This is football in general now. Players are rarely given freedom to express themselves on the pitch now and everything seems ultra structured and rigid.
I’m concerned that Arteta won’t be able to find the balance though. His rigid approach is costing us any type of attacking cohesion and the constant changing of personnel doesn’t help either.
It’s not his basic attitude. People seem to have completely forgotten that from the moment he stepped in (december) until the Brighton game (after the season had restarted) he played possession based 4-2-3-1. It didn’t work however. We didn’t create anything, Ozil/Willock as 3rd midfielders were shit and defense was vulnarable. He made a couple of adjustments and he won the Cup and had a view decent results in there. Now it’s time for him too make other adjustments.
This is something new
One thing he hasn’t changed that whole time, like the stubborn moron he is being…
This is true. You can kinda see the same thing happening at City now, plus Guardiola was lucky at Barca that he had Messi to make the moments of individual skill and improvisation.
We have a good shape and look solid out of possession but there is pretty much no creativity when attacking. Saka was the only player yesterday who showed initiative in the final third.
Feels a bit like a lot of people are giving up on Arteta already. I’m not suggesting criticism is not allowed, as he’s not getting everything right yet by any stretch, but it’s starting to feel like the improvements he made since joining and the trophy he won haven’t necessarily earned him all that much leeway with the fans. I guess the joy of success is fleeting, but it was only a few months ago and it feels like the mood has gone from celebrating him and our cup win and feeling optimistic about the future to a lot of the same people now acting like he’s total fucking shit.
I get we’ve played pretty poorly so far this season, but I feel like the minimum he deserves is another fifteen games before we start drawing harsh conclusions about the state of things. Let’s let the season get out of its infancy before we start catastrophising about how bad things are.
I know we all get emotional after losing matches but he’s getting all sorts of names flung at him by Arsenal fans and it feels a bit shitty to me, I feel like what he’s done so far in his ten month long managerial career has been fairly promising and means he’s probably entitled to the most basic level of respect, ie not being called names when we lose away against a big side by one goal.
I think he certainly deserves to have this season to prove if he is up to the job but, apart from the Fulham game, we haven’t looked convincing against any other team and were outplayed by West Ham and scraped a win against Sheffield United, who have far inferior players than us.
I can’t believe people were predicting us to get a top four place and, after we signed Partey, some were even saying we could win the PL title.
It’s far more likely we could finish outside the top six than get a CL place and that’s why I said a top six place would be a fairly successful season, especially with so many teams in contention for it.
Why? It’s not that much of an outrageous claim.
I still think we can. It’s still early days, but I haven’t seen much from our rivals to suggest they’re nailed on for top 4.
We playing where we left off last season.
We’re making fewer chances than nearly every other team in the PL and conceding more than most other clubs.
I can’t see anything in our play that would suggest we’re top four material.
The win against Fulham is our only decent performance so unless we have a change in direction and Arteta starts to get us playing at our full potential there is no CL place for us.
What do we think of the current system? On paper it’s a 3-4-3. But in reality it seems like we’re overstacking the left hand side of the field. Tierney and Saka seem to get more licence going forward, perhaps to create openings for Aubameyang (which haven’t been actually happening). Where as we have far less representation in the middle - only 2 midfielders and on the right.
For me I want to see a transition to 3 in the midfield in a 433 so we’re more balance in our attacks and control of possession.
The creativity is lacking, I’ll give you that. I don’t have to hand how many chances we’ve conceded, but I do know we have only conceded 6 goals in the league. Only 3 teams have conceded fewer, and all 3 of those teams have played less games than us.
Defensively, we’ve been pretty solid for the most part. If we can start scoring more goals, then there is absolutely no reason why we can’t be in the mix for top 4.
I get the frustration we’re not better than we are.
But…
The defeats to Liverpool and City were much closer than corresponding league fixtures in recent years. These two are unquestionably 2 of the top 4 teams in England even if not fully back to their best form yet this season.
The defense and squad are better than in years. As the trend is improvement I’m happy for now and feel we will continue getting better as Arteta embeds his philosophy more. We’re no longer a fragile pushover for the top teams like we used to be and can beat any of them on our day now.
I still think top 4 is a realistic hope - at least 50:50 if I was betting on it imho although maybe it’ll turn out to be a false hope.
Remain hopeful for the next few weeks where I think we should push on and beat most of our opponents.
Is it me or does this magnificent historically rich club drive you mad ?!
I don’t know that a lot of people are seriously calling for Arteta to be fired. It does feel like there was so much positivity after the Cup run that any criticism, no matter how gentle, feels abrasive. That said I think we’ve seen enough to have legitimate questions about Arteta’s decision making. The midfield isn’t working and the attack isn’t working. I think yesterday showed that Arteta learned Pep’s skill of over complicating things for no reason. Willian at CF is a joke, especially if we were trying to emulate Leicester who have a very different type of striker in Vardy.
It’s also fair to question why, if we were trying to counter with quick passing, we continued playing Xhaka for 80 minutes who isn’t quick to anything except blaming the fans for his own stupidity.
I’m all for incremental progress but it’s fair to question why we’re continuing to operate with a system that is getting less than the sum of its parts out of our star striker and wildly expensive vanity purchase from last summer.
I agree @JakeyBoy but I think it’s fair to say fans got a bit stung by the faith placed in Emery many people (including myself) ended up looking foolish.
I’m not close to giving up on him yet, I’m still satisfied with how things are going.
The frustration of his appointment even around the Cup win was very sensible, even though people might not have said as much.
The midfield isn’t working indeed…that is why we signed a midfielder. Not saying everything is going to be solved with Partey, but he is clearly working on it. Let’s see where we stand after 20-25 League games before blasting him like has been happening last night. Five games in of which two against Liverpool and City AWAY. Of course those were going to be shit games.
Yea as disgruntled and disappointed as I feel right now generally speaking giving Arteta time is the only logical thing to do. He deserves it in any case and he’s going to get it from the club so I just have to remain patient and hope it comes good.
The one thing I’ll say though is that I have no idea what Arteta is actually trying to achieve in terms of style of play. Rovers went through a few managers since the time we got to the Europa group stages and it’s only with our latest manager (Stephen Bradley) that I got a sense of what a Rovers manager was trying to achieve style wise from the off. It took him the guts of two years to lock that down but it was clear what he wanted. It worries me that 40 or so games in that isn’t evident here.
They haven’t been shit games for other teams though, he is deservedly being criticised.
He bottled it yesterday against a lukewarm City side, what you’re saying would be true against City and Liverpool at or near their best but neither have been since the start of the season.
And that’s the point of contention, we performed like that against City with a barely fit Aguero and no KDB or Laporte.
It’s a shame we don’t have a gameplan from minute 0 nor do we have a plan if we go ahead in a game (the recent game at Anfield comes to mind)
If this is the basis for Ozil’s exclusion then the creativity issues are purely on Arteta alone