Confidence & Psychology the Keys To Success

The team's confidence and their psychological profile are the keys to any success we may have this season. Of course, any gooner who hasn't been living under a rock for the last two years and has finally decided to come out will know that the preceding statement is extremely obvious. Of course our young side rely on confidence to win, but the question is, do they have it?

After the Chelsea game on Saturday, I feared our season may have just come apart. In my opinion, at least 50% of the reason behind our amazing form was confidence: the players had been virtually undefeated in 2009 and they knew it; we were playing out of our skin. But then with the terrible loss to Chelsea, a game full of errors, mistakes, and bad style, I feared we may have lost that confidence and we may pay the price.

Well, it looks like the quality of playing style had dropped in part because of Saturday, but on Tuesday against Liverpool, in that match that is destined to be called a Premier League classic, we scored four goals, all from Arshaivn of course, and drew 4-4. Now I believe the real question is which side of the coin are the Arsenal players going to look at? The fact that we scored 4 goals against Liverpool, or the fact that we have conceded six goals in our last two matches?

Of course gooners this season have tended to look at the glass-half-empty side of our fortunes, and no doubt will be extremely worried about our recent defensive performances. But here's the class-half-full view.

Arsene Wenger is a fantastic motivator and always has been. He understands better than most the psychology involved in football, and has learned spectacular man management techniques. He can make players believe in themselves and their abilities to the point that they can think they are far better than they actually are. But then, by that same process, they become better than they were.

It's all about mind over matter, or in this case mind over body. The more you tell yourself something is true, the more it becomes so, and soon the very thing that was just a dream not so long ago has become reality. Arsene Wenger uses this fact of psychology to motivate his players and make them better than they should ever really be at their age or level of technique.

Perhaps no finer example of this is in Flamini and Hleb, the two players that left us last summer. These players have gone from perhaps the peaks of their careers, a time when both were playing magnificently, to sitting on the bench for most games and not playing at all as well when they come on. Some have called this the "curse of Arsenal," but is perhaps this curse nothing more than a lack of psychological conditioning.

Arsene Wenger is no longer there to motivate them, to tell them how wonderful they are at football, to make them feel better than they are so that they can thus become better through this psychological phenomenon. And since they have lost that precious gift, available at few other clubs besides Arsenal, they have realised just how lacklustre they are without it, and have shown that accordingly. It is perhaps the reason why seemingly every player who leaves us fails to play as well again: the psychology at Arsenal.

So is our state of confidence and psychological conditioning high enough to beat Middlesborough at the weekend? I believe so, and if it isn't right now, we can rest assured that Le Professor, in my opinion the greatest psychological motivator in modern football, will do everything in his power to restore it to the side. Arsene always looks on the bright side, and thanks to that, so will our players.

Here's hoping for an excellent return to our winning ways this weekend. Don't forget, you can now follow us on our new Twitter page; we'd love to have you follow! You can find us here:
http://www.twitter.com/Fab_4_Arsenal

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