🚨 Hi everyone. To celebrate Arsenal’s title win I'll be giving away THREE 'Champions' prints by the brilliant @matthewjiwood to three random winners
- Simply repost this to enter
Winners picked on Saturday.
(If you're not feeling lucky the prints - and loads of others - can be found here: https://t.co/718xYZwECf)
So happy for everyone.
I reflect on how so many from the outside have relished in stripping us of any JOY all season
Analysed to minimise minor successes to a point where we are seen as the enemy of the game
Last night we showed what a connected club can achieve
Enjoy ❤️
🚨The most comprehensive list of the highest % trends at The Masters for the most predictive course - Augusta National Golf Club.
TAKEAWAYS
⛳️Love them or hate them, the trends speak to the bigger picture of what matters at Augusta National.
⛳️Course knowledge and experience is directly correlated to success.
⛳️A longshot winner is improbable.
⛳️Recent winning experience is significant.
⛳️Current form, especially tee-to-green is paramount.
⛳️An elite putter is not required.
⛳️It's a "bombers" paradise - Architect Bobby Jones literally designed the course to give golfers "an unrestricted feeling of being able to swing away amid a wide swath of parkland". He believed that good drives would be rewarded, not by staying out of penalty areas, but by “making the second shot simpler in proportion to the excellence of the first".
⛳️Attacking the par 5s (with aggressiveness) is a necessity.
⛳️Chipping on tight, uneven lies around the green is a predictive skill and brings out the best short-gamers.
✅Three players fit 17 of 19 trends...
Ludvig Aberg
Xander Schauffele
Tommy Fleetwood
✅Six players fit 16 of 19 trends...
Scottie Scheffler
Rory McIlroy
Jon Rahm
Bryson DeChambeau
Matt Fitzpatrick
Min Woo Lee
✅One player fit 15 of 19 trends...
Cameron Young
✅Two players fit 14 of 19 trends...
Collin Morikawa
Hideki Matsuyama
⛳️Last year, Rory McIlroy fit all 19 trends...and won.
Now that Arsenal fans are booing their own team and former players are lining up to criticise, let me offer the bigger picture, the one you hear across Europe.
Arsenal are not seen here as a team that has stalled. They are seen as a reference point. As the team many look at when trying to understand where elite football is heading.
The game has shifted, it is no longer enough to dominate the ball or to attack well. The top sides now compete in, and often decide matches through, the four phases that make teams excellent: organised attack, attacking transition, defensive transition and structured defence. At the highest level, those phases matter more than possession percentages or aesthetic debates.
This is where Arsenal stand out.
Under Mikel Arteta, Arsenal control space, time and another very important element, rhythm. They are aggressive without being chaotic, but can create chaos to find gaps, they are compact without being passive. Their pressing is prepared in detail, lose the ball and the reaction is immediate. The opponent is denied oxygen.
Across Europe, this is understood as modern dominance.
The key battleground today is transition. Not what you do with the ball, but what happens the instant you lose it. Defensive rhythm has overtaken offensive rhythm. Space is smaller and time is shorter. The teams that survive are the ones that arrive first, win duels, plus reset order before danger appears.
Arsenal do this as well as anyone.
In Europe, Arsenal are seen as a team that has absorbed Guardiola’s ideas and pushed them forward, they have strengthened them for a football world that now plays faster, presses harder, and it totally punishes hesitation.
At the very moment Arsenal are being questioned at home, they are being analysed as a model.
Progress is often uncomfortable and it rarely moves in straight lines. Arsenal don’t look lost. In my eyes they look early!