Unai Emery

TL;DR BUT honestly, what is Emeryball? Because we are changing tactics and approaches on a weekly basis. Having the defence being more involved into the play isn’t just an Emery thing, it’s a general modern approach. PSG play the same if not better football than before. Starting to doubt that he even has an idea of what he wants to do or he is just surviving each week.

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Think he is trying to make us more solid like Wenger did in 2017. But as we can’t defend in any case let’s just attack.

Wenger changing to 3 at the back in early 2017 won us an FA Cup but did it make us more solid? I think because it was a new fresh thing the players just took to it. Can you get new formation bounce?!? haha

I think from memory when we switched to that back 3 our expected goals conceded stats remained the same, which probably just meant that we rode our luck more in the back end of that season.

Fair play to Wenger for that though, we got over City and Chelsea consecutively to lift the cup.

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Honestly, I don’t think we will ever win the title under Kroenke, no matter who we get as manager. The league is being dominated by teams that have spent big, with money being pumped in by their owners. We cannot compete with that, unless we do a Leicester (highly unlikely) or Sven finds us some diamonds, that are also cheap, which is also very unlikely. I mean, maybe we get 1 or 2 young players that turn out world class in a few years but we cannot expect to find 4 or 5 of them, in the positions we need. So, as far as winning the title goes, I really don’t see us doing that for the foreseeable future.

Also, wasn’t there a rumour that one of the major reasons Emery was offered the job was because he was willing to work with a small budget unlike Arteta who asked for 150 million or something. If that is true, then can’t really see us doing any better than we are.

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I agree, but it’s not just buying top players that is the problem, it’s keeping hold of them.
If we drop out of the CL for yet another season, which is very likely as we will probably finish sixth, then we won’t be able to attract top players anyway.

I know Man U were out of the top four places but despite that, they could still attract the best players because they are relentlessly ambitious and will do what ever it takes to get back to the top.

Very few of our top players stayed here even when we were playing CL football, so when we’re not, it’s going to be almost impossible to keep the few top players we have, let alone attract anymore.

I’m confident we’ll turn it around but we need to be patient. You have to remember It’s only our first full season with our new regime. We still have Wenger’s squad and players that shouldn’t be here let alone the wages they are on because of our inept negotiating team.

This mess is going to take a minimum of 2-3 years to begin to sort out. Crying over it right now is pointless IMO. Emery has inherited a very disfunctional team however some blame can be put on his tactics on a much smaller scale, but I genuinely believe he’s far from the issue right now.

We’ve fucked ourselves financially over recent seasons and add the fact we’ve lost the CL revenue is a sucker punch. We just have to stay patient for the short term. Sallenhi and Sven both said that contracts running down are a thing of the past, but there’s not much they can do at this minute. Ramsey was offered a contract and snubbed it so there’s not much we can do there as he was in his last year. Going forward though I’m confident we’ll be in a much better place but it’s going to take time.

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The narrative on Kroenke shifts so much. Now the prominent issue is lack of external investment? Why muddy the waters

This club does not need his money did. Our football operations needed to get better lol

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I think switching to 3atb was more for attacking than defending reasons. Arsene mentioned it quite often that we had better control of the ball with 3 atb which is not what you tend to hear. Tbf, in actuality, 3 atb allows you to rack up your midfield.
It’s pretty evident that the guy just gave up on us being defensively solid preferred enforcing our football to our opponents, thus creating more chances and not allowing our opponents the opportunity to play(which whenever they tend to have the ball, we conceded chances).

We need to spend this season creating a defence that works under pressure. We are not going to win the Prem…or make top four with our leaky defence.
Next season spend money in the midfield attacking options.
With a solid defence we may make the final of Europa this season.

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Yeah, Europa is absolutely crucial for this season, can’t even think of half-arsing it as our chances of making top 4 is pretty slim.

With our half-arse defense, how can we win the Europa if we are not even good enough to get top 4?

The same way Manchester United did it after finishing 6th :slight_smile:

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I don’t believe riding on luck and being “fluke” can get us anywhere.
MU’s defense was much solid that the one we have right now.

In the league, if you made some mistakes, have a bad game, you still have plenty of games to make it up.
In a 10-game run, you can lost a couple but still win and tie several.
In a tournament, you don’t have the luxury to afford stupid mistakes round after round.

We are pretty much making at least one to two defensive fatal errors in almost every game we played.
Before luck hits us, we sink our own ship already

Because it is a 2-leg game where defending is important, but not that important in the end. Scoring is more important, imo.

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won’t disagree

Just outscore the opponents :mustafi:

how good was our attack against West Ham?

Do people here think it is 100% necessary to win the Europa this season, else we’ll fall off a cliff into some sort of Sunderland/Villa/Leeds oblivion? Europa or bust?

I’ve heard it a few times but never really subscribed to it. Liverpool went 5 or 6 seasons being choked of the supposed lifeblood that is CL participation but they came back with a canny choice of manager, wise investment and trading off the name of their club.

That’s my point really, I think once you get past a certain level now, a club can just become too big to fail and will always be within a few years max. of getting itself back into top level contention, with a few shrewd appointments and a bit of good fortune. Arsenal is one of those clubs, we’re too big an institution in 2019 to fall away.

I know Chelsea finished 10th one season not long back but I truly think that’s an exception. Then they bounced back. I can’t see Arsenal falling below 6th for years going into the future*, whilst on the other hand we still have the potential to be on the backs of Man City in the not too distant future

*unless a billionaire buys out a west ham or an Everton I guess and creates a ‘big 7’ ‘big 8’ overnight

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I highly doubt it, I’ve not heard anyone be nearly that overly dramatic.

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