Thierry Henry: Pep’s approach against Arsenal surprised everyone

In his latest blog, our global ambassador discusses Arsenal’s approach to big matches, Liverpool’s star striker duo and how managers balance a system against results.

Arsenal scored a late goal to earn a draw against Man City at the weekend. In your opinion, was that a point earned or two points dropped?

Who are you trying to catch? Liverpool, right? So technically, you dropped two points. 

Now, if you look at the performance and the resilience, it is not bad. It’s only the beginning of the season, there’s no need to panic. Liverpool went five points ahead, but it’s early doors.

I saw a lot of people panicking, but I’ll say it again – do I think that Mikel Arteta is doing a great job? Yes. Do I think he should leave? No. Do I think we can win the league? Yes, I do. But we have to win something, and if I was a player, that would be my attitude.

There has been a lot of conversation about Mikel Arteta’s approach to the Liverpool and Man City matches. Do you think they are too defensive in the big games?

No one would have thought that City were going to approach the game like that. No one. I was at the game, and I was shocked. “Wow, City? Really?”

I’ve sat on the bench, but a lot of people talking have never sat on the bench. They don’t know what it is like to prepare to play against City, a team that usually destroys other teams in possession.

So maybe Arsenal worked on something else. Maybe he got surprised. We weren’t at the training ground, but there’s no way in the world that anyone here would have prepared the game against City thinking they were going to go low.

Man City recorded the lowest ever possession of a Pep Guardiola side. What does his approach to the game say about his City side?

If you look since the beginning of the season, they’re having an issue that they never used to have before – they struggle to stop transitions. If you play Arsenal and you’re too open when you attack them, you’re dead. People have been saying that Pep never wants to adapt to a situation. He did, and people kill him. It’s easy to talk after things happen.

Maybe he’s trying to find his best team with two new coaches alongside him. They played on Thursday night, and I know it bothered a lot of people, but it does matter. 

Maybe he thought, “let’s try to surprise them, play a game that we never did before.” And, by the way, he can do whatever he wants. He surprised us all.

What changes have you seen in the way Arsenal have played this season?

You can see it is tough to break us down when we are set. I have seen a lot of people talking about a lack of creativity, long throw-ins, long ball, corners. The one thing that is the most difficult to create at times is to be good as a unit and difficult to beat, and we do have that at Arsenal. You feel like sometimes you watch the game and it’s going to be tough to score a goal against us.

This is the way Mikel Arteta as a coach wants his team to operate. We have to understand that, come to terms with it, and support it. Is it the flamboyant way that the team was playing three years ago? I would say no, but teams also adapted to what Arsenal had to offer, so they came up with something.

We are very resilient. If I said to you that a team didn’t lose a game in 33 against the big six, and didn’t lose against Man City for five games in a row, you would say that team won the title. That’s what we need to do now.

Liverpool have now got two top strikers in Isak and Ekitike. As a manager, how do you juggle having two players who both feel they deserve the same spot?

You call that a nice headache. There is a choice now, and Ekitike made himself a choice. He arrived and erased any doubts about the time it would take him to adapt. He showed that he is at the level to play for Liverpool.

Nobody was questioning whether Isak would adapt after what he did for Newcastle. The question mark was more on Ekitike, and he answered the call.

At every club, you need to have players of the same quality at every position, because if someone falls asleep then the guy that comes in can take your place. That’s what we created at Arsenal – the quality on the bench is the same as on the field.

Who is the Premier League summer signing who has impressed you the most?

It’s Ekitike. People will say it’s an obvious one, but credit is due – nobody thought he was going to arrive and perform like that.

There has been a lot of talk about Ruben Amorim sticking to his system at Manchester United, and Ange Postecoglou with Tottenham last season. As a manager, how do you balance long-term philosophy with getting results? 

It depends what you are allowed to do by the board upstairs. You’re not going to change your tactic after three or five games. The players will say, “you said we’re going to press and play out from the back, and in every game you change it?”

It’s not me or you sitting there. If he doesn’t want to change, he doesn’t want to change. Let him be. I understand that maybe sometimes the tactic of a coach is not everyone’s cup of tea, but at the end of the day, the coach is trying to pass a message to the team.

The question is how far you go, because you’re always going to think you’re about to break it. If you change it, you need to change the whole thing, and that takes another two to three months.

People will tell me there’s no time, because Man Utd are trying to be competitive in the league, but I’ve been there in games where you work on something, and then on the bench you realise it’s not working. But if I change it, it will be something we’ve never worked on. It happened to me in the Olympics against the US. They were doing something that disturbed our shape, and my assistant wanted to change things. I said, “it will work, it will work,” we stuck with it, and boom, it worked. We scored exactly how we worked on it. If I had changed it, we had no plan, we would have played off the cuff.

The best example is when Pep Guardiola arrived. He had Claudio Bravo in goal, and people were telling him, “this is the Premier League, you can’t play out from the back like that.” He didn’t change, he carried on believing in what he could do, and he succeeded. Now nobody remembers that part.

At some point winning matters – that’s why you hope your system works, because even if you know fully that it can work, people will not buy it.