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罗宾范佩尔西
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23#
t
T
发表于 2011-01-19 15:14
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Looking for a Leader?
I’ve been saying that Denilson hasn’t done anything of note all season. Well, he has now.
Denilson gave a recent interview to Arsenal Brasil. I’m not sure exactly how recently the interview was given, but it has to have been pretty recent because they specifically talk about the Wigan match, which was only a couple of weeks ago.
It’s a pretty rare interview in that it’s so long, and unedited — unlike the 90-second, heavily-edited interview excerpts we get from Arsenal TV Online, this is just a guy sitting down and talking about anything and everything for almost 25 minutes. In what looks to be someone’s bedroom with a sheet nailed to the wall. But I digress. And before I forget it, kudos to the interviewer, who really asked some good, tough, insightful questions.
Anyway, let’s get right down to it. You can watch the entire interview in its entirety over at Arseblog, and it’s pretty good. But here’s the money quote, the one that’s going to make all the papers tomorrow. The following exchange happened:
Interviewer: It is widely said that Arsenal lack leadership on the pitch, for example, the incident with Ramsey, if you look at what happened with Eduardo before. We were very close to the title, and after I spoke to Gilberto he told me it really had an effect on the squad, but in the Ramsey incident, you could see that it was different. Sol Campbell was the man who went there to motivate the players. So my question is, do you think we lack that leadership on the pitch?
Denilson: I think that we lack leadership, and without leadership we cannot move forward. You can walk forward a bit, but then the same that’s happened will happen again. Those are things that happen, that make us very sad indeed. But I don’t see a player at Arsenal who is a real leader. I can’t see a single one. Even if Fabregas is the captain, he is not a leader to me. It does not depend on the player’s age or experience, there are players who’ll walk on the pitch and will show that leadership, but that’s something of the personality of the player, he was born with that. So today, not only Fabregas, but the important thing is that everyone is talking to each other, everyone understands each other, that is what is helping us this season. And the results are coming, little by little, but they are coming, and we’re second or third in the league table, so we have to keep it that way, always talking to each other, always working hard in training, that’s the only way things can work out.
Interviewer: So you think we lack a leader, for example Gilberto Silva?
Denilson: For me Gilberto is a leader, he is surely.
Interviewer: So you think we need a reference, a guy like Sol Campbell?
Denilson: We do, we do. A leader is always important in a team.
Interviewer: Today, who are the closest to leaders in the squad?
Denilson: I can’t see one.
Interviewer: There isn’t then a person who’ll take the responsibility to himself?
Denilson: I can’t see that.
Now. Your immediate reaction to this may have been one of the following things:
1. Why the frak is he saying this publicly?
2. It’s classless and disloyal to throw your captain and everyone else in the squad under the bus like this.
3. Who is he, the guy who can’t even be bothered to run back on a counterattack, to criticize anyone else?
4. If he thinks leadership is so important, who doesn’t HE try to step up and provide some of that?
5. Even if he’s right, how is this helpful?
And I wouldn’t disagree with any of these. And I suspect this will be the reaction of most Gooners today. However, after the dust settles and anger fades, we may have to face the disturbing possibility that he may be absolutely, positively, 100% correct. Because the thing is, this isn’t Balotelli, who says something seemingly calculated to offend in every single interview. And watch it for yourself, that isn’t taken out of context — the interviewer certainly cannot be accused of trying to trick him into saying something he didn’t mean — he asked him a simple question, and Denilson took it in that direction.
In a way, the biggest sign that there’s probably something to this is the rest of the interview. It was 23 minutes long. He was asked about Wenger, the medical staff, the goalkeepers, the defenders — pretty much every topic that Arsenal fans love to bitch about, and had ample opportunity to criticize anyone else. But he didn’t. He gave answers as measured and scripted as if Wenger himself had written them out for him on cards beforehand (although he did say that he thought Almunia was our best keeper, which is a pretty compelling argument for mandatory drug testing). And he generally came across as a nice, calm, relatively intelligent (if not particularly insightful) player. And that’s worrying. If something like this had come from some idiot like Adebayor, we could write it off a bit and ignore it. But watching this interview, you just get the sense that Denilson is saying this because it’s true. And that’s a problem for Arsenal.
Leadership is, of course, impossible to quantify. It doesn’t show up in statistics. But I don’t know a single football fan who doesn’t think it matters. And I do know that when Tony Adams was captain, we won things. When Patrick Vieira was captain, we won things. With either of those guys, you just got the sense that this was their team, they were in charge, and if someone didn’t do their jobs, they were going to hear about it, and possibly feel it, in the locker room after the game. So most of the time, players did their jobs.
We haven’t won anything since those guys left. Players like . . . well, Denilson, for one, seemingly feel free to amble around the pitch, conceding stupid penalties, giving the ball away, and generally not doing the things they need to do to help us win. And you just don’t get the sense that there’s that urgency — anyone who has played sports of any kind knows how powerful fear can be. It’s not the only motivating factor, or even necessarily the best one . . . but it’s a pretty damn good one. If you know you’re going to get dressed down by your coach or your teammate in front of everyone if you don’t do your job, it really does make you work harder to do your job. Most militaries are based on this simple but effective motivational principle.
But with Arsenal, you just don’t get the sense that there is that fear there. And that is a problem, because it hurts our performances, and hurts our chances to win. Let me put it this way — if Adams or Vieira was our captain, don’t you think they would deal with some of the problems we have in the squad right now? Not necessarily the old “bar of soap in a tube sock” prison-style “deal with it,” but they’d find a way, don’t you think? I just don’t think Arshavin would be half-assing it around, standing around when we don’t have the ball, Charlie Brown walking when the slightest thing goes wrong, etc. I think he’d get an earful and he’d learn some new English words, and he’d have to think twice before he did it again. But that’s just not there right now.
Maybe this is an overreaction. I do think Cesc seems to be growing into the leadership role a lot more. Guys like van Persie and Nasri are passionate and talk to their teammates a lot on the pitch. Vermaelen seems absolutely like leadership/captain material to me. Maybe Denilson is just misguided, and doesn’t view those players as “leaders” in the same way that he viewed Gilberto and Slo as leaders b/c the current squad is his own age range and he doesn’t put them up on a pedastal the way he does older players. I’m not sure.
But I do know that watching that interview gave me the impression that he absolutely understood what he was saying, and meant every word. He thinks this is a team with a good coach, and skilled players, and good teammates, but he obviously thinks we could use a guy to take charge and be the leader. And it’s not like what we have seen with our own eyes doesn’t support what he says. It was disturbing in a way to see Slo be by far the best player in an awful match against Spurs that killed off our title hopes last season — he was a guy who was only here for 5 months, why did he care so much more than anyone else on the team?
I’m not sure what the answer is. Cesc is still very young, so I don’t know that it’s fair to criticize him too much for leadership failures. He’s still young. Yes, I know, Tony Adams became captain when he was 21, but you know what, we’ll never have another captain like Tony Adams, so that’s not really a fair comparison. I think Cesc takes his role seriously, and wants to be a good captain. He talks to his teammates on the pitch, he intervenes on their behalf with the referee, he carries himself as a good representative and ambassador of the club. But the bottom line is that if his teammates don’t view him as a leader, and at least one of them is willing to publicly state that he does not, Cesc may not be the right man for the job. If that’s the case, do we let him grow into it, or give it to someone else?
As I’ve said several times already, I don’t have any answers. And I’m not sure anyone does. That’s the problem. Denilson has said something which may have confirmed many of our worst fears about the club as currently constituted, and it’s a problem which is: (a) potentially serious enough to keep us from winning trophies; and (b) not easily fixable.
Big thanks to Arsenal Brasil and Arseblog for conducting the interview and bringing it to the masses, respectively.
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