Daniel Storey: Football must get head around concussion before timebomb explodes
Arsenal’s two victories against the best two teams in the country in the same week have come with plenty of good fortune. They were comfortably out-shot by Liverpool and Manchester City, and were grateful for the profligacy of both opponents.
But then that is Arsenal’s reality. They do not possess one of the best four squads in the country, a club that has been eroded by its own long-term incompetence on and off the field. The only sustainable answer was to appoint a manager with the skills and patience to create a team greater than the sum of its parts, improving what he inherited and adding to them as budgets allowed.
By any measure, Arteta has already proven himself worthy of taking on this task. On Saturday, Arsenal executed the perfect gameplan to thwart Arteta’s former mentor.
They pressed and harried City’s midfielders and exposed the clear defensive deficiencies of Pep Guardiola’s side. More pertinently, given Arsenal’s flaws, they defended magnificently and Emiliano Martinez must surely be close to establishing himself above Bernd Leno as No. 1 goalkeeper.
Now Arteta deserves some help. Arsenal will not bridge the gap to the top four without investment. They need at least another central midfielder, creative influence and centre-back, and none will come cheap.
Arteta has picked the perfect time to put pressure on the boardroom to release transfer funds, safe in the knowledge that impressed supporters will back him. A first trophy since Arsene Wenger retired would be a wonderful bargaining chip.
Same old Manchester City. Pep Guardiola will stress that his team have comfortably beaten Southampton and Arsenal on expected goals in recent weeks and that defensive issues were only laid bare by their inability to take chances in the final third, but that only offers a part-explanation.
During his time at City, Guardiola has spent more than £300m on defenders and the naked truth is that his team have barely improved their defending.
The loss of Vincent Kompany last summer may have caused a drop in defensive leadership, but Kompany’s defensive attributes should have been easily covered by those left behind. John Stones has gone backwards, Nicolas Otamendi is surely finished and Eric Garcia is far from a finished product.
City’s season can still be saved. Winning a first European Cup would overshadow a limp title defence and FA Cup semi-final flunk. But can we really trust a side with such obvious fragility when falling a goal behind to succeed in a mini-tournament against Europe’s best?
If Arsenal can pick holes in City’s midfield and defence, Real Madrid, Juventus and Bayern Munich will be licking their lips.
It may not play much part in the Monday morning back-page headlines, but it should. Eric Bailly had already received one blow to the head when he was involved in a second collision that halted Sunday’s FA Cup semi-final for 10 minutes and saw Bailly head down the tunnel on a stretcher.
The issue with head injuries and potential concussion damage is not that the initial blow causes lasting damage, but that any subsequent knocks to the same area are far more likely to cause serious injury. It is those secondary incidents that concussion experts insist can be potentially fatal.
Football must be more mature when it comes to the treatment of head injuries. Whether it takes temporary concussion replacements (as in rugby), ‘free’ substitutions for those who sustain cranial blows or even taking steps to reduce the amount of aerial collisions, something must be done. We are sitting on a ticking timebomb.
Any club that employs four different managers would struggle to keep a straight face when making the case for a long-term plan being implemented effectively, but then Watford have always been run a little differently. The Pozzo family are no strangers to knee-jerk managerial changes. Watford also had four managers during a promotion season.
From the outside, it is an extraordinary decision. Watford have struggled in recent weeks and are still mired in relegation worry, but Pearson steadied the ship after a dismal autumn when all hope of survival looked lost.
Perhaps there was a ruckus after Friday’s lethargic defeat to West Ham, but it’s only a few weeks since goalkeeper Ben Foster was insisting that Pearson stay beyond this season whatever division Watford ended up in.
Whatever the reasons, Watford’s owners face a huge summer to rebuild confidence in their ownership and decision-making to avoid this club undoing their brilliant work of seasons past. They are now looking for their 14th manager in a little over nine years. Rent rather than buy would be the best advice for Pearson’s replacement.
There have been precious few good news stories during a Bournemouth season that will likely see them relegated back to the Championship. But 22-year-old goalkeeper Aaron Ramsdale deserves to stick around.
Were it not for Ramsdale, Bournemouth would already be down and would have lost by a significantly greater margin against Southampton on Sunday. He does everything with minimum fuss despite playing behind a defence that has made a series of individual and collective errors to make his life harder.
Reliable young goalkeepers available at a knockdown price are hard to come by. Ramsdale is probably not in England’s top three goalkeepers (Jordan Pickford, Dean Henderson and Nick Pope are above him), but a clever move and another solid campaign and he might well push for a place in their squad at Euro 2020 next summer.Â
At the very least, he should be a starting Premier League goalkeeper next season.
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