Aaron Ramsey’s Anderlecht display sums up confusion in Arsenal ranks

When a man who once played the last 10 minutes of a Premier League match still drunk from the night before is quite this horrified about your defensive organisation, it is perhaps time to take a breath and listen. Paul Merson’s response on Sky Sports to Arsenal’s concession of a 3-0 lead at home to Anderlecht on Tuesday night was perfectly pitched: a combination of fan-level astonishment, ex-pro’s disdain and impartial bewilderment at the shoddiness of a team led by the same new-broom manager who sold him to Middlesbrough 17 years ago, in the prelude to the most successful period in Arsenal’s history.

For all that, Merson’s description of Arsenal as “tactically clueless” is perhaps slightly wide of the mark. It wasn’t so much Arsenal’s tactics – the gameplan, the formation – that were wrong at the Emirates. It was the execution, the spirt, the basic quality of the personnel involved, the system of recruitment and preparation that put them on the pitch together in the first place. This was, let’s face it, not so much a tactical blunder as a systemic collapse, a story of failure spreading back up the arm.

Indeed, if Merson wanted to criticise anybody’s tactics it ought to be those of the Anderlecht manager, Besnik Hasi, who left it until his team were 3-0 down before probing with any real purpose some very obvious Arsenal weaknesses. Why didn’t Hasi bring Aleksandr Mitrovic on to cuff Nacho Monreal around much earlier in the piece? Why didn’t Anderlecht simply stride through that collapsible Arsenal midfield once it became clear there was little resistance there? Have they not been watching? Has Wenger not been watching? Did any of this, in the end really come as much of a surprise to anyone? Wenger blamed his defence for the goals conceded, a defence, just to be clear, trained, selected and prepared by Arsène Wenger. As ever though it was in Arsenal’s midfield that the real problems with the team and indeed the methodology of late Wengerism coalesced. And most obviously in the person of Aaron Ramsey, a lovely footballer with a wonderful range of skills, who right now simply looks a little lost.

Two moments at the end of the game seemed to sum up Ramsey’s fretfulness, the sense of confusion over exactly what it is he’s supposed to be doing out there. With 88 minutes gone Arsenal, 3-2 up, were awarded a free kick 30 yards from goal. Ramsey (really?) stepped up and rather than slowing things down or playing the ball to a colleague simply punted it over the bar. Moments later, as Arsenal attacked, five red-shirted players swarmed into the box, Ramsey chief among them, only for Anderlecht to scamper away through a vacated midfield and score a schoolboy-level, two-touch equaliser.

It would be easy to blame Ramsey for this, to wonder how a central midfielder can play so loosely at the end of a match of such importance. But he is in effect an embodiment of a wider confusion of methods. Wenger suggested during the week that Ramsey is currently suffering from the after-effects of his seductive, unrepeatable 18-goal season, struggling now to locate the real meat of his role. Ramsey was wonderful last year, but perhaps he was wonderful in the wrong way, his rare attacking gear a distraction from the more basic areas – linking, tackling, passing – in which Arsenal need him to excel right now. Just as Paul Scholes often played deeper for Manchester United, so Ramsey needs to accept that Alexis Sánchez has that forward role, that his job in the current team is to score less and play more, to be a shield rather than a sword.

If he has failed to do so, then this is a managerial failing on two levels: most obviously it is Wenger’s job to ensure Ramsey understands and executes his role; and secondly both Ramsey and Mikel Arteta – worryingly immobile again – are ill-fitting parts as a defensive fulcrum. Arteta came to Arsenal as a passing midfielder with an eye for goal, just as Ramsey’s streak at the start of last season came in a team that contained Mathieu Flamini and Jack Wilshere, and where he was allowed to play half and half, to defend and attack with relative freedom.

This season, if he has failed at times to stretch himself across a larger space, it should be remembered he is attempting to fill a hole that ought not to be there in the first place. The frustration for Arsenal supporters is that the most obvious omissions in the team are hardly insurmountable. Two signings would have done it: a competent centre-back to replace Thomas Vermaelen; and an athletic, specialist defensive midfielder. Had Arsenal signed either of these they may well have already qualified for the knockout stages. They might have had a (small) chance of topping the group. There might even have been a sense of progress, of trying to allow this team to play to its full potential, to challenge the best, to dream of going a little further.

Instead failures of recruitment are obscuring progress that has been made. The full range of Arsenal’s high-speed attacking combinations was on show in opening up that three-goal lead. This really should have been the story here. Instead it is simply the same old story. Arsenal will – almost certainly – once again reach the last 16 of the Champions League, a fine achievement in itself, albeit one that is being glossed by the failure to strive for a little more.

There is a wider issue here too. Arsenal have been helped greatly by the Uefa seeding system, which has for the last few years placed them in groups with only one genuine heavyweight. From next season this will change. Teams that win their domestic league will instead be given top seeding. As a result simply existing lucratively within that top 16 group and sustaining the prestige of Champions League football in spring is about to become that much more difficult.

Back in August 1997, as Merson was heading for Middlesbrough, an article in the Independent concluded “The sale of Merson is Wenger’s first questionable decision as Arsenal manager”. At a time when simply standing still could soon mean taking a slight step down there is perhaps good reason to question him again.