Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger in all he does » Is it the defence that is the problem? The stats suggest not.
By Walter Broeckx
A reader asked it we could look at the goals conceded and compare this with the invincible year. A fair question and so I went on to do some research on this.
And if you just look at the bare facts they say:
2003-2004 : conceded 26 goals and won the title.
2009-2010 : conceded 41 goals and finish third.
Okay that’s it. We have a very bad defensive record compared with that year. I could finish the article and move on to why. But when I tried to come up with an answer I found it not that easy.
Could it have been the experience in the side? After all it was an aging squad with many players in their thirties or nearing it. So I think age is one thing that could explain the difference. It could have been the injury problem we have faced this season. In fact the only player who made it to the end without injury was Sagna.
But as I was looking at some numbers I noticed some strange things. Because if we take the invincible year as the reference year we only managed to do better once in the last 18 seasons. That was in 98-99 when we only conceded 17 goals and still we didn’t win the league that season as we ended in 2nd place. In fact that is very strange to see that we didn’t win the league with a defensive record like that.
But is this 41 goals the worst result in those last 18 seasons? No. The worst result was in the season 94-95 when we concede 49 goals and we finished in 12th place. YES 12th.
Speaking about disaster. That was one year of disaster. We even finished behind you know who, I dare to say in a whispering voice. Could you imagine that we had all those blogs then? But the blogs in those days would not have had the chance to blame Wenger as he was nowhere near our club in those days.
Now if we take a further look at the invincibles we all know that it was not a defence that was brought together at the start of the season. No in fact is was a defence that played many years together before that great season.
To put things in some perspective I would like to divide the last decade in 2 parts. I would like to take the 1999-2000 season as a starting point and take this as the years of the invincibles up to 2004-2005. From that moment on I think the invincibles were leaving or stopped playing and we had to start all over again. So I just give you the season with the goals against we got and the place we finished.
99-00 : 43 goals against and place 2
00-01 : 38 goals against and place 2
01-02 : 36 goals against and place 1
02-03 : 42 goals against and place 2
03-04 : 26 goals against and place 1 (The Invincible year)
04-05 : 36 goals against and place 2
I think it is fair to say that these were the seasons we played with the defence, or for a large part anyway, that Wenger inherited from even before him. It had players like Adams, Keown, Winterburn, Dixon, Lauren, Campbell in it and had great international goalkeepers like Seaman and Lehman.
If we try to make an average of it then we see that we conceded almost 37 goals each season. If you want to have the exact number it is 36.83.
So lets us move on to the era of our current defence. The one with Gallas, Sagna, Eboue, Clichy, Toure and now Vermaelen. And if you wish we can include a bit of Campbell, Lehamn and Almunia.
05-06 : 31 goals and place 4
06-07 : 35 goals and place 4
07-08 : 31 goals and place 3
08-09 : 37 goals and place 4
09-10 : 41 goals and place 3
If we make an average of these years we come to 35 goals conceded. And that is the exact number.
Now I must say that I, maybe like you, was very surprised by this. You can always hear people saying : ah in the seasons when we had those players, the invincibles, from those good old days we were much stronger in defence. But apart from that one invincible year we conceded more goals than we do now.
So sorry for the one who asked to find an answer to his remark “The invincibles always scored plenty of goals but didn’t concede as many as this team”; as I can not give you an answer. The fact is we don’t concede more goals than we did with most of the invincibles playing. It just looks that way but it is not supported by the facts.
But if you do want to find something strange than I can tell you that in the era before the season 1999-2000 and starting from the year 1992-1993 we only concede an average of just under 33 goals per season. So this was by far the best defence we had in the last 18 years. But in that same period we ended 10th, 12th, 5th and some 4th places but we only managed to get one title. It was in 1997-1998 and I think most of you will know who was our manager.
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Where next in 2010: Next Season: a set of articles about the current (2010) squad, the transfers, and who is moving up from the reserves – not to mention a definitive analysis of how the 25 player system works.
The glorious future Everything else from 2010
The adventurous past Everything from 1910