Under Pressure

I tuned into Sky’s Sunday Supplement after Arsenal’s win at Burnley last weekend and listened to one of the journalists, in discussing Arsenal’s recent form, suggest that we always go on a good run when the pressure is off. The proposition being that our present position means that we are not under pressure. This seemed skewed logic to me as the present run of 8 consecutive PL wins started with us in 6th place staring up at Southampton and Spurs among the CL place contenders and Liverpool just behind us. If this recent form can be attributed to us playing without pressure then when are we ever under pressure? The more logical conclusion to this present run is that we have responded to the pressure of competing at the least for a CL place very positively and any comfort we might feel now, premature as it may be, is a result of successfully facing and dealing with it.

There have been equally confused musings on the club’s ability to handle pressure in exchanges on these forums. One suggested that we couldn’t handle the pressure of expectation in overcoming weaker teams in the CL, such as Monaco, but could pull out good results in single legs against bigger teams such as Barca or Bayern when we were not expected to beat them. Another suggested that the reverse was true and the beatings we took away to the bigger teams in the PL last season such as Chelsea and Liverpool showed that we can’t handle the pressure of big games even though we weren’t really expected to win. So we can be seen as under pressure against sides we are expected to beat and also those we aren’t and failing to cope with that pressure very well in either circumstance.

Such confusion just shows that a club like Arsenal is always under pressure and that that pressure is curiously a result of actually being quite good at dealing with pressure in the sense that we are usually in the hunt for the prizes even if not leading it. In the 8 seasons between 2006 and 2013 which didn’t deliver a trophy we were regularly and uniquely singled out as having gone X seasons without a prize while other ‘big’ clubs equally deprived of silverware whose form had fluctuated more wildly than ours over that period didn’t seem to carry quite the same weight of expectation.

This weekend’s Sunday Supplement broadcast held similar reflections on expectations of Arsenal. Sam Wallace, in considering successive FA Cup finals said that he found it hard to determine what an acceptable expectation is for Arsenal with Matt Dickinson pointing out that it changes most weeks. Dickinson then went on to set the bench mark of winning the PL or CL as a minimum expectation with which Arsenal should be satisfied with Neil Ashton then asking the question whether relative domestic cup success has now changed the demands of Arsenal. The answer, in my view, has to be that it has just changed the narrative and that whatever the success expectations will always exceed them.

Winning a domestic trophy just ramps up the pressure to win a greater prize. Even if we win the FA Cup for a second time in as many seasons the qualification will be that we should have run Chelsea closer for the title. There lies the true pressure for AFC. Every success, at whatever level, just breeds the demand for success. The success of consistent CL qualification, an aspiration for many, has become taken for granted for Arsenal and even mocked as demonstrating a lack of ambition and acceptance of 4th place as trophy. Yet that minimum consistent achievement, met despite internal and external pressures, isn’t always seen as the club successfully dealing with the pressure really quite impressively. A similar attainment in regularly getting beyond the group stages of the CL is also not a pressure every team has met.

Fewer clubs face that sort of pressure. Liverpool’s 25 years without a title and Spurs more than half a century seem to immunise them against such demands. Even in our recent drought period we were usually close enough to trophies to make an issue of the fact that we hadn’t won one. We were never far enough away from them to make it a redundant issue. Hence the pressure and expectations are always there.

Arsenal seems to be a club that has dealt with pressure better than most throughout its history which is perhaps illustrated by its record as the only PL club to have won a trophy in each of the last 10 successive historical decades. Even in the recent barren spell the club has resisted the pressure to chase rainbows in spending more than was sensible and mortgaging its future to do so. In chasing those rainbows some clubs have also failed to resist the pressure to change horses almost every year in the usually futile belief that success is just a product of rolling the dice often enough. Failing to resist such pressures has seen some of our peers become more constrained than they might have been as a consequence. Arsenal has prudently increased its spending as resources have allowed it to do so and football has now more sensibly decided that the spending of all clubs should similarly reflect such resources.

These expectations and demands of Arsenal and the consequent pressures can be seen as an endorsement of our success as a club even if that success hasn’t always brought the trophies that match the expectations. But don’t claim we can’t handle pressure. Over the years few have done so, and on a number of different fronts, as well as we have.