It’s not the individual defeat…that’s the whole point. From the top of my head we had questionable defensive perfomences against Leicester, Wolverhamption and Watford. They had a brainfart moment against United which cost two points and than there are the three losses.
But if the general consensus is that those are growing pains and other defenders will fix these shortcomings than I guess I’ll have to be more patient.
We are on track for nearly 80 a season after not breaching 70. Jury is still very much out on long term, but we are certainly in a better place. We are also dealing with a season of 2 teams possibly getting 90 and a peaking Spurs and Pool.
Before that one season we breached 70 consistently. That means nothing really.
Trending wise it certainly does. We need more players and have some issues but we are likely having highest point total in a few years and might even get 80… when did we last do that?
Hold the horses mate. We heading for 76…we got 75 in '14/15 and '16/17. Sure he might make this team hit 80 but that is not a certainty at all.
Of course it isn’t but extrapolating preSoton we were on track for 80+. Things can change fast. Point is, all u can go on is data we have so far.
exceeding point total by trajectory by close to 10? Check
progressing convincingly in all cups so far? Check
3). Giving minutes to star youngsters and seeing how Iwobi and Guen progress? Check
Yeah we have lots of problems still, many are legacy issues… first half starts… injury crisis… fluffing golden chances… several players we need to rely on being awful for too many games.
Atm I tend to give more benefit of the doubt with the data so far.
The Southampton result is pretty much a reflection of where we are right now. We’ve been winning games while being defensively poor and conceding. We could have lost some of those games too. Emery’s reaction to our poor defensive performance has been to move to 3 at the back with wing backs and 2 defensive midfielders. Because of that we have less impetus going forward until he switches it up by adding another forward in there but then we have less defensive stability.
Our unbeaten run was an illusion because of this. We aren’t dominating games like City and Liverpool or even Spurs are. That’s Emery’s immediate challenge, to move us at least to Spurs level.
This. We average 2 points per match atm which is what Wenger did for the last 10 years of his career basically, and I’d argue this team is so much more talented than anything he’d managed the past 3 or 4 seasons. Wenger had a couple spans going unbeaten as well if you recall. We even had the “most points in a calendar year” trophy. I’m not over the moon with Unai as most seem to be.
How could we dominate games like City and Pool?
Emery is not perfect, our team is not perfect, and far from being a “complete squad”.
I only know that we are already playing better football than last few seasons.
Everything takes time, and we are in the process of rebuilding, and having a new manager to fix the problems one at a time. So unfortunate we are having an injury crisis (again).
Can’t say we are “really” heading to the “right” direction, but improvements are there. Don’t say we haven’t improved much, which we did.
Give Emery and our management some time, 2 - 3 seasons, then we will see.
You’d be saying that if we were unbeaten and ten points clear tbh.
And it’s not even accurate. Most have seen some progress in this team which is what most of us wanted. Virtually nobody is over the moon with him.
I wouldn’t use last season where Wenger had lost the dressing room as a barometer of whether Emery has had a successful season. I’d compare Emery’s point total’s to Wenger’s 16/17, 15/16, 14/15, 13/14. I think that’s a fairer comparison. Emery has had investment that Wenger didn’t necessarily have through that tenure too, with the summer and last January investments being relative outliers.
So right now he’s on target for 76 points, which in itself is Arsenal par for the course. If he gets 6 points from the next 2 he’s back on course for an 80 point first season. The last time Wenger got near to that was 13/14 when we got 79 points.
Also we still have to go away to City, Liverpool and Spurs. The lower teams away games slightly tougher imo with Everton, Leicester, West Ham, Watford and Wolves seem to be tougher away games than we’ve had against the non top 6. So if he gets 80 points considering all that it would be impressive but it also makes it less likely and we’d need to improve to do it imo
I don’t think you can ignore Wenger’s last season, but I get what you are saying… we were stagnating massively, had contracts a mess, a complete lack of tactical discipline and character and things fell apart - it isn’t easy to just “fix” that by changing manager. Agree with all your other points - it is too early to tell and to me over 76 would be mild success as long as we also get close to Euro and/or FA Cup (you can’t say “must win” on cups, b/c they are a crap shoot).
80+ would be impressive, I agree on that… I hope we at least invest in a defender in winter and that Xhaka continues to develop chemistry with Torry and becomes less of a Xhakalamity - and if Auba and Ozil/Iwobi gets it going, we could definitely threaten 80.
What worries me most at this point is our shambolic first halves, our relatively meh defenders, including an aging and oft-injured Koss, and what appears to be a failed upgrade at GK (and a waste of a decent amount of money). If we are wrong about Leno and he comes good, that would also help.
The reason I don’t think you can use last season to determine to much wether Emery is doing a good job is, probably 70 % of managers in would football would beat the 60 points or whatever we obtained last season. Comparing him to 14/15, 15/16, 16/17 seems a better measuring stick.
Maybe - I would say certainly a few managers would have - but beating 63 is different than projecting out to 75+ … we were dire last year and still have massive issues at the back and now an injury crisis in defense, probably our weakest area (with wing attack). Look at Utd with massive spending and options - they have barely cracked 70 for the 4 years after Fergie left, and he left them in a mess too, despite them winning the title by some miracle that year. There is no reason to think we couldn’t have been mired in the 65-70 range for a while - that may still happen, but I am certainly more optimistic than I was at the start of the campaign.
I can’t believe people are complaining about being “underwhelmed” and such with Emery. Its his first half season and he has to fix an absolute mess.
Guardiola came into the league and had a nightmare of a first season, and needed to spend hundreds of millions to improve them properly. What on earth were you expecting Unai to have done by December? I don’t think it could’ve been much better so far.
I think it’s perfectly valid to use the last shambolic season of Wenger as a measure of Emery’s success in his first season, because he’s had limited funds and has had to directly address that shambles. From next season it would be appropriate to expect better from Emery and start comparing his performance to some of Wenger’s less appalling offerings.
So a manager who has in domestic play (after all, a 75-90% of a manager’s record–that is, the bulk of his work) constantly out-performed expectations, often significantly so, is better than a manager who has almost never out-performed expectations, in the few occasions that he has marginally done so, and has various times under-performed expectations. That makes sense.
Honestly, how do you lot let people get away with saying shit like this? Put this anywhere other than an Arsenal forum and people are having a serious laugh. It’s wonderfully provincial really.
Ugh, is it just me or is there almost something inherently frustrating (with the exception of Powderfinger) about yanks/North Americans discussing football?
You can’t believe people are underwhelmed with 5th place in a season where almost everything has gone right for us and we spent very well over the summer (adding two very good midfield pieces in Torreira and Guendouzi, and a good CB in Sokratis)?
Take a look at the xG tables from this season and last season:
https://understat.com/league/EPL
https://understat.com/league/EPL/2017
Current table has us 6th, one spot below of where we were last season. (In case you don’t think xG has any worth, take a look at United as proof that kind of luck will not sustain: everyone could see, much like us this season, that they were greatly outperforming their luck, and here they are this season when their performance levels more or less match up with their pts total…)
Then, the Guardiola to Emery comparison Because Emery has a track record of success like Guardiola did coming into Arsenal, because the “revolution” Emery is doing right now is similar to what Guardiola did with City with likely similar pay offs, because there is really anything comparable at all between Guardiola and Emery 
Finally, a point that is completely ignored here, that for some reason OAers constantly ignore, for reasons beyond me: it made (and continues to make) no sense to hire a manager worse than your top 4 competitors and expect to make up ground that way. People talking about our potential point total (which, even belying our actual performance levels, if achieved, wouldn’t represent any progress) as if it’s impressive are missing the point: the competitive climate changed. Our top 4 competitors are no longer a Mancini/Pellegrini managed City, a Redknapp/AVB managed Tottenham, a Dalglish/Rodgers managed Liverpool, and a revolving door at Chelsea. That Tottenham is performing as it is, that City and Liverpool are performing as they are, that Chelsea is showing some improvements while having the occasional set-back while making a genuine revolution in style, is all entirely predictable.
This forum sorely misses the contribution of Burgundy, CunningLinguist, and A.F. That a comment like that about Poch can fly and even be approved of, that not one other person but SDGooner is mentioning how our point total belies our performance levels (and that no one has provided the analytical data behind it), that the competitive climate has somehow been completely ignored…is really pretty damning.
Lol
AC’s making a late bid to earn the Combative title in the OA Awards :ramsey:
Agreed.
I haven’t missed yours though.