• ! ! ! IMPORTANT MESSAGE ! ! !

    Discussions about police investigations

    In light of recent developments about a player from Premier League being arrested and until there is an official announcement, ALL users should refrain from discussing or speculating about situations around personal off-pitch matters related to any Arsenal player. This is to protect you and the forum.

    Users who disregard this reminder will be issued warnings and their posts will get deleted from public.

Mikel Arteta: Top Of The Klopps

Manberg

Predator
Am I grumpy in the fact that I don't really miss any squad apart from the invincibles? All of the teams post 2007 just come across as losers to me, like I remember way too many humiliations to have fond memories.

You count multiple FA cup winners amongst losers?
 

Tir Na Nog

Changes Opinion Every 5 Minutes

Country: Ireland
Am I grumpy in the fact that I don't really miss any squad apart from the invincibles? All of the teams post 2007 just come across as losers to me, like I remember way too many humiliations to have fond memories.

There's some moments and a few players but in general I don't see this yearning for the days of 2011 for example. People post videos on twitter all the time of some nice team goals but then I just remember the 4-4 vs Newcastle, Birmingham in the league cup, bottling a lead at WHL, losing to Stoke, Bolton, losing 4-3 to Blackburn, losing 8-2 all in the one calendar year.

I think nostalgia plays tricks on people, but if people have fond memories then fair enough. I'm hoping we move past all that and build a team that's mentally strong enough to go the distance and not just settle for some pretty football along the way.
 

BigPoppaPump

Reeling from Laca & Kos nightmares
You count multiple FA cup winners amongst losers?

I don't think it would be fair of me to say it but @Tir Na Nog basically summarised it here:

There's some moments and a few players but in general I don't see this yearning for the days of 2011 for example. People post videos on twitter all the time of some nice team goals but then I just remember the 4-4 vs Newcastle, Birmingham in the league cup, bottling a lead at WHL, losing to Stoke, Bolton, losing 4-3 to Blackburn, losing 8-2 all in the one calendar year.

Or that one year where we were the best team defensively in the league but still lost 6-3 to City, 5-1 to Liverpool, 3-0 to Everton and the worst of all 6-0 to Chelsea at Arsène's 1000th game and being top most of the year to ending up 4th. Just too many bad memories for me to be nostalgic. It's like your uncle molesting you but you remember the times he took you out for ice cream instead.
 

Manberg

Predator
I get that way of thinking. When it comes to my life I tend to remember the bad things I did with regret, ignoring the good.
But when it comes to Arsenal I like to remember the positives and be happy.
 

Riou

In The Winchester, Waiting For This To Blow Over

Country: Northern Ireland

Player:Gabriel
When I look back at past Arsenal teams and players, in certain occasions I am looking back with rose-tinted glasses...look at the 2010s that just finished...first decade in ages with no league title, all our best players leaving, regular heavy defeats...all that ****ing sucked.

But the positivity comes from not only Arsenal, but moments from my life that I look back on and smile about, think that's where the happiness comes from...times when football, music, films/tv shows, relationships...life came together to give me moments that I will always remember fondly, even if they weren't all great, they just kinda worked together.

Take the 2012-2013 season as an example, kinda meh overall really...but around that time it was also when I met the woman that I am in love with, so that season has a nice meaning to me.

Obviously no Arsenal season has topped the Invincible one since, that will probably never be topped...but I can find even the smallest of great moments in pretty much any season since, even the "worst" ones.

I just like looking back in the past, as life will never stop changing...so it's nice to look back at moments that will never happen again, but still mean a lot to me.
 

jgirolami

Active Member
I don't think it would be fair of me to say it but @Tir Na Nog basically summarised it here:



Or that one year where we were the best team defensively in the league but still lost 6-3 to City, 5-1 to Liverpool, 3-0 to Everton and the worst of all 6-0 to Chelsea at Arsène's 1000th game and being top most of the year to ending up 4th. Just too many bad memories for me to be nostalgic. It's like your uncle molesting you but you remember the times he took you out for ice cream instead.
Lol.

Was wondering what my team of the Emirates era would be.. and weather even this would be good enough to win the league.

Leahmann

Sagna. Touré. BFG Monreal

Fabregas. Cazorla
Nasri. Alexis

Judas. King.


On paper this looks a good team but in my heart I still don’t believe that this would win the league which again highlights the downgrade in players we have had since moving in to the emirates. We were led to believe that the move would actually get us better players than we had before the move like W.T.F. Vieira,petit,Campbell,Henry,Wiltord,Anelka,Ljungberg,Bergkamp, and many more I’m sure.
Living with the krankies let’s hope Arteta is a miracle worker.
 

Sydney-Gooner

Active Member
I don't think it would be fair of me to say it but @Tir Na Nog basically summarised it here:



Or that one year where we were the best team defensively in the league but still lost 6-3 to City, 5-1 to Liverpool, 3-0 to Everton and the worst of all 6-0 to Chelsea at Arsène's 1000th game and being top most of the year to ending up 4th. Just too many bad memories for me to be nostalgic. It's like your uncle molesting you but you remember the times he took you out for ice cream instead.

giphy.gif
 

FinnGooner

Established Member
I don't think it would be fair of me to say it but @Tir Na Nog basically summarised it here:



Or that one year where we were the best team defensively in the league but still lost 6-3 to City, 5-1 to Liverpool, 3-0 to Everton and the worst of all 6-0 to Chelsea at Arsène's 1000th game and being top most of the year to ending up 4th. Just too many bad memories for me to be nostalgic. It's like your uncle molesting you but you remember the times he took you out for ice cream instead.

And in worst cases even the good memories may be false ones, I mean, are you sure it was ice cream...?
 

Trilly

Hates A-M, Saka, Arteta and You
Trusted ⭐

Country: England
href="
Really interesting article where he talks about how Auba can probably keep his speed for a few more years , Xhaka is Captaincy material ,amongst the reasons "he's not afraid to have difficult conversations with players and staff " and he insists Özil can transition to a high intensity game as his running numbers including sprint speed are elite in the league and clashing with Emery's strength and conditioning staff.

Nevertheless, Burgess’s results remained good. “By all objective measures, things were even better than the first year”, he says. According to Opta, Arsenal players covered 4310.14km in 2018-19 — the most of any Premier League team. Crucially, their high speed running was similarly intense. It was particularly satisfying to achieve these results with a squad not renowned for their physicality.

The inevitable question is whether Aubameyang, who turns 31 in the summer, can maintain that level of performance. “Look,” Burgess replies, “time catches up with everybody but when you’re Auba, when you’re Jamie Vardy (the Leicester City striker is already 33)… when you’re these people, you can hold on to it and still be above-average for a lot longer.”

In his mind, there’s no question over whether Özil has the capacity to adapt to a high-intensity game: “Mesut is much-maligned physically, but there were many games where his running numbers — and I’m talking high-speed numbers, not just distance but high-speed numbers — were among the elite in the competition. So he’s certainly capable of doing it…”
My athletic free trial is over, will get it back in a few weeks. I really, really, really want to read this though. Could somebody help please.:rolleyes:

Also not surprised about Özil's sprint numbers, he's really quite quick. Just seems to have a 5 second limit on his sprints.:lol:
 

Rex Stone

Long live the fighters
Trusted ⭐

Country: Wales
My athletic free trial is over, will get it back in a few weeks. I really, really, really want to read this though. Could somebody help please.:rolleyes:

Also not surprised about Özil's sprint numbers, he's really quite quick. Just seems to have a 5 second limit on his sprints.:lol:


Ever since Mikel Arteta took charge of Arsenal, he has intimated the squad are not as fit as he would like.

In his post-match interview after the New Year’s Day win over Manchester United, David Luiz appeared to admit as much when he said “physically, we are not ready.”

Certainly, Arteta’s team have struggled to maintain the intensity the Spaniard demands, frequently tiring within games and failing to perform for the full 90 minutes. Now, their squad is being stretched thinner by muscular problems.

Arsenal’s former director of high performance Darren Burgess might know why.

“Hard work is the best form of injury prevention and injury protection,” Burgess, who left the club at the end of last season, tells The Athletic. “You should be slowly but deliberately building up people’s training tolerance because then, in December and January, when the games come thick and fast, the players are used to it.”

During his time at the club, it was Burgess who took responsibility for ensuring players trained at the requisite intensity. Arteta predecessor Unai Emery’s sessions tended to be more tactical, so it was Burgess’ job to ensure the players got through enough work to reach peak performance. Frequently, that meant an extra 10 or 15 minutes of physical exertion tagged on at the end of training sessions.

“Once Unai finished his session, most of the time he would say, ‘Look if you need to do some extra work with the players, go on and do it,’” Burgess explains.

The Australian would observe the live data and lead the squad through whatever supplementary training was required. The players were occasionally reluctant, but doubtless benefited — during Burgess’ two years at Arsenal, the injury record improved dramatically.

“I tried to have the difficult conversations when I felt it was needed,” he says.

Perhaps after he left last summer, those conversations didn’t happen as regularly.

Burgess’s willingness to confront problems was partly what made him attractive to Arsenal.

The fitness guru was brought to London to help overhaul a culture that had gone somewhat stale under Arsène Wenger.

It was the then-chief executive Ivan Gazidis who contacted him first, and in a series of cross-continental phone calls explained his vision for how Arsenal could close the gap on their rivals.

“The club identified two areas in which they needed to try and regain an advantage — recruitment and performance,” explains Burgess, who was working in Aussie Rules football having been Liverpool’s head of fitness and conditioning from 2010-12. “The idea was that Sven (Mislintat, the head of recruitment) would identify the best young talent, and me and the performance department would develop them.”

Burgess flew to Nice in southern France and met with Wenger, who approved the appointment. In the summer of 2017, he joined Arsenal for pre-season.

Although Gazidis had explained the club’s troubling injury record, Burgess was largely satisfied with the competence of the staff within the department. The issue wasn’t one of quality — it was one of culture.

“The players often ran the place,” says Burgess. Many of the performance staff had been in place for some time, and had developed relationships with members of the squad that were a little too cosy.

“In a lot of clubs, masseurs and physios in particular, as they spend a lot of time with players and provide them some relief, can develop really strong relationships. That can make it a little bit harder for people — doctors, physios and other therapists — to have the really difficult conversations.

“I think there was a reluctance of some of the people involved to use hard training as protection, and so instead they’d do more rest and recovery.” Why? “Because that was the easy option. It’s easier to sell to players, in particular.”

Burgess’ philosophy was to use hard training to make the squad more durable: “Essentially there’s been a fair bit of research that shows that if you can build up players’ resilience to hard training, that the impact of a game becomes less and less because your body is accustomed to it.”

Crucially, he had Wenger’s backing in that. The Frenchman gave Burgess the autonomy he needed to work. Recently, Manchester United manager Ole Gunner Solskjaer revealed their star midfielder Paul Pogba had been advised to undergo surgery by “his people”. That’s something Wenger would not have tolerated.

“One thing that Arsène was amazing at was that he stopped any external therapists being allowed inside the club unless given the green light by us,” revealed Burgess. “Arsène was adamant that once you start doing that, it’s like a cancer in the place. So certainly in the first year at Arsenal that wasn’t a problem.”

The methodology behind high-performance techniques is not widely understood among fans, but Burgess sought to change that, inviting media members into the department and providing more detail in Arsenal’s injury bulletins. Supporters became accustomed to hearing Wenger talk about a player being at risk of injury due to being in the “red zone” — but what does that actually mean?

“There was a really good example at Watford in my first year,” Burgess explains. “At half-time, Danny Welbeck had completed around 479 metres of sprinting — I remember that number distinctly. Now, his average for a whole game was about 400 metres, so he’d already beaten that. Lo and behold, in the second half, he gets injured.

“Once you get close to your game average, particularly on metres sprinted, that puts you in a really high-risk scenario — whether that’s in training or in a game. And that ‘red zone’ could be across a game, a week, or a month. If you’re approaching, or above, your previous week, previous month or previous game, particularly on sprinting distance, that puts you in danger of a muscular injury.”

Burgess and his team gathered live data, and would offer it up to the manager at half-time. Whether he followed the advice was up to him.

At the end of that first season, Burgess faced some difficult decisions of his own.

By that time, it was known that Wenger would be leaving the club. In the spirit of progress, Burgess decided certain members of the medical and fitness department, including the popular physio Colin Lewin, would follow him.

“That was one of the toughest periods of my career. I had sleepless nights over those decisions. There were people who’d been there for over 20 years,” Burgess says. “I guess I felt there was a cultural change that needed to happen, and I had support from the people above me.”

Burgess’ decision drew some criticism from outside the club, but it was one he made in the best interests of Arsenal. Of the five physios released that summer, only one found immediate employment in elite competitive sport — and that was in the Championship with Bristol City.

Burgess traces his own departure from Arsenal back to Ivan Gazidis’ decision to leave for AC Milan eight months earlier.

“As soon as he was leaving I recognised a possibility,” he says. “When Sven (Mislintat) left too, I became more vulnerable. We’d come in together.”

When Emery arrived, Burgess was immediately enthused by the Spaniard’s fastidiousness. “He was unbelievably thorough, an absolute workaholic,” he explains.

Emery brought with him his own strength and conditioning coach, Julen Masach, and the pair initially clashed. Burgess reflects: “One of the things that I guess I wonder whether I might have done differently, is that I was brought in at director level. So in theory, the job could’ve been turning up in a suit and taking a broader overview of things. Arsène had wanted me on the grass, and I felt it helped me effect change and take difficult decisions when they might not have otherwise been made.

“Unai brought in his own staff, and his own methodology, and his own team and said, ‘This is the way we’re doing to do things’, and that led to me and Julen butting heads a bit. If I’d taken the suit and tie route, it wouldn’t have been my battle to fight.”

Nevertheless, Burgess’s results remained good. “By all objective measures, things were even better than the first year”, he says. According to Opta, Arsenal players covered 4310.14km in 2018-19 — the most of any Premier League team. Crucially, their high speed running was similarly intense. It was particularly satisfying to achieve these results with a squad not renowned for their physicality.

Arsenal did suffer some significant injury blows, with Danny Welbeck, Rob Holding and Hector Bellerin all missing at least half that season. Burgess says Welbeck and Holding’s injuries were “unavoidable”. Bellerin’s case is more debatable, as he had been overplayed in the wake of an injury crisis at full-back.

In this period, Burgess developed strong relationships with several squad members. Granit Xhaka was always, in Burgess’ eyes, a captain in waiting: “His attitude to training, his attitude to work, is exemplary. He’s very, very comfortable having difficult conversations with staff and players and coaches and if he doesn’t believe in something, he’ll tell you and often that’s a rare quality. He trains really hard, every training session. He rarely misses games, rarely misses sessions… He’s a big personality, a big presence.”

Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, meanwhile, was “a delight to watch. The only person that I’ve seen move similarly to him is Fernando Torres.

“For someone in my profession, it’s a joy to watch him move because, particularly in a straight line, the speed is electric and the ability to repeat that consistently over games is outstanding.”

The inevitable question is whether Aubameyang, who turns 31 in the summer, can maintain that level of performance. “Look,” Burgess replies, “time catches up with everybody but when you’re Auba, when you’re Jamie Vardy (the Leicester City striker is already 33)… when you’re these people, you can hold on to it and still be above-average for a lot longer.”

Burgess was also a first-hand witness to the battle of wills between Emery and Mesut Özil.

In his mind, there’s no question over whether Özil has the capacity to adapt to a high-intensity game: “Mesut is much-maligned physically, but there were many games where his running numbers — and I’m talking high-speed numbers, not just distance but high-speed numbers — were among the elite in the competition. So he’s certainly capable of doing it…”

In March last year, Burgess’ success had begun to attract suitors from outside football. At that point, he was reassured about his future at the club. By May though, it became clear something had changed. Communication from the executive team running Arsenal dried up, and Burgess began to realise his time with the club was coming to an end.

Arsenal endured a disastrous end to last season, winning just one of their final five league games before being humiliated 4-1 by Chelsea in the Europa League final, fumbling two chances to regain Champions League status. Some have suggested the squad were tired, but Burgess refutes the suggestion the players were worn out: “According to objective analysis, the running with and without the ball actually improved in two out of the final three games.”

“Difficult conversations” are a theme of Burgess’ story, and there were more in the build-up to the Europa League final. Initially, the club had been due to play a money-spinning friendly in South Africa against Everton just a few days after the final league game against Burnley. Although that was ultimately scrapped, there was still significant debate within the club about the training schedule for the 17 days between the end of the domestic season and the final.

Within a few days of the loss to Chelsea in Baku, Burgess was relieved of his duties.

The impending arrival of Edu as technical director was presumably a factor — in Arsenal head of football Raul Sanllehi’s new ‘org chart’, there was no room for a director of high performance. Tellingly, Burgess has not been directly replaced.

“It’s tough,” he says. “When you’re a foreigner and you get sacked you have 60 days to leave the country. Your children get ripped out of school.”

He has returned to Australia to take up a position with top-flight Australian Rules football team Melbourne Demons, but keeps an eye on Arsenal’s progress under Arteta.

“The good thing is that a lot of the structures and philosophies that we put in place as a group are still there,” Burgess reflects. “That still gives me a sense of pride.”
 

celestis

Arsenal-Mania Veteran
Moderator

Country: Australia
@Trilly

By James McNicholas Jan 22, 2020
comment-icon.png
52
save-icon.png


Ever since Mikel Arteta took charge of Arsenal, he has intimated the squad are not as fit as he would like.

In his post-match interview after the New Year’s Day win over Manchester United, David Luiz appeared to admit as much when he said “physically, we are not ready.”

Certainly, Arteta’s team have struggled to maintain the intensity the Spaniard demands, frequently tiring within games and failing to perform for the full 90 minutes. Now, their squad is being stretched thinner by muscular problems.

Arsenal’s former director of high performance Darren Burgess might know why.

“Hard work is the best form of injury prevention and injury protection,” Burgess, who left the club at the end of last season, tells The Athletic. “You should be slowly but deliberately building up people’s training tolerance because then, in December and January, when the games come thick and fast, the players are used to it.”

During his time at the club, it was Burgess who took responsibility for ensuring players trained at the requisite intensity. Arteta predecessor Unai Emery’s sessions tended to be more tactical, so it was Burgess’ job to ensure the players got through enough work to reach peak performance. Frequently, that meant an extra 10 or 15 minutes of physical exertion tagged on at the end of training sessions.

“Once Unai finished his session, most of the time he would say, ‘Look if you need to do some extra work with the players, go on and do it,’” Burgess explains.

The Australian would observe the live data and lead the squad through whatever supplementary training was required. The players were occasionally reluctant, but doubtless benefited — during Burgess’ two years at Arsenal, the injury record improved dramatically.

“I tried to have the difficult conversations when I felt it was needed,” he says.

Perhaps after he left last summer, those conversations didn’t happen as regularly.

Burgess’s willingness to confront problems was partly what made him attractive to Arsenal.

The fitness guru was brought to London to help overhaul a culture that had gone somewhat stale under Arsène Wenger.

It was the then-chief executive Ivan Gazidis who contacted him first, and in a series of cross-continental phone calls explained his vision for how Arsenal could close the gap on their rivals.

“The club identified two areas in which they needed to try and regain an advantage — recruitment and performance,” explains Burgess, who was working in Aussie Rules football having been Liverpool’s head of fitness and conditioning from 2010-12. “The idea was that Sven (Mislintat, the head of recruitment) would identify the best young talent, and me and the performance department would develop them.”

Burgess flew to Nice in southern France and met with Wenger, who approved the appointment. In the summer of 2017, he joined Arsenal for pre-season.

Although Gazidis had explained the club’s troubling injury record, Burgess was largely satisfied with the competence of the staff within the department. The issue wasn’t one of quality — it was one of culture.

“The players often ran the place,” says Burgess. Many of the performance staff had been in place for some time, and had developed relationships with members of the squad that were a little too cosy.

“In a lot of clubs, masseurs and physios in particular, as they spend a lot of time with players and provide them some relief, can develop really strong relationships. That can make it a little bit harder for people — doctors, physios and other therapists — to have the really difficult conversations.

“I think there was a reluctance of some of the people involved to use hard training as protection, and so instead they’d do more rest and recovery.” Why? “Because that was the easy option. It’s easier to sell to players, in particular.”

Burgess’ philosophy was to use hard training to make the squad more durable: “Essentially there’s been a fair bit of research that shows that if you can build up players’ resilience to hard training, that the impact of a game becomes less and less because your body is accustomed to it.”

Crucially, he had Wenger’s backing in that. The Frenchman gave Burgess the autonomy he needed to work. Recently, Manchester United manager Ole Gunner Solskjaer revealed their star midfielder Paul Pogba had been advised to undergo surgery by “his people”. That’s something Wenger would not have tolerated.

“One thing that Arsène was amazing at was that he stopped any external therapists being allowed inside the club unless given the green light by us,” revealed Burgess. “Arsène was adamant that once you start doing that, it’s like a cancer in the place. So certainly in the first year at Arsenal that wasn’t a problem.”

The methodology behind high-performance techniques is not widely understood among fans, but Burgess sought to change that, inviting media members into the department and providing more detail in Arsenal’s injury bulletins. Supporters became accustomed to hearing Wenger talk about a player being at risk of injury due to being in the “red zone” — but what does that actually mean?

“There was a really good example at Watford in my first year,” Burgess explains. “At half-time, Danny Welbeck had completed around 479 metres of sprinting — I remember that number distinctly. Now, his average for a whole game was about 400 metres, so he’d already beaten that. Lo and behold, in the second half, he gets injured.

“Once you get close to your game average, particularly on metres sprinted, that puts you in a really high-risk scenario — whether that’s in training or in a game. And that ‘red zone’ could be across a game, a week, or a month. If you’re approaching, or above, your previous week, previous month or previous game, particularly on sprinting distance, that puts you in danger of a muscular injury.”

Burgess and his team gathered live data, and would offer it up to the manager at half-time. Whether he followed the advice was up to him.

At the end of that first season, Burgess faced some difficult decisions of his own.

By that time, it was known that Wenger would be leaving the club. In the spirit of progress, Burgess decided certain members of the medical and fitness department, including the popular physio Colin Lewin, would follow him.

“That was one of the toughest periods of my career. I had sleepless nights over those decisions. There were people who’d been there for over 20 years,” Burgess says. “I guess I felt there was a cultural change that needed to happen, and I had support from the people above me.”

Burgess’ decision drew some criticism from outside the club, but it was one he made in the best interests of Arsenal. Of the five physios released that summer, only one found immediate employment in elite competitive sport — and that was in the Championship with Bristol City.

Burgess traces his own departure from Arsenal back to Ivan Gazidis’ decision to leave for AC Milan eight months earlier.

“As soon as he was leaving I recognised a possibility,” he says. “When Sven (Mislintat) left too, I became more vulnerable. We’d come in together.”

When Emery arrived, Burgess was immediately enthused by the Spaniard’s fastidiousness. “He was unbelievably thorough, an absolute workaholic,” he explains.

Emery brought with him his own strength and conditioning coach, Julen Masach, and the pair initially clashed. Burgess reflects: “One of the things that I guess I wonder whether I might have done differently, is that I was brought in at director level. So in theory, the job could’ve been turning up in a suit and taking a broader overview of things. Arsène had wanted me on the grass, and I felt it helped me effect change and take difficult decisions when they might not have otherwise been made.

“Unai brought in his own staff, and his own methodology, and his own team and said, ‘This is the way we’re doing to do things’, and that led to me and Julen butting heads a bit. If I’d taken the suit and tie route, it wouldn’t have been my battle to fight.”

Nevertheless, Burgess’s results remained good. “By all objective measures, things were even better than the first year”, he says. According to Opta, Arsenal players covered 4310.14km in 2018-19 — the most of any Premier League team. Crucially, their high speed running was similarly intense. It was particularly satisfying to achieve these results with a squad not renowned for their physicality.

Arsenal did suffer some significant injury blows, with Danny Welbeck, Rob Holding and Hector Bellerin all missing at least half that season. Burgess says Welbeck and Holding’s injuries were “unavoidable”. Bellerin’s case is more debatable, as he had been overplayed in the wake of an injury crisis at full-back.

In this period, Burgess developed strong relationships with several squad members. Granit Xhaka was always, in Burgess’ eyes, a captain in waiting: “His attitude to training, his attitude to work, is exemplary. He’s very, very comfortable having difficult conversations with staff and players and coaches and if he doesn’t believe in something, he’ll tell you and often that’s a rare quality. He trains really hard, every training session. He rarely misses games, rarely misses sessions… He’s a big personality, a big presence.”

Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, meanwhile, was “a delight to watch. The only person that I’ve seen move similarly to him is Fernando Torres.

“For someone in my profession, it’s a joy to watch him move because, particularly in a straight line, the speed is electric and the ability to repeat that consistently over games is outstanding.”

The inevitable question is whether Aubameyang, who turns 31 in the summer, can maintain that level of performance. “Look,” Burgess replies, “time catches up with everybody but when you’re Auba, when you’re Jamie Vardy (the Leicester City striker is already 33)… when you’re these people, you can hold on to it and still be above-average for a lot longer.”

Burgess was also a first-hand witness to the battle of wills between Emery and Mesut Özil.

In his mind, there’s no question over whether Özil has the capacity to adapt to a high-intensity game: “Mesut is much-maligned physically, but there were many games where his running numbers — and I’m talking high-speed numbers, not just distance but high-speed numbers — were among the elite in the competition. So he’s certainly capable of doing it…”

In March last year, Burgess’ success had begun to attract suitors from outside football. At that point, he was reassured about his future at the club. By May though, it became clear something had changed. Communication from the executive team running Arsenal dried up, and Burgess began to realise his time with the club was coming to an end.

Arsenal endured a disastrous end to last season, winning just one of their final five league games before being humiliated 4-1 by Chelsea in the Europa League final, fumbling two chances to regain Champions League status. Some have suggested the squad were tired, but Burgess refutes the suggestion the players were worn out: “According to objective analysis, the running with and without the ball actually improved in two out of the final three games.”

“Difficult conversations” are a theme of Burgess’ story, and there were more in the build-up to the Europa League final. Initially, the club had been due to play a money-spinning friendly in South Africa against Everton just a few days after the final league game against Burnley. Although that was ultimately scrapped, there was still significant debate within the club about the training schedule for the 17 days between the end of the domestic season and the final.

Within a few days of the loss to Chelsea in Baku, Burgess was relieved of his duties.

The impending arrival of Edu as technical director was presumably a factor — in Arsenal head of football Raul Sanllehi’s new ‘org chart’, there was no room for a director of high performance. Tellingly, Burgess has not been directly replaced.

“It’s tough,” he says. “When you’re a foreigner and you get sacked you have 60 days to leave the country. Your children get ripped out of school.”

He has returned to Australia to take up a position with top-flight Australian Rules football team Melbourne Demons, but keeps an eye on Arsenal’s progress under Arteta.

“The good thing is that a lot of the structures and philosophies that we put in place as a group are still there,” Burgess reflects. “That still gives me a sense of pride.”
 

Toby

No longer a Stuttgart Fan
Moderator

It's kind of a crappy route to take. Guys like Burgess and Mislintat were brought in with a seemingly rather clear idea on where to move the club, and let them take the reigns and responsibility and move the club forward in a rather longterm process to restructure and modernize it post Wenger. And then these guys were axed after about 2 years instead of letting them work on, reinforcing the new behind closed doors leadership and continue that process because someone who was brought in to primarily be a negotiator has made himself the Director of Everything after the board failed to bring in a proper CEO after Gazidis' departure. And I think you can tell that despite Edu joining this Sanllehi era has been a bit of a shambles in terms of direction the club is taking. I can't really evaluate Edu properly, but right now it seems Arteta is the only guy with the semblance of an idea where this whole thing should go.
 

Tourbillion

Angry & Miserable
It's kind of a crappy route to take. Guys like Burgess and Mislintat were brought in with a seemingly rather clear idea on where to move the club, and let them take the reigns and responsibility and move the club forward in a rather longterm process to restructure and modernize it post Wenger. And then these guys were axed after about 2 years instead of letting them work on, reinforcing the new behind closed doors leadership and continue that process because someone who was brought in to primarily be a negotiator has made himself the Director of Everything after the board failed to bring in a proper CEO after Gazidis' departure. And I think you can tell that despite Edu joining this Sanllehi era has been a bit of a shambles in terms of direction the club is taking. I can't really evaluate Edu properly, but right now it seems Arteta is the only guy with the semblance of an idea where this whole thing should go.
Yep. Can only hope Josh can see this.
 
Top Bottom