I think most people have given up on the current Premier League season tbh.
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One person who can’t is Arteta though.
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Not publicly no.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they had internal discussions about prioritising developing players and style of play and not focus on the table as much this season.
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See and that’s a worry for me. It’s a luxury of time argument which brings me back to would a bigger name have accepted that. So far he’s said some good things and implemented a bit but the backing of Xhaka reinforces doubts for me personally.
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The backing of Xhaka could also be born from the realisation that the january market is way too short to sell him for the right fee and get a replacement in. According to some journalist clubs didn’t want to meet the valuation Arsenal for Xhaka had.
Said this before; Arsenal is not an attractive propostion for Arsenal for the biggest managerial names out there. To be fair we are a platform for up-and-coming managers for the top eight in Europe. In the meantime we have to hope that manager can make Arsenal better.
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Xhaka shouldn’t be around the team full stop for me.
That’s my gripe and others can see it different but all this summer utopia stuff and everything comes good is not believable to me.
If not for ref & his Jorginho call, Arteta would have won the Chelsea game. If not for Auba’s red card, good chance we would have scored again.
Some things are beyond Arteta’s control
And every other manager.
Not Klopp tho. Not 1 stroke of bad luck for 2 seasons straight.
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Keep trying.
I’m curious to know specifically what Allegri would have done differently in the 3 weeks or so that Arteta has had?
I originally favoured a more experienced coach before Arteta was appointed, but after seeing what Arteta wants to do with the side (albeit the team isn’t consistently delivering the final result) I have faith in this appointment.
Would Allegri have us pressing better over 90 mins? Different defensive shape? Different attacking patterns? (after getting Unai habits out of the system)
The main thing I think could maybe be different is a quicker reaction with subs in the Chelsea match.
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Call me mad if you must, and I’ll take it on the chin if you do but this top 4 race is far, far from over!
We just need to play our part of fixing the hell up, which is the most pivotal and complicated component to our stance this season.
We should never have got into the top 4 with how we played last season, and yet we missed it by a micro thread. I honestly feel the ineptitude of other teams can make that possible again and allow us to have a target worth chasing at the very least.
Unfortunately we’re just decaying at a quicker rate than our competition at the moment but it’s defo worth noting our competition outside of the top 2 are far from spectacular.
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11 points is very hard to make up.
We need to be near enough unbeatable imo
Hmmm, it’s a tough one. Saka and Nelson are nothing players for me. I dont rate them whatsoever. Auba playing wide is okay because it hasn’t deterred him from scoring goals anyways. If it were up to me this would be our best formation.
--------------------GK-------------------
-AMN----Papa------Luiz-----Kola
----Guen------Torreira-----Dani—
----------Pepe------------Özil----------
--------------------Auba-----------------
But yeah I’d honestly rather have Laca out there with Auba than the alternative of having those two subpar wingers on the pitch.
We’re not putting Auba wide to accommodate for Laca, we put him wide because he’s the best scorer we have and he can play wide which is optimal so we do that just like every other team that plays with more than two guys up front have for more than a decade, Salah and Mane aren’t wide to accommodate for Firmino just like Ronaldo and Bale weren’t put wide to accommodate for Benzema any more than Ribery and Robben were wide to accommodate for Mandzukic any more than Mbappe and Neymar are put wide to accommodate for Cavani/Icardi any more than Messi has been wide to accommodate for Suarez or Villa or Eto’o or Zlatan or anyone else etc.
They’re wide because it is better, they have one guy on them rather than two and that guy is half a defender and they can roam freely into the box whenever they want and their guy can’t necessarily even follow them all the time for tactical reasons. Just like all their managers, the four managers we’ve had haven’t done that either for the same reason, no one is trying to shoe horn Laca in, you lot are trying to shoe horn Auba in. It’s not about how good Laca is at this or that. And he is really good, especially lately at a bunch of the tasks he is given. He would’ve had both assists to the winning goals last game had Pepe’s shot gone an inch more to the left.
Should Auba not have made that stupid tackle since he is the only one who can score atm, correct, should he maybe do more than being anonymous all game bar for the one tap-in, maybe not normally but maybe with us since we’re struggling, and should Laca have scored once or twice more recently, absolutely agree. But their positions is not the problem whatsoever and a bigger problem is why the resources we invest in Pepe and Özil who cost more/make more than Auba and Laca aren’t giving us enough right now either. And behind those four it’s Martinelli and then not really much in the squad atm.
I hope Laca can score a goal or two now that Auba is out, and that Pepe and Martinelli can give us some as well, and we’ll need Özil to keep going in the right direction which I think he somewhat has recently, or we will have trouble brewing in the next three games. We also still concede more than we should, most teams above us have scored a bit more but none of them have conceded more than we have.
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Think is, apart from Auba’s goals thanks to his nice diagonal runs, he doesn’t play that well at all out wide.
He can score those goals, plus more if he’d just play in the middle.
He has to play on the middle, or don’t play him.
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We play more like a 442 when Auba is out wide than having a traditional winger over there tbh.
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I agree it’s far too early to judge whether Arteta will be a good long term success.
Nevertheless I think the team are playing notably better than they were in the months before he joined. 5 points in 12 isn’t stunning but a small improvement on the final days of Emery and with a little more luck could easily have been 7-9 points. I do think we need to see this improving soon though and we definitely had 30 minutes or so against Palace where we disappointed and they showed more desire than us. These dog fights are games where we really must improve.
Klopp and Guardiola both took time to shape their teams and get them performing so I’m definitely still in favour of giving Arteta a good go at the job to see if he can be the next big thing in modern football management.
It’s very clear he’s picked up a number of modest but over paid performers. The centre mid and defence remains mediocre and more befitting of a mid table team. Lacazettes inability to score chances remains a worry (hopefully just a temporary patch of poor form). Ozil gets starts again only for him to go missing again versus mid table opposition just a few games into Artetas reign. Our club record signing still fails to consistently light up the team although we see a few flashes of quality here and there to hope he can maybe acclimatise to the prem. The manager is key but players more so. Only Auba would have a chance of playing regularly in some of our best teams of the past and even then I wouldn’t swap him for Thierry or even say he’s an upgrade on Wright or Van Persie.
Sorting out player recruitment remains just as key to our success as the gamble on Arteta working out if not more so.
I feel confident now we’ll avoid a relegation battle this season but equally our chances of top 4 after dropping 7 points in Artetas first 4 prem games look minuscule.
Not a good time to be an Arsenal fan. Hopefully Arteta can get them to 3 points off Sheffield at the weekend at least.
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No doubt Arteta will need time. But one small change I’ve noticed him bring in from his City(Pep) experience straight away is the use of inverted fullbacks. Notice when Kola bombs forward, Xhaka drops to the left and AMN tucks in centrally to support the midfield. Provides us an extra man going forward while also making sure we aren’t overloaded by the opposition in any areas. And the pressing, though brief, has looked very organised and we look more compact while doing so. No doubt Arteta will need time and a few quality players to implement his ideas better, and the initial results haven’t been very great either, but the direction we are heading in with each passing week makes me certain Arteta will bring us back to the pinnacle of English football sooner rather than later.
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Allegri being an instant impact better than what Arteta has been, highly doubt that, overrating what can be done in a 4 game sample a lot there. (Aside from what I suspect is the habitual Allegri overrating— Serie A bias? 
)
Also quite possible that the impact would actually have been less under allegri, we needed something far from the methods of Emery to wake these players up, Allegri is obviously a million times better than Emery—no comparison whatsoever in quality—but in terms of methods they won’t be that different, so to really put a jolt in the system of the players, something much needed after the hellfire of the the worthless assclown Emery.
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