Arsenal flexibility under Unai Emery paying dividends as club move past rigid Arsene Wenger years

If Arsene Wenger was watching his beloved Arsenal on his 69th birthday then the delicate, precise demolition of Leicester in the second half would surely have delighted him as much as many a game where he was in the dugout. Unai Emery’s assessment of this superb win, though, might have given his predecessor cause to pause.

For Mesut Ozil this was “sexy”. Wenger himself might have termed it “football as art”. As far as Emery was concerned this breathtaking evisceration of Leicester was merely a means to an end.

Given the relatively innocuous opportunity to stake a claim for his philosophy around Arsenal’s magnificent third, begun by Bernd Leno and ended with an impudent flick of Ozil’s boot and a tap-in by Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Emery would not take the bait.

“It’s one way,” he said. “For example this morning we were watching the last match here against Watford. We repeated the second goal in this match, which started with a Leno long ball to Welbeck. The second action we pushed with Ozil and Welbeck and then we did one quick attack, scoring with Mesut.

“It’s another way. We can do the combination like today, the passes and arriving in the opposition box with chances to score is very good.

"But also when we can do one long pass and win the second action with our quality to score more quickly this attack it’s another way.”

Had a few long balls up to Danny Welbeck been a more effective way of overcoming Harry Maguire and Jonny Evans then that, it seems, would have been how Emery had approached the game.

That might seem like an innocuous statement but for Arsenal it represents the most radical overhaul in 22 years. With exceptions so infrequent they are seared into the mind of supporters - take that 2-0 win at Manchester City back in 2015 - Wenger’s sides played Wenger’s football no matter the occasion, no matter the opponent.

The football was fluid, free-form and improvisational - yet somehow that freeness to express yourself was no less rigid than George Graham's grinding, defence-first approach.

Emeryball may be all the rage but what it really is is far from clear. There are unifying facets - most notably a commitment to play from the very back of the side - but a flexibility rarely associated with Wenger.

Already this season the Spaniard has deployed his standard 4-2-3-1, a 4-4-2 against Fulham and even a back three in the Europa League against Qarabag. His frontline changes by the game and so does his utilisation of them.

At Craven Cottage Arsenal looked to rifle through Fulham on the counter-attack. On Monday they were prepared to play the long game even after Hector Bellerin’s own goal, applying a stranglehold to the contest early in the second half that it seemed inevitably would lead to the win.

This flexibility is encouragingly fresh in the early days, though like much of the Emery revolution there is a sense that it is perhaps most effective simply because it has injected something different to an environment that had changed so little for so long.

It will undoubtedly have its downsides and it is hard not to wonder what Arsenal will fall back on at their lowest ebb if Emery is reluctant to define his philosophy. But with 10 wins on the spin the absence of a unifying approach is clearly paying dividends.