At this point we might as well…
What’s the alternative? Smith-Rowe? Elneny? 
Didn’t we beat Leicester with Joe and Reiss and AMN playing 
But they’re shit because Arteta thinks so? Same guy who just offered Mustafi contract extensions, thinks Auba is a winger, wanted to keep holding and has sent Saliba to the shadow realm.
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I don’t rate Reiss or Joe really, they just seem like they be decent championship and lower PL level players. I don’t see either really making a impact at Arsenal. So I don’t blame Arteta not playing them much. let’s not change narrative here like they were pulling up trees before for us. Arteta played Willock a lot and he’s never really done much to persuade Arteta that he’s first team player.
I do like AMN but he’s been poor this season let’s not beat around the bush. But him and Saka have a big future.
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I know he’s well off having a starting berth in this team however, with our lack of runners, can Joe find a niche in Arteta’s side as a ‘plan-b lite’?
Our rigid build up play on the flanks totally negates anything building in the middle and I feel if we can slot Willock in as an advanced CM, he’s a willing runner and normally tries to progress the ball into the final third. We’ve not got much of those and it all depends on if Mikel gives him that much rope to begin with anyway.
With the Leicester loss still in my mind, I feel like we should be resorting to a homage of Wenger’s ‘throw the kitchen sink at them’ approach and chase the game until we eventually get a goal. No way should we be so structured and mechanical. Which is why someone as unorthodox as Joe might help aid these situations.
They talked about this on the Arsecast extra it seems like no matter the scoreline coming into the final 15/20 minutes Arteta will keep the same boring defensive formation.
0-1 away to a disappointing City side and he accepted the 0-1 defeat like a coward. Same again against Leicester he didn’t change anything from how we started the game.
Boring coward manager.
0-1 is better than 0-2, 0-3, 0-4 and 2-8 tbf
Hi Mikel. Get off OA
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I’ll take that 2 - 8 because we actually tried to play football. We had a championship level team trying to play football so we got punished by a great Fergie United squad, meh. However because of our attacking philosophy we went on to put 4 past WBA, 7 past Blackburn, 5 past Tottenham, 5 past Chelsea, and the list goes on and on, and we finished 3rd in the PL that year. Wenger got shit on by United with a backline of Carl Jenkinson, Djorou, and Armand Traore 
a bit heavier than normal but not a surprise. Ppl make wayyy to big of a deal out of that match it didn’t mean anything more than just an L on the schedule.
Great Fergie United squad :ozil:
Take a look at the team that played us that day, and the average / ageing bollocks they had on the bench. Load of revisionist tosh, your delusion levels are quite astonishing my dood
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that certainly was a great day, best of my arsenal supporting life
Bruh they scored 89 points that year and only lost the league on goal difference lellellelelelelell ur smoked out affff homeboy 
Yeah, in hindsight it’s easy to downplay that team.
Tbf, most Man Utd players plummeted their rep post-Fergie.
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We got pummelled 8-2 by a midfield of Cleverly, Nani, Anderson and Ashley Young haha.
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U can call them old or whatever but those mother fuckers were putting in massive performances. At the time I was mad cuz I was in agreement I was like how are these old fucks doing this, but they were just clutch ass experienced grown ass men, they were ballin. Didnt they add RVP and win it the next season?
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That United team was not that good and Fergie was doing black magic to get those performances out of that corpse.
But the Arsenal team that played them that day was ravaged by injury and we had a guy sent off.
There were many crazy results that year. United lost 6-1 to city at home. Yet we almost beat City at the Etihad and beat them at the Emirates.
Now to my thoughts. At the end of the day, losing is losing.
You get 0 points if you lose 1-0, you get zero points if you lose 8-2.
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Nani and Rooney were balling hard during that period. Then they added Young as well who was probably the best player outside the Top 4 at the time.
Smalling and Jones were good up and coming defenders and managed to do really well early on.
Of course, those players were carried a lot by Fergie and Man Utd’s name.
Once Fergie left nobody could pick them up and Moyes was never gonna get it out of them. All that was left was the Man Utd name.
I think the only guy who could’ve handled that was Mourinho but thankfully they went a different route.
So true.
Plus, the past decade we’ve probably seen all top teams get embarrassed at the top level at some point.
It has been specially common for very successful sides to go through great suffer before and after they reach the top.
Bayern, Madrid and Barca are great examples.
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Wenger and Arsenal never recovered its reputation as a realistic challenger from that day. The greatness was tarnished and here we are years later still unable to get in the ring.
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Bull shit that match isn’t some jumping off point. Our team was getting weaker and weaker due to financial restraints after the move to the Emirates. We put together a title challenge just fine in 2015, and nobody gave a shit about that defeat had nothing to do with having a paper thin squad the subsequent years.
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Nobody took us serious after it and has since. We never ever looked like winning that title or any since from February of any year after this match.