Premier League champions Chelsea take on Arsenal in the FA Cup final at the Wembley Stadium on Saturday. While the Blues will be looking to complete a Premier League-FA Cup double by securing another win against their London rivals, Arsenal will be looking to salvage some semblance of pride by winning a record 13th FA Cup.
For the managers too, there is a lot at stake. A win for Chelsea will give Antonio Conte his first domestic cup. Meanwhile, Gunners boss Arsene Wenger will be looking for his 7th FA Cup triumph after a bruising Premier League campaign that saw his team finish outside the top 4 for the first time since he took over.
Also read: FA Cup 2016/17: 5 reasons why Arsenal will beat Chelsea in the final
Chelsea, though, look better placed to take home the trophy and here are five reasons why.
#1 Arsenal’s crisis in defence
While Arsenal and injury crisis are familiar bedfellows, Arsene Wenger is staring at an empty cupboard as he looks to assemble a workable backline for the FA Cup final. Gabriel, who has done well in a back three, is out until August with knee ligament damage. Mustafi, who suffered a concussion in the game against Sunderland, is yet to train.
To compound Wenger’s misery, Laurent Koscielny is suspended for the game after collecting a red card in the match against Everton. The Frenchman has been one of the few bright spots for the Gunners in a distinctly average season and has been marshalling the back three fairly well. Kieran Gibbs too is suffering from a thigh problem and it remains to be seen if Arsenal can even find five defenders to play a back three and a couple of wingbacks.
If Arsenal go back to a back four to compensate for the lack of personnel, it will break the momentum built up since switching to a 3-4-3. If, somehow, a back three is assembled, it will include Per Mertesacker – partnered by Monreal and Rob Holding – who has played around 30 minutes of football in the last 13 months.
Every option available to Arsenal seems ill-equipped to handle Chelsea’s marauding attack.
#2 Chelsea are a better-drilled team than Arsenal
In terms of individual personnel, Arsenal are a match for Chelsea in almost every position. In fact, the Gunners have one of the strongest squads in the Premier League in terms of individual quality. The problem for them is that the whole is never greater than the sum of the individual parts. Chelsea, on the other hand, are the exact opposite of Arsenal in that their whole is greater than the sum of individual parts.
Much of this is down to the philosophy of the managers. While Wenger eschews structure and organisation to allow players – especially creative players – freedom and independence to make their own decisions, Conte, like most modern managers, places emphasis on structure, organisation and repetition on the training ground. Wenger allows his players to play unburdened by rigid instructions and this often leads to chaotic games.
While this works against most teams, when Arsenal come up against well-drilled teams like Chelsea they look clueless. As we saw in the Premier League fixture at Stamford Bridge, Chelsea went 1-0 up early and then picked off Arsenal on the counter-attack. On the back of a memorable Premier League triumph, even Arsenal’s switch to a back three should not pose much of a problem for Conte’s men.
#3 Conte is savvier than Wenger
As alluded to earlier, Conte is a modern manager, in the Pep Guardiola mould, who makes managers like Wenger look like a relic of the past. It’s not that the Frenchman is no longer a good manager, it’s that he is no longer elite. The upshot of this is that Wenger needs elite players to make up for the systemic faults in his approach. In stark contrast, Conte can build a system which can make average players like Victor Moses look elite.
As he had shown with Italy in EURO 2016, Conte adapts his approach to the players he has at his disposal. He is a proactive manager who fuelled Chelsea’s rise this season by smartly switching to a back three to get the best out of David Luiz and freeing Eden Hazard of defensive responsibilities which were, ironically, exposed by Arsenal at the start of the season when they ran out 3-0 winners at the Emirates.
In contrast, it required Arsenal’s season to teeter on the brink of collapse to bring about some much-needed changes from Wenger.
While cup games are by design chaotic and not-so-tactical, given Arsenal’s beleaguered defence, it may be the best time for Conte to win his first domestic cup and complete the double.
#4 Arsenal’s poor record against the top 6
One of Arsenal’s biggest problems over the past five years has been their poor record against fellow top 4 contenders. Arsenal prefer to have chaotic, end-to-end basketball-type games as it masks some of their systemic faults. Much of this is down to a lack of tactical rigour.
It’s not that they don’t do tactics. It’s that it is very lasseiz-faire with the onus on players to figure out solutions. As Tottenham showed at White Hart Lane, Arsenal’s change to a back three was easily figured out by Pocchetino. Teams which place an emphasis on structure and assignment of dedicated roles to players prevail easily against Wenger’s men.
This manifests in Arsenal’s poor record against the likes of Chelsea, Tottenham, Man City and Liverpool – especially away from home. That trend is likely to continue on Saturday evening too. Arsenal’s best hope may lie in keeping the score level at half-time, lure Chelsea into pushing players into attack and hitting them on the counter.
Arsenal need huge chunks of luck if they decide to play the way they normally do.
#5 Morale of both the teams
While cup games are, by design, one-off affairs where form goes out the window, it is impossible to not think of the mood surrounding both the teams. As Arsenal contemplate life out of the Champions League for the first time in 21 years, fret over the futures of Mesut Ozil and Alexis Sanchez, and continue to dither over Arsene Wenger’s tenure, a revitalised Chelsea are contemplating rubbing shoulders with Europe’s elite again.
Of course, Arsenal and Arsene Wenger have seen the FA Cup as something of an escape route from addressing some of the fundamental issues afflicting the club. Having won two out of the last three FA Cup finals, they must be heading to Wembley with some sense of hope.
That said, over the past 10 years, if there is one club which has seen sustained success in the FA Cup it is Chelsea, having won the competition four times in six years between 2007 and 2012. They would be eager to add another piece of silverware to end their season.
