A football pundit’s reasons behind a team’s success or failure rarely vary beyond a narrow band of hackneyed murmurings: for Arsenal’s myriad failures over the past decade, these harpings have been a tedious mix-tape of ‘lacking a British core’, ‘having the mental strength of a woodlouse’, ‘excessively empowering young players’, and the constant underlying static of ‘having no Patrick Vieira in midfield’.
To be fair to the pundits, Arsenal fans have been cycling through permutations of the same reasons to explain away their club’s crests and troughs in the Emirates era. However, the more sober and discerning of supporters have often replaced the whimsical ‘having no Patrick Vieira’ with the far more realistic ‘having no Mathieu Flamini’.
Players like Patrick Vieira in his pomp come across once in a generation; there was never going to be another one. But in 2007-08, Arsenal found a midfield enforcer-cum-destroyer in Flamini who ran through walls and jumped across moats for the team. He was all-action in a way that the telescopic, loping Vieira wasn’t; his ceaseless harrying of the opposition and steadfast protection of the back four gave freedom to the likes of Cesc Fabregas and Alexander Hleb as they tipped, tapped, and almost led Arsenal to the Premier League crown.
The Gunners haven’t mounted a serious title challenge since Flamini shunned a new contract and left for AC Milan in 2008. Many sections of fans put Arsenal’s subsequent meekness down to the lack of a Flamini-like barnstorming presence in the middle of the park to shore things up and lend steel to the side.
Well, I daresay Arsenal are definitely equipped with a Flamini-like presence this season.
Arsene’s punt on an older and more war-wizened Flamini after his Milan contract expired was met with much balking and cynicism. There were younger, sleeker iterations available in the market; this apart from the inexplicable but inevitable stigma that attached itself to the transfer because it was on a free. But all these doubts melded into nothingness once Flamini came on against Tottenham and tore into the Lilywhites from the word go.
Flamini has been extremely impressive so far this season, and adds a kind of talk-and-tackle quality that was hitherto conspicuous by its absence.
Talk
Too often has an opposition goal been conceded because of a breakdown in the two-cans-one-string setup that is Arsenal’s defensive communication. Centre-backs will collide, defensive midfielders will go gallivanting up the pitch (Song, anyone?), full-backs will get caught out of position, and general positional discipline will pack its bags and exit the premises. These scenes have been depressingly familiar to Arsenal fans over the years, which makes the parsimony in defence this calendar year all that more noteworthy.
Far be it for me to suggest that Flamini is the harbinger of this newfound stability; the imperious form of Per Mertesacker and administrative excellence of Mikel Arteta would be far better reasons to cite. But as someone who will shout his lungs hoarse against both Bayern Munich and Bournemouth, Flamini makes sure that communication links never switch off even in the most tepid Premier League encounter. His marshalling ability goes a long way towards negating Arsenal’s over-reliance on Per and Mikel; his roaring Theoden impression keeping the red-and-white forces of Rohan on their toes.
Tackle
Arsenal’s sleeve-cutting French bulldog is as fearsome in his bite as he is feral in his bark. Flamini spends every single playing minute motoring around the pitch, snapping at heels and checking bodies and putting whatever appendage possible in the path of the ball. Statistics show that Flamini and Arteta have roughly the same number of tackles in most games where they play together, but the ways in which they apply their defensive nous is markedly different: Flamini is the sledgehammer to Arteta’s syringe, the shotgun-sporting hillbilly to Arteta’s balletic figure-skater. And one of the biggest things Arsenal had been crying out for all these years was this balance in midfield, a midfield that can now both pick opposition pockets and slit opposition throats.
Although the previous 700 words make it seem so, this article is not meant to unconditionally eulogize Flamini or gloss over his flaws. His propensity to collect bookings is as rampant as ever, he has a subversive streak as evidenced by the sleeve-cutting incident mentioned earlier, and the purist fans will sneer at people forgetting so quickly how he hiked off to newer pastures when Arsenal needed him the most (where have we heard that before, eh?). But these trophyless years ought to have sobered up the fanbase and made them aware of one fact more than most viz. football players are guided by mind over heart in their career decisions and acting the jilted lover by harbouring emotional baggage is not going to lead anywhere. Flamini’s move to Milan was a professional decision, as is his decision to re-join Arsenal after seeing out his contract in Italy. He’s never going to be an N5 hall-of-famer, but his trash-talking, slide-tackling second stint in London might just end with a gold pot at the end of the rainbow.
And he isn’t even the one who cost 40 million pounds.
