On Monday night, Arsenal’s maturing team eclipsed Chelsea’s aging one with a performance even more emphatic than the 3-1 score suggested.
The good news for Arsenal, masterfully led by its 23-year-old captain and creative heart, Cesc Fàbregas, is that its form is excellent to carry forward to the Gunners’ next game, at Wigan on Wednesday.
The bad news for Chelsea, eight of whose players are the high side of 30, is that playing twice in 48 hours is a less comforting aspect of the bloated Christmas soccer schedule in England.
The players know the games pile up when they sign their multimillion-dollar contracts. They also know that the winter weather can make travel unpleasant, but they just hope that experience carries them through.
At Arsenal, however, the boot of experience was on the other foot.
Fàbregas is a veteran at 23. He was schooled at Barcelona, stolen by Arsenal when he was 16 and has pretty much been a regular in the Premier League ever since. In his seventh season, Fàbregas displays leadership and know-how that few of Chelsea’s senior citizens will ever acquire.
He has a vision that is almost a sixth sense. He reads the game so smartly, so intelligently, so quickly that he makes the decisive pass quicker than most players can see it.
And he talks a good game, too. Before Monday, with Fàbregas recovering from hamstring injuries that were the almost inevitable result of playing so many matches in a World Cup year, Arsenal appeared to have growing pains. The quality of the players was never in doubt, but confidence was lacking.
The team had the talent to put on a show inside almost any stadium, but its record against the handful of opponents who dominate the English Premier League was poor. Before the Chelsea game, Arsenal had looked defeated before it even took the field against Manchester United at Old Trafford.
Fàbregas, playing only as a substitute while he recovered from injury, summed up that 1-0 defeat in one word, describing his team as being “scared” of the big occasion.
Rather than chastise Fàbregas, his captain, the Arsenal manager, Arsène Wenger, qualified the criticism.
“Scared is a big word,” Wenger said. “But we played a little bit with the hand brake on at Manchester. It is down to the fact that the team wants to do well.”
Even with his captain, Wenger said, there was a need to banish fear. Fàbregas appears to be a born leader, but with both hamstrings breaking down, he had looked like a troubled athlete until Monday.
One performance against Chelsea does not erase a season of doubts, but Fàbregas said immediately after the convincing victory: “Belief was the difference. The difference between a good team and a great team is very little.
“Tonight, we did what a great team does. It felt fantastic, but England is like no other league in the world — in two days we have to go again.”
Fàbregas scored the second goal against Chelsea on a Theo Walcott pass and created the third goal for Walcott to score. “We made Chelsea look average at times,” the 21-year-old Walcott said. “But like Cesc says, we have another game on Wednesday.”
Like Cesc says. He looks, and sounds, as if he is the fulcrum of Arsenal’s approach. Last summer, Wenger had shown infinite patience laced with fatherly toughness when he talked Fàbregas out of wanting to return home to rejoin Barcelona.
It was understandable on all sides. Barça nurtured Fàbregas at its academy and wanted him back to play alongside Xavi and Lionel Messi, players he grew up with, playing in the same system.
But Wenger said no. And he has time on his side, because while Wenger has been building a team at Arsenal, Chelsea has gone through eight coaching changes. And even now, under the experienced, successful Italian Carlo Ancelotti, there is deep insecurity.
Ancelotti helped Chelsea’s old hands to a league and cup double in England in his first season. Yet he was hired to win his specialty, the Champions League. And that, as Ancelotti proved at A.C. Milan, is where experienced, even aged, players can make the difference.
Unlike Wenger, whose authority over playing matters is virtually unquestioned by the club’s board, Ancelotti acknowledges that he does not know how long he will retain the trust of the autocratic Chelsea owner, Roman Abramovich.
“The league table is not good, that is the reality,” Ancelotti said Monday. “I’m not worried for my job. We have to work, but this is a question you have to ask the owner, not me.”
The owner removed Felipe Scolari, a World Cup-winning coach, after a less-troubled losing streak than the one Ancelotti is mired in.
Abramovich removes coaches like dusting snow off his shoes, and has already undermined Ancelotti by firing his assistant, Ray Wilkins, without a public explanation.
Wilkins was a faithful No. 2, a support, in a way an interpreter is in what it takes to maintain consistency in the English league. Without him, Ancelotti appears visibly alone on the bench. And since Wilkins’s abrupt exit in November, Chelsea has not won in seven league matches, its worst run since Abramovich bought the club lock, stock and Russian oil barrel in 2003.
Ancelotti is always commendably honest in front of the news media, but his summary of what went wrong at Arsenal on Monday could not have been music to Abramovich’s ears. “The difference was the quality,” the coach said. “Arsenal put more quality on the pitch than us.”
Source: Rob Hughes, The New York Times on 28 Dec 10
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