I think it was his worst tbh. In most of the matches prior, his substitutions have generally worked and have been timed well. Today, not only were they timed wrongly but they made absolutely no sense whatsoever. They essentially weakened our attacking threat against a poor side who we made it so easy for.
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His substitutions have still resulted in more goals scored than any other team in the entire football league, altho I suppose you can just turn that back on him as an accusation of indecisiveness over team selection
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Emery’s not really handling the crunch time well at the moment, you have to trust your seniors to get the job done at parts of the season like this.
Not a great month, can still put it right against Liverpool but that’s going to be a right bastard especially as Klopp is on fire.
I think it’s both honestly. He hasn’t assembled this squad himself and we are really heavy in some areas and totally under strength in others, so it’s pretty difficult for him to find a consistent XI.
He clearly doesn’t know his best team and at times I think he’s made brilliant substitutions and changed games such as the NLD, but today his choices were abysmal for the first time in my opinion.
He’s definitely struggling to get to grips with this squad. What’s going on with defensive training? Does it happen? The amount of balls over the top that could have caught us out were ridiculous.
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I miss the old days when we didn’t win either but at least played nice football. Now we don’t even have that.
Sub off Ozil and Lacazette, please. Bring Arteta.
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Yeah it was ok to let the run of wins and long unbeaten run paper over some of the cracks in defensive frailty and discombobulated play, but imho this was absolutely a game to prioritize 3 points for and gamble on Pool - we will probably get smashed either way and I’d rather go in on back of 3 points and no expectation… now there is a bit of pressure on us to try to get something out of that game… not good.
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This is such a classic example of recency bias.
At times this season we’ve played some great football, think of the goals we were scoring against Lieceister and Fulham for instance, or the football we played in the league against Spurs.
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Not sure I would call it recency bias, it has been a long, long time since the Wenger teams played beautiful football… this season we are more effective but we are still seeing long stretches of pretty mediocre quality football - we need an upgrade at several spots and more time for the manager - hopefully we will see more next year…
We’ve seen some great stuff from Emery’s team but what we haven’t seen yet is a 90 minute performance… arguably the pool game was the closest we’ve come. Or possibly the Spurs game where we gave a really good account for 70 minutes or so but still managed to almost fuck both of them games.
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I actually put that in my nominations but Mysty didnt act on it.
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The biggest test for Emery is going to be next season and the season after, when the majority of our fan base are no longer content with 5th place.
Dont think it can ever be harder than having this bunch of dross too work with.
For me, next season is when I’m going to start getting hard on him if he doesn’t deliver. I think he deserves the benefit of the doubt for a year, because he needs a chance to replace a lot of this squad and we can all see that. I don’t think any of us like being 5th, but to expect that we can do much better this season is a little foolish whether you’re thrilled about the manager or not.
I’ve been generally happy with him, although today was a low point so far. We just need to be patient and see whats happening 12 months from now.
He’s taking peters from everyone tonight about his weird subs. Honeymoon period is over Unai.
Play Lacazette and Özil for 90 minutes ffs. Our bench is shit. Fucking substitution merchant
Missed the game because I had a court trial :gabriel:
Sounds like Unai had a worse day than I did.
What does “Peters” mean in this context?
I read that as pelters.
My worry with Unai going forward is he will persist to long with our home grown young dross, won’t fix our defence and I reckon he’s the sort of manager that’s content fighting for 4th place in this league.