Having built one good team, how do you do it a second time? Or a third? What are the key ingredients? That has been thrown into the spotlight by the travails of two of the league’s top clubs.
Arsenal and Chelsea are both in transition. Yet their problems are very different. At Arsenal, a good core of players has found itself let down by a lack of strength in depth in recent years as injuries take their toll. Chelsea on the other hand, have the opposite problem. They have good strength in depth, but their core is becoming increasingly weak.
For Chelsea, this poses Andre Villas Boas particular concern. He must find new players to form his core, but rests safe in the knowledge that he has the backup to form a strong squad. For Arsene Wenger, he has a situation where he knows he has a good backbone to his team in Wojciech Szczesny, Thomas Vermaelen and Laurent Koscielny in defence, Jack Wilshere and Robin van Persie. But Wenger now must find the strength in depth to compensate for that when these players are injured or away for whatever reason. Without Vermaelen and Koscielny, Arsenal look weaker. Mertesacker is a good replacement but Johan Djourou is not. And the less said about Ignaci Miquel or Sebastien Squillaci the better.
Chelsea know that Didier Drogba, Frank Lampard and John Terry are coming towards the end. Terry is no longer the player he was; his style – aggressive, unrelenting, acting before thinking, has left his body seemingly unable to cope with the demands of top level football anymore. Drogba seems keen for his last pay day whilst Lampard conversely, still has his uses. Able to come up with important goals, there is little reason why Lampard can’t do as Paul Scholes or Ryan Giggs have done at Manchester United. He has the intelligence, sure footed touch and fitness to go on for years still. But he must accept that his time as an automatic first choice player are at an end.
These are the myriad challenges facing a manager who must deconstruct a team and rebuild it over. Alex Ferguson is the past master of such an art. He knows that he must take his team apart from the biggest egos first of all; hence the departures over the years of Jaap Stam, Ruud van Nistelrooy, David Beckham and Roy Keane. But he does so knowing that he still has the core of a strong team as well as the depth in the squad to cope. Wenger’s big mistake was ripping apart a successful team entirely. Ferguson would never do that. Villas Boas must find the balance between the two, but he is clever enough and tactically astute, so there is no reason he cannot do this. He just needs time.
