Do Arsenal have a disciplinary problem? Well, the numbers would certainly suggest so. Their three red cards in eight Premier League matches this season have taken their total under Mikel Arteta’s management to 18, at least five more than any other side in that time.
“Obviously there is an issue,” admitted Arteta on Monday. For the Arsenal manager, the biggest problem is that his team is trying to win the Premier League, and it is impossible to do that with only 10 men on the pitch.
As proof of the point, consider this: Arsenal have played five league matches without a red card this season, and won them all. They have played three league matches with a red card, and won none of them. It hardly requires a professional coaching licence to identify the issue.
The situation becomes more murky, though, when you take a closer look at the red cards themselves. Based on the amount of red cards that Arsenal have picked up this season, one might assume that Arteta’s players have been acting as thuggish brutes, lunging into tackles and clattering their opponents.
After all, they are certainly capable of bullying the opposition. Such is the size of Arteta’s first-team squad that Mikel Merino, their powerful new midfield signing, said on Monday: “I look around and everyone is taller than me. We look like a basketball team now.”
The reality, however, is that Arsenal have simply been guilty of being daft, rather than dastardly. This is “naivety”, as Declan Rice described it on Saturday, rather than nastiness.
None of the three red cards were for violence or aggressive tackling. Rice and Leandro Trossard were shown controversial second yellows against Brighton and Manchester City respectively for “delaying the restart”. William Saliba was then dismissed on Saturday for pulling the shoulder of Bournemouth striker Evanilson after Trossard had accidentally punted the ball over his own backline.
“When you analyse the three very different actions and the outcome of them, the reasons are very different,” said Arteta. “What happened in those three cases has nothing to do with aggression, in my opinion.”
It seems one of Arsenal’s biggest failings has been an inability to adapt to the changes in officiating over the past year. Refereeing body PGMOL last season launched a crackdown on “delaying the restart” and they reiterated that directive to clubs before the start of this campaign. It seems Arsenal’s players either did not get the memo, or they did not listen particularly carefully.
Trossard’s decision to kick the ball away to City was especially foolish, given the importance of the game and the fact that Rice had been punished for the same offence just a few weeks earlier. “We’ve kicked ourselves in the foot three times in eight games,” Rice conceded on Saturday.
When Arsenal had an issue with frequent red cards earlier in Arteta’s tenure, the Spaniard found an unusual solution to the problem: pretending it did not exist.
“The most effective way, I have to be very honest, is not talking about it,” Arteta said ahead of his team’s Champions League match against Shakhtar Donetsk on Tuesday night.
“Because we tried and we showed and we talked and we repeated the message that we had to play with 11, and it happened again after a week, or after three weeks. They said, ‘guys, let’s try something else’. And then it disappeared. So I don’t know if it’s the right way or not but that’s what happened. That’s the reality.”
Perhaps Arteta and his coaching staff will take a similar approach this time, in the hope that the problem will simply go away. Perhaps they will accept that each of these red cards were, in their own way, freakish. But no matter how unusual the incidents have been, the fundamental truth is that, if Arsenal are to have any hope of success this season, this needs to stop.
