning ugly, playing football the Unai Emery way

Arsenal are learning to win ugly under Unai Emery, something you never used to associate with Arsene Wenger’s team, although not pretty on the eye it’s proving successful at the minute.

Arsenal‘s victory over Watford was our fifth consecutive victory and seventh overall. Given the caliber of opposition on paper, this is something you would probably expect, but it’s an impressive statistic none the less.

It’s the manner of the victories that have got people talking, though. Under Arsene Wenger, people would have expected the team to blow these clubs away with scintillating one-touch football and back to front high-speed attacks.

Although this kind of football has been on display on rare occasions under Unai Emery, Arsenal are very much digging deep and showing a side you would never normally associate with the club. The only goal that I can think that the Gunners scored that you can maybe call Wenger – esque was the second against Brentford.

In each of our seven victories, we haven’t been that impressive, with the players looking sluggish for periods, but when it matters most, the team has become focused and showed effectiveness.

You could argue that Everton and Watford had the better chances and could probably count themselves unlucky not to come away with something. Again, you could argue that against better opposition the Gunners would have been made to pay and we would have been a couple of goals down before we got started.

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These are all eventualities, obviously, but with each game, the players appear to be growing in confidence. It’s filtering through to the fans and the Emirates is becoming a happier place again.

What’s most impressive about the performances is that the players seem to be showing more than a little bit of fight and passion. Both Watford and Everton came to the Emirates with the sole intention of being physical, but the Gunners took their kicks and got on with it; no complaining no misery just fighting fire with fire.

We have some really physical players. Suddenly, the spine of this team don’t look so powder puff anymore and with players like Alexandre Lacazette, Sokratis  and Lucas Torreira, not many teams are going to want to face them if they utilise their physicality.

Yes, I am maybe getting ahead of myself in saying all this and I’m fully aware that there are greater challenges against better opposition and maybe we won’t be able to fully judge until after the game against Liverpool in November, at which point we can really see if this is the same old Arsenal or if we are really learning something new.

As the old saying goes, the best teams win even when they play bad.