Arsenal's thrashing by Milan leaves English football potentially facing its worst European Cup performance in 16 years
Perhaps the most damning assessment came from Arrigo Sacchi, the man who created possibly the finest Milan team in history. Sacchi had already used his "Sopra La Panca" column in Wednesday's Gazzetta dello Sport to say this was the worst Arsenal team for a decade but, after seeing them close-up, he wanted to revise his criticisms. "I said 10 years," he told television viewers. "Maybe I was being too generous."
Sacchi, a two-times European Cup winner with the team of Gullit, Van Basten, Rijkaard, Baresi et al, had called it exactly right. Zlatan Ibrahimovic, he predicted, could be "devastating" against a defence this vulnerable.
"Arsenal cannot match Milan for experience, technical quality and individuality. They are not sharp. They do not move as a unit, their defence is slow and not protected by their midfield."
In the past, he said, Arsène Wenger's teams played a "fast and brilliant way". The current team was "not fluid" and "still searching for a convincing system".
It was difficult to argue with a single word of it after a night that Wenger described as "our worst in Europe ever". Arsenal's manager has never been particularly good at hiding his distress after bad defeats and it was difficult to remember the last time he looked quite so mortified. No side has ever turned around a four-goal deficit to win a Champions League knockout tie. Arsenal have played 222 times in Europe and never lost so comprehensively. Wenger could hardly maintain eye contact. He was grey.
Yet Sacchi's observations extended further than the current malaise at Arsenal. "Look at the Premier League," he said. "They are a long way behind the two Manchester clubs, both of whom are already out of the Champions League. This just underlines the decline of English football."
The more popular view, certainly in the self-congratulatory Premier League, is that it is actually Italian football that has been regressing. Sacchi, however, had a point. This is threatening to be the first season since 1996 when English football has not been able to provide a single quarter-finalist.
Arsenal's chances rank somewhere between minimal and nonexistent and, though Chelsea will hope to do better when they take on Napoli at the Stadio San Paolo on Tuesday, the dislocation between André Villas-Boas and his increasingly mutinous group of players hardly inspires confidence.
This could probably be written off as a one-off, nothing too potentially serious or long-lasting, if Manchester United had not already been eliminated from a group featuring Basel, Benfica and a Romanian team, Otelul Galati, that Sir Alex Ferguson admitted he had never heard of when the draw was made. Manchester City did manage 10 points from a challenging group featuring Napoli and Bayern Munich, which would ordinarily be enough to qualify, but it still represents a failure given the enormous spending under the ownership of the Abu Dhabi United Group.
Whether this constitutes a genuine decline is difficult to say. A decline usually means a number of years, rather than one bad campaign, and it is not so long ago English football was slapping itself on the back for having provided three of the four semi-finalists in three successive seasons, from 2007 to 2009. United have reached the final in three of the past five campaigns and Arsenal, United and Tottenham have all knocked Milan out of the last 16 in the same period.
What happens with Chelsea next week will give a clearer picture but, for now, Arsenal's lamentable efforts and the sight of the Premier League's top two clubs grubbing around in the Europa League does raise the question of whether everything in the self-acclaimed best league in the world is as good as it is cracked up to be.
Arsenal's performance had been shocking and yet also predictable. The Manchester clubs did not even make it out of the group stages and that leaves English football relying upon a Chelsea team whose deterioration, much like Arsenal's, is close to the point of being staggering. Napoli have already eliminated City and, if they do the same to Chelsea, it will represent the least distinguished performance from English clubs since Blackburn Rovers had a go 16 years ago and demonstrated exactly how not to do it – David Batty, Graeme Le Saux and all that.
Source: Daniel Taylor, The Guardian on 16 Feb 12
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