Arsenal's embrace of the 'Dark Arts' shows they are serious about winning

For too long this was a team that was above doing the things that were part of the game, now they are a team won't let any marginal gain go unexploited

If you look at the headlines after Manchester City vs Arsenal, it looks like the Premier League needs to get one of the teachers from Hogwarts to help them deal with Arsenal and their use of the Dark Arts.

Sky Sports has this: “Premier League clubs send concerns to PGMOL over Arsenal's use of the 'dark arts'“

BBC has this: “Exploring the 'dark arts' in Man City v Arsenal”

The Athletic has this: “Exploring the 'dark arts' in Man City v Arsenal” (in an article that I think fails on journalistic standard but that is for another time).

Most of these deal with time wasting and finding time to take break which they needed after the relentless pressure that they were under after playing a full half down a man away to what is arguably the best team in the World.

What makes these the ‘Dark Arts’ is that the laws of this game that we love are very vague and don’t have lots of specific rules on time to take a restart.

Here are the rules on taking a goal kick:

Nothing here about how long it should take, what is the maximum amount of time it should take, and at what point it goes from fine to too long. This is the case with basically all of the restarts, you won’t find any reference to time on throw ins, free kicks, or corner kicks. The only reference to time, is how long a goalkeeper can hold the ball, it is six seconds, and that is also one of the least enforced rules.

What we have instead is a flawed way of policing the game where the time is added on to the end of each half.

Or for the worst examples (and some not very bad examples get a yellow card) of deliberate delaying of a restart can earn a yellow card.

What Arsenal have done, is take these loose rules with no hard and fast timings with them and just take their time. By the letter of the law what Arsenal is doing is completely fine and by the rules there is no avenue to say they aren’t following the rules. If Arsenal want to take the longest time on restarts, that is fine and there isn’t anything in the rules that say they are doing things wrong.

The things that are on the wrong side of what is permitted such as kicking the ball away after the whistle, has long been unenforced, but is now something unevenly enforced with Arsenal’s examples getting the punishment it says in the rule book.

When you then go through the other examples that people come up with it is things like not shying away from physicality in this contact sport, embracing some of the cynical fouls to stop counter attacks (the Manchester City special), and pushing the boundaries on the contact allowed on set plays to create openings.

These are a part of the game, and for the longest time this was something that teams did to Arsenal and the lines were that Arsenal needed to be stronger and suck it up. So that is exactly what Arsenal have done and now teams don’t like that the perennial team that had the diminutive player makers has grown into a team full of big boys that won’t shrink away in those situations anymore.

I loved the team that played nice soccer between highly technical smaller players, but I also love that we have a team that now has a similar level of technical skill but won’t get pushed around. This is all a part of Mikel Arteta not leaving small gains on the table and I love it.

Call it the embrace of the ‘Dark Arts’ if you want, I think it is being smart and maximizing every chance to win and I love to see the team move in this direction.

"Its fine that people hate us. It's part of our history." - George Graham