I will blame our recent misfortune on the naivety of the manager, complacency of the recruitment team and lack of ambition of the owners.
Arteta is naive to think he can win the league with one tactic and 11 players. Certainly not with the quality of players we currently have. No adequate preparation was made in the event of injuries to key players. Some of the things happening now, like teams parking the bus against us and doubling up on certain players, even loss of form of players, are what should have been envisaged.
I mean if amateur tacticians on social media have been making posts/threads on how to stop Arsenal and most agreed it is by looking for ways to neutralize our wingers, why can’t the manager prepare for this?
Arsenal have one of the best defences and some of the fastest attackers in the league but we hardly try to sometimes absorb pressure and then use counter attack. There is a way that counterattack serves as a deterrence against mass attack that is underestimated.
We are so fixated on possession football and inverted fullback thing that our wingers and fullbacks have now lost the ability to properly overlap. I noticed several misplaced passes yesterday on the wings because the 2 players were just not in tune on what they wanted to do — the winger expecting the fullback to overlap (probably because they were instructed) and the fullback wanting to invert.
It has become so noticeable that other teams are not afraid to massively attack us knowing that our players are very slow and hesitant on transition and this gives them time to quickly restructure their defence.
I was not surprised yesterday when Tierney didn’t play because he had been one of the players with the least minutes played this season so, you can’t expect to start such a match rusty player in an important match where you can be severely punished for mistakes. But Tierney is a player that can give us another tactical dimension but Arteta’s tactics is “invert or nothing”.
I really commend Arteta for being successful with the inverted tactics but there are many great managers who don’t believe in it and have won many titles, and the fact that we have succeeded with it should be giving Arteta a tactical edge and flexibility if only he could also play the regular fullbacks.
Another issue I have with Arteta’s management is lack of game time for fringe players. Certainly, there are matches we could still have won with some of these fringe players starting, without injuries to the first 11. This could have provided rest for some players and also keep others sharp and prepared for when they will be needed. I really like Arteta and I appreciate the great work he’s done so far, but it is hard not to notice his naivety in terms of management of the squad available to him.
On Edu and his recruitment team. My God, what were they thinking? Partey has been an injury-prone player since he joined us, but we never went all out to get a proper replacement in the summer and winter, when it was obvious we could fight for the title. Say what you will, our January window was a failure.
If we had such window in January 2022, it could have been enough because we were fighting for top 4, but this year it was not enough. We never got any of our main targets in a year we are so close to the title. This reeks of the Wenger years and it’s such a shame that we never learnt from the experience.
We got Trossard because Brighton wanted to offload him, and Jorginho because he would have become redundant with their new midfielder, plus he has not really been impacting games for a while. Yet we still got another Chelsea reject for the umpteenth time.
This is not disrespect to his achievement and experience but come on, Chelsea that fought tooth and nail to prevent us from getting Mudryk would never turn around to do us a favour with Jorginho.
What about Xhaka’s replacement even when his limitation is so obvious. Let no one say Vieira. Xhaka is supposed to be the box to box and that role demands a lot of physicality, strength and defensive ability and, with the way Arteta likes to play, a lot of technical ability, too.
We never attempted to get in important players until very late in the window when selling clubs wouldn’t have time to buy replacements. Or, were all these a decoy to give impression to fans that they were trying to sign players?
We could all blame Arteta and Edu but they will still have to work within the resources made available to them by the owners. Why wouldn’t Arteta want the best players to win the title, or, Edu be the architect of the biggest deals in the world? Who wouldn’t want all that!
I am still pro-Arteta and I really hope we win the league but top 4, to me, is still a good achievement this season.
Meedo
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