I honestly have no issues with pragmatic football when needed.
Madrid have won 6 CLs the past decade playing this way.
We’ve won one our last 6 Champions league games which was a very squeaky 1-0 against Porto and I don’t think our performances over this time were deserving of any more than that.
We need to improve in the CL if we want to go deep because this is not the blueprint.
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We’re shocking in Europe. I don’t know what it is, whether it’s a mental block or otherwise. But we’re unbelievably poor when playing on the biggest stage in club football.
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If we didn’t roll back the years at the Emirates against Bayern and concede two silly goals then we’d probably have beaten Bayern.
If you see the teams that won the CL the past decades, it’s rarely the team that plays the best football. It’s actually teams who can play ugly and know how to take their chances.
This isn’t Arteta’s first season in Europe as manager but this is only just his second CL campaign for us as manager. Let’s see how far he gets this season.
I’d like to think that had we had our strongest midfield (Ode, Merino), we would have played differently. We had to play that way cause we can’t rely on Partey to shore up the midfield on transitions cause he’s just not the same player anymore.
Then there’s the issue with Martinelli not being anywhere near his best. A confident Martinelli would have put away that chance in the second half and we would have come away thinking “job done”. It would have been called a professional performance.
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Honestly, apart from 2004 when have we ever been favourites for the CL?
I don’t think we’ve ever been favourites since. But it appears like we’re in the top 2-5 this year.
But I don’t know why. League form doesn’t necessarily translate to UCL success and historically, we’re awful in Europe so the odds are a bit strange to me.
My point is that we haven’t really ever “underachieved” in the CL. We always make it out of the group and have made a few QFs which is about right for where we’ve generally been expected to finish.
Probably because we never had a big strong enough squad to compete outside PL?
Potentially yeah, we’ve always seemed to be about 2-3 players away from really competing in multiple comps. Our current squad looks good overall though. Think it’s just the forward options that’s lacking.
Considering we had two unnecessary red cards and we should have won those two games against Brighton and City, we are well on course for another promising season.
Feels like Timber slots in very naturally so far.
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I think our depth has looked very good as well despite making our squad a bit smaller than last season.
Promising signs from Nwaneri and MLS and we were able to cope with injuries to Jesus, Zinchenko, Tomiyasu, Merino and Odegaard already quite well and with tricky fixtures too.
We seem to be in a position where we can deal with absentees in all 3 lines now. Still a bit unsure about the goalkeeper depth, hopefully we won’t have to worry about it.
We’re still missing a little top top quality in attack but this has to be the deepest Arsenal team I can remember. I’d say there’s 19 players Arteta would be happy to call upon to start an important match if fit and in form and that doesn’t count Nwaneri, Kiwior, or Lewis-Skelly (yet in the case of the youngins).
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Looking at our schedule ahead, seems a fairly good schedule apart from a tricky week in November where we play Newcastle, Inter and then Chelsea all away from home.
And the small matter of a game against the scousers 
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Also, we’re scratching off going to City, Spurs, Villa, Chelsea and Newcastle by that point.
After going to Brighton in early January(and then heading to a break), our toughest away matches left seem to be Man Utd and Liverpool.
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Hmmm, that seems fairly bad to me to be honest lol
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Sorry, I only took a screenshot of the tough period.
If you see the schedule from now till December, it’s actually decent.
This might come back to haunt me but 
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