There are few more practised than Arsène Wenger when it comes to shifting the spotlight away from his players but the Arsenal manager believes it will be difficult for Leicester’s team to avoid the noise around their title chase.
Claudio Ranieri suggested earlier this week the established order were nervous of Leicester but Wenger wonders whether external influences may yet succeed in ramping up the pressure on the Premier League’s unlikely leaders.
“Leicester have a manager with a lot of experience and he has certainly tried to deflect this kind of pressure and thinking from them,” Wenger said. “[But] you’re not the only one around the team. There are other people to tell them: ‘You will win the Premier League’ and all that. How long you can isolate the players from that, I don’t know.”
The mind games, if those are what Wenger’s words counted as, were couched in praise and he accepted Leicester are “in a position where they have nothing to lose”. Wenger believes Sunday’s opponents have tweaked their style as the season has developed, adopting a more circumspect approach than the one that Arsenal exploited five times when the two sides met last September in a game Wenger says could have finished 8-4.
“I watched our game again because I wanted to know how this team had moved on since,” Wenger said. “There is an evolution in their game, they’re more cautious at the moment. They play a lot in their final third and they come out very quickly. Look at the number of direct balls from their half into the opponents’ – it’s higher than anyone else’s because they have [Jamie] Vardy on his way straightaway when they win it.
“They suck you in and they go very quickly into the opponents’ half. I think at the time [of the last game] they were a bit more all-going but today they are a bit more: ‘Let’s use our strengths in a different way’, which they did remarkably well against Manchester City.”
A high level of focus will be required to thwart Vardy, who scored twice in the first game, and much of Arsenal’s defensive security may rest on the goalkeeper Petr Cech, with Wenger admitting the centre-backs Gabriel and Laurent Koscielny – who have partnered one another since Per Mertesacker’s red card against Chelsea last month, are not particularly given to communication.
“Neither of the two is a real commander and I ask Cech a bit more to lead because they don’t talk too much,” Wenger said. “Koscielny is a silent leader and Gabriel at the moment doesn’t master [the language] well enough, and as well I don’t think he’s a natural extrovert central defender.”
The temptation may be to recall Mertesacker despite the German’s lack of pace, which Wenger was at pains to point out could be offset both by the speed of those either side and his own powers of anticipation. There is also the fact that Mertesacker played well in – among others – the crucial wins against Manchester City and Manchester United but Wenger’s bigger concern is that Leicester do not force Arsenal to deviate from their usual approach.
“We’ll try of course to stop their counterattacking but we have, as well, to play at home and express our strengths,” he said. “Our strength is to have the ball. If we start thinking: ‘Do we do what we usually do but not really well?’ we are weaker.”
Wenger is unlikely to test Leicester with the pace of Theo Walcott, who has “recently gone through a little bit of a difficult patch” from the start. The away side are likely to make space as hard to come by as possible but it is a less tangible quality, highly evident in that win an the Etihad, that may prove the biggest obstacle for Arsenal to overcome.
“[They showed] the kind of dominance of belief in every challenge, that kind of special force where teams get into a zone and think: ‘We can do this,’” Wenger said. “The message they gave out in that game looked like every single player was there with the belief.”