Arsenal and playing out from the back: Speed, speed and more speed

Under Unai Emery, Arsenal are attempting to play out from the back. But they are doing it entirely. wrong. It all comes down to speed, speed and more speed.

There are many problems with Arsenal at present. They are defensively vulnerable, offensively dull, lacking creativity and invention, and cannot press with cohesion and structure either. There are many reasons for their inability in these different areas. No one player, individual or tactic is responsible. There is a whole lot of moving cogs that must fit together to build a team, and the Gunners have rusty ones all over the pitch.

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However, if there was one thing that Arsenal must fix this season, the one element that I believe would have greatest impact on the rest of the team and the performance, it is their inept playing out from the back.

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The ability to control games is crucial to any team. Now, some teams look to control matches without the ball — see the defensive structure of Atletico Madrid, for instance — but most use their dominance of possession to exert their command over the opposition. And this, obviously, stems from being able to play out from the back, even when being pressed high. If you can solve playing out from the back, many of the other problems will also ease.

Take the lack of attacking creativity. By successfully buildinh attacks from deep and bypassing opposing pressing structures, Arsenal will put their attacking players into more advantageous positions to exploit an exposed defence. Similarly, by being able to keep possession and progress the ball into more advanced positions, they will be able to press from the front with more effectiveness. They will also have more possession, which should aid their defensive problems.

But, consistently under Unai Emery, they have been unable to play out from the back, to evade the pressing structures of the opposotion, and to move the play from their own defensive third and into more advanced areas of the pitch. Why is that? Why are good players struggling to progress play when lesser teams, like Sheffield United on Monday night, are able to?

Well, there are a lot of reasons for this. But the overarching point is that playing out from the back must be done quickly, with a tempo and rhythm that makes it difficult for the opposition to first set up in a defensive structure and then maintain that structure as the ball is zipped from one player to the other. And the one thing that Arsenal do not do is play at speed.

Whether it be the players dallying on the ball, hesitating in their decision-making, the poor movement off the ball limiting passing options, especially forward ones, the over-reliance on one or two players to play the more progressive passes, the one-footedness of certain individuals, the lack of press-resistant dribblers that play in deeper starting positions in the team. These all contribute to the team’s collective inability to play out from the back, and it is hurting their efficacy each and every time they take to the pitch.

This is not a piece to attribute blame. There are plenty of players and coaches that must change their approach. Rather, it is simply to delineate the most baisc, on-pitch problem at Arsenal, and to show that, until it changes, nothing will improve. This, more than any other weakness, is the first fix for Emery and his players.