Arsenal's 'The Invincibles' - Tactics Explained

Hello everybody, Adam Cleary from 442. Here we are yet again in the midst of an international break, which means there’s goal going on right now. So it’s time for another. Anyway. Yes, hello. Now, hard cores on the channel may remember we did one of these for Mourinho’s Chelsea not very long ago, and we asked if we ever did this again because obviously we’re going to do this again. What team would you like to see? And the overwhelming answer we got by a million bajillion squillion miles was Arsenal’s Invincibles. One person did ask for Alan Pardew’s bananas Newcastle United side and I will do that one day, just probably in the pub Now one thing I want to point out right at the start, OK, is that obviously this is what everybody thinks Arsenals Invincibles were. Right that that is the 11. There’s no disputing any of those players, but just to prove we’ve really done our research here at 442, this eleven was only fielded by Arsene Wenger that season. Twice. I know, I know. That’s absolutely bananas, isn’t it? But they also had Martin Keone, they had GAIL Cliche, they had Eddie, they had Ray Parlor, they had Jeremy Aliadier. My favorite name in football ever, Jose Antonio Reyes and Sylvan Viltord. But were you to give Arsene Wenger a live microphone on a big stage and say please sing the true song of your Invincibles heart, this would be the lyrics. These were the 11 players he always had in mind. The others just filled in as like for like and I’ll receive. The reason I’m telling you this is because we’re going to proceed with the video as if this was the 11:00 every single week, even though it wasn’t, but it did definitely feel like it was alright. So anyway, this stuff you’re actually here for. This was the Arsenal Invincible squad wink. It was a 442IN theory, but this being the turn of the Millennium, 442 was slightly starting to get on the way out. We’re just a couple years away from Mourinho coming in and almost killing it completely. And Wenger, ever the innovator, had made several adjustments to it. So primarily you had Dennis Bergkamp here who never really played like an out and out strike. It was always in the pocket was always off. Henry was always trying to be in this gap between the midfield and the defense of both his own team and the opposition team. Thierry Henry did like to float out to both flanks, primarily the left one. He’s loads of his good work there, but would usually have to stay central because the two wide players, young, Berg and Perez, would push really far forward. Yet combine that with the fact that both Gilberto and Vieira would look to get forward, but only very late on a move, They were usually quite deep and yes, well observed. This is actually more of a 4231. But The thing is, while this is obviously quite innovative for the time, it’s not something that worked because it was really, really clever and Wenger had found some magic formula to beat other teams in the league. It’s a system that worked because of the way it was executed. One of the main advantages of playing 442 and something Arsenal still hard even in this sort of 4231 shape, is that you get pairs all over the pit. So two centre backs, 2 wide players, 2 central fielders, 2 attackers. So no matter what you’re doing as a player, there’s always somebody who should be near you but as well as those pairs. And this is going to start sounding like some bad GCSE revision video right now, right? Is that Arsene Wenger also added loads of triangles and he did that by basically staggering the entire core of the team, because Bergkamp would obviously drop off but he would favour the right hand side, while Henry would stay forward but favour the left. Patrick Vieira would usually hold a very central position but Gilberto Silva had no problems dropping out of that space to sort of receive the ball off the defence. And then in Saul Campbell, you’ve got a really great conventional central defender, but in Kolo Toure, a converted midfielder, you had someone who liked to bring the ball forward. And as massively over simplistic as this explanation is for it, all of a sudden look, you’ve got these little triangles all through the center of the pitch, where normally under a 442 you’d have players on the exact same line. Now just imagine for a second you’re playing against the team that does this and you are using a 442 and it’s just absolute bedlam for you. Like who would deal with Dennis Bergkamp here? Would you want one of your century midfielders to drop onto him, leaving his pal completely outnumbered in the middle? Or should one of the center backs push forward and allow Henry to run into the space he leaves? And likewise, when Tori is bringing that ball out from the back, does one of you midfielders then press onto him in that space Because you’re going to be leaving your pal, not just with both of these midfielders to deal with, but remember Bergkamp dropping in as well, so it’s a three on one? Or do you stay there and just let him have the ball? It’s so difficult to work out what to do across 90 minutes and what this commitment to finding space between the lines allowed Arsenal to be was a really direct, quick side. Like, it does kind of bug me a little bit that Arsene Wenger’s now got this reputation for just building sides of little passing nerds who want possession for possession’s sake. Because this is not what this team was at all like. They didn’t really have that much more of the ball across 90 minutes than most of the teams they were playing. What they wanted to do was pull the vendors out of position to allow any of their forward line, all of which blessed with incredible pace, to break into that space. Like, if you just think back to the best goals scored by the Invincibles over this season, how many times in your head can you see either Henry or Perez or Yunberg running at a back four, or running into the space behind them and scoring a goal that way? That was their bread and butter. Move you up the field, move you out of position, and then get in quickly and also right for all. This is like an early version of a 4231. Arsenal sort of had an early version over high press as well. Like do you know how your dad always says, oh it was just called closing down in my day? Well it was it was just closing down but it was structured closing down. Now what arson would do when they didn’t have the ball as the two wide players they would drop back to form like a really conventional 2 banks of four. Like the good old days. The defense would push up leaving quite a highline and then bird camping Henry. Their job was to press slash close down the center box, not very aggressively, but just to let them know they’re there and force them to put the ball out wide to the fullbacks. Now because Arsenal are simultaneously very compact but also very high, and theoretically Bird Camp and Henry have shut down, the options to get it back to the central defenders doesn’t really leave the Fall back there with all too many options. But they can see a load of space in behind, so they’re trying to tempt them to hit it long into that space now. And you know, not to show off or anything but four 40s own Mark White spoke to some of the Invincibles for a massive feature on them in the next issue of the Mag. Look out for that. He told us specifically about this system. When you play with such an attacking team, you have to have such speed at the back. That’s what Arsene Wenger did. Sol and myself were fast. We had power, we were able to defend high lines and we could pin teams in with our quality. And that was exactly the plan. Because in Lauren Campbell, Tore and Cole you had four incredibly fast defenders who, if the ball did go over the top, could beat most forwards in a race to chase a back. But also the reason they went and got in Jens Lehman was because for the time he was a very sort of, I want to say innovative again, but sort of innovative sweeperkeeper. He would come out and close that space down and low. If you can’t play through them because I mean, Christ, that Gilberto Silva and Patrick Vieira there. And you can’t play over the top because the defenders are really fast and the goalkeepers going to sweep up doesn’t really leave you with many ways of breaking them down. And they don’t get anywhere near enough credit for how good defensively they were that season. Check this. I’m going to guess and think they conceded like 26 goals in the league. I’m going to check that. 26. What’s 26? What? I doubt myself. 2626 goals, that’s really good. This is why I said at the start that understanding The Invincibles is not about some clever system that Wenger stumbled upon. It’s all in the execution. Because while this is a system based around finding the space between the lines and dropping out of your own position to do so, it’s being executed by a group of players almost perfectly assembled to BE, like, naturally inclined to do positional rotations with their teammates. What do I mean by that? Well, think about it this way. You’ve got Dennis Bergkamp, who loves to drop away from the forward line on the right hand side, but you’ve also got Freddy Umberg, who just adores to receive the ball in that sort of right hand half space, confusing the central defender in the fullback as to who should be marking him. You’ve got Thierry Henry, who loves to go all the way over to the left hand side to receive the ball and be set for a counter attack. But you’ve also got Robert Perez, who loves to drift into the center and let’s just go at goal himself. And then when Perez does find himself coming in field, you’ve got young Ashley Cole here who adores to bomb up the left hand side. There he goes, falling off the table because he used to be a striker. To get that back, you’ve got Viera and Toure, who both like to break forward from their position, either carrying the ball or making late runs into the box. But they’re ably supported by Gilberto Silva and Sol Campbell, two men with sort of the spatial awareness and the heft to cover that space all on their own. Now, more than anything on this entire earth, I want to pay special attention to this forward quartet because I would argue, or at least in my opinion, I think they are the best collection of four attackers ever in the Premier League. They just. But I know there’s arguments for loads of other different groups like York, Cole, Giggs, Beckham. They would obviously really Good Morning, Salah Faminio, probably the best in the modern age, Duncan, Ferguson and just the really angry voices in his head. You could, you could say loads, but for me, just the pace, the inventiveness, the incisiveness, the creativity, the fluidity, everything between these four. I think it’s just worth talking about because as we’ve already talked about, this Arsenal side was built around dropping out of your position, finding space and having players who were naturally able to fill into it. And it was just so just lethal. The way it was organized between these four and it all starts and ends with Thierry Henry. Teams were absolutely terrified of him and there was seven or eight different ways he could effectively score a goal against. You look at its most basic sense. Imagine you are marking Thierry Henry and he pulls away from you and drops sort of into the space behind the field. Like, do you go with him? Because if you do, you might get the ball and just literally Sprint past you and score a goal, but if you don’t go with him, you’ll just crack in a ship pinging from about 30 yards. He loved to drift wide of the defenders and either receive the ball and drive directly a goal or receive a pass in behind them. And Dar diagonally and whenever his movement did createspace for a team mate, they were more than happy to fill it. It was just impossible to work out what to do. I think, honestly, maybe I’m getting slightly carried away with this. I think Thierion Ray might have been the first centre forward in the Premier League ever who could just score every kind of goal anyway, though, for one entire Premier League season. Just this creativity and this fluidity in attack, this sort of robustness in the centre of the pitch and this sort of structural ingenuity that allowed them to play forward. And just every single element of this team that Wenger had designed worked perfectly and it worked perfectly for 38 games. Couldn’t get beat. Now just one final little point before I go, OK, you do get a lot of people trying to talk down the achievement of going unbeaten in a Premier League season. Like obviously, yes, they were not the first team to do it. Shout out my boys, Preston North End in like 188990 or 9980 or whenever it was. They obviously did it first and they did get knocked out of all the cup competitions and then they draw like 12 games as well. But there is a reason why you did not see this for over 100 years and you have not seen it in the $0.20. So many tiny little individual things have to happen at once here. Like Jens Lehman had just arrived but he hit the ground running straight away. There was no bedding in period for him. All the really key players were getting into peak points of their career at the same time and stayed largely injury every single week. Arsene Wenger had to sit down and analyse their upcoming opponents and make certain adjustments and he never got it badly wrong even once that season. Like that’s all I would have taken. Just, you know, getting the marking disorganized at a corner, oh, back post one nil. Oh no, we’re not going to be invincible anymore. Happens to every single team, no matter how good they are. But for 38 game weeks it did not happen here. Like they were really frugal at the back. They were unbelievable to watch. Going forward, they set up in a 442, so they represented all those best bits of that British footballing mainstay. But they also innovated it in ways that would change how a lot of other teams set up in the future. They were the perfect balance of just everything and we will leave it then. Or if you have enjoyed this video. I will say this is not the kind of thing that the algorithm on YouTube usually likes, but we have a whole heap of fun doing it. So if you have enjoyed this, please do consider sharing it around and sending it to your friends and just giving us a little extra push that we might normally get. That would be really, really helpful. And maybe do this. And also, hey, while you’re here, please to consider subscribing to the channel because we do normally cover the latest in what’s going on. But when nothing is going on, we do this little fun stuff as well. And not just for Arsenal of course, for all the clubs. Can you hear my voice going? I can hear my voice going, so I’m going to wrap up even quicker than I normally would. You can get me on all the socials at Adam Cleary. CLERY just joined TikTok. Don’t know why the latest issue with the mag is not upside down. It is right here. Trent Alexander Arnold is on the cover, but the new issue is coming very soon and includes a massive piece, not just by myself, tactically, from the entire team, about the Invincibles, ’cause we think they’re mint, right? Yes, that is it. I do need a tweet now, so we’re going to go. Love you. Bye. That’ll do.