Unai Emery

I think he is the right man for the job, however if we dont invest and give Emery some players he wants to work with then you arent going to see his best.

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This summer is massive. Hope Emery pushes the board to spend.

I just worry we’re going to fill out the squad with too many older guys and that our ability to unearth talents such as Torriera and Douz with Sven gone restricted.

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This is the passive of the passive.
Not only zero, but negative creativity.

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Chambers earned his right to play for us (at least with this squad) by his performance from last year.
Mustafi, NOT.

Yeah it isn’t the most creative midfield, but that’s why I say “if we set up correctly”. Mainly my thought would be to play a 4-3-3 if we did this, and have players in the wide areas who can create (which we obviously lack in the squad right now).

If you also have attacking fullbacks bombing on as Emery likes and look to create overloads from wide areas, with the right balance I think that midfield could be solid. For instance, when we played the diamond against Chelsea, Xhaka played deepest while Torriera and Guendouzi did a great job of covering the fullbacks out wide. Although Ramsey was technically part of the midfield, often it was essentially a three.

I’m quickly running out of patience with Xhaka anyway though, and I’ve defended him a lot. This was just a thought I had, I don’t necessarily think we should actually do it.

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Basically I agree of what you said, but when you listed out the names of Tor, Guen and Xhaka but then saying “if we set up correct”. This I don’t agree.

Having them together straightly means we CANNOT set up correctly.

I wouldn’t say I disagree, that’s a fair opinion. What would you prefer we do with the midfield currently at our disposal? Leave out Ozil though, cause he’s probably going at this point.

First, I don’t know why we have to insist 3 at the back.
It is not like we are having Maldini, Baresi and Nesta at the back.
We are leaking goals for fun.

I will go back to a more balanced 4-2-3-1.
Bellerin and the LB can still taking turns to act like a wing back, at least we have one extra body at the back.
Doesn’t matter what formation we are using right now, we have a CB crisis. I mean if we have enough CB coverage again, I will choose 4 at the back instead of 3.

2 DM/CM would be Tor and Guen (at this point). I want a better player to start, and use Guen as a rotation.

If you need to exclude Ozil/Ramsey (leaving anyway), then I probably will use Xhaka in the middle.
Our midfield has zero creativity anyway, but putting Xhaka to attack is to minimize the chance he fouls people at our own back. His shooting and passing are “okay”, and more like a central player than Iwobi and Mhki and anybody else on the team.
Auba on the left, whoever on the right, and Laca as striker.

I agree with a lot of that. I too prefer a 4-2-3-1 to anything else, although I think we could try a diamond or a 4-4-2 at times to maximize the output of our strikers. I’ve never liked the back three, I think that unless you’re a coach who prefers it, you basically switch to it as a sign of caution when you don’t have good enough defenders.

The issue with pushing Xhaka up though is that we lose his distribution from deep which is fairly important to how we build up, so I’d probably still want a midfield two of him and Torriera, but I accept that his defensive liability creates a massive issue for us. Torriera and Guendouzi simply wouldn’t be able to progress the ball enough imo.

I would honestly look to go with Mhikitayran as the number 10 when he returns; I know many people aren’t a fan of his, but without Ozil or Ramsey he’s clearly the best choice we have in that position as far as I see it.

It’s very difficult because quite simply, we don’t have the right players in this squad ATM to create a dependable 4-2-3-1.

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Still waiting to see a single pivot of Torreira, with Guendouzi and Rambo in front him as B2B.
Fluid football. :flushed::flushed:

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Watched Spurs v Crystal palace game on the box at the weekend and the defending from Palace was superb. As soon as they lost the ball they all ran back to defend. When they had the ball they ran forward to attack. Simple…simple… strategy. Shame we can’t play that way.

Barcelona’s 3 second rule on pressing the opponents after losing possession should be the way we imitate.
Klopp’s BVB/Liverpool model comes very close to that.

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We played a similar style to that against Chelsea and we dominated the game.

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yep, but we are missing the consistency (and healthy players)… that’s the biggest problem.

Already played more than half of the season, how many games did we play like that?

Agreed it’s not looking good for our players but unless they give 100 percent as often as possible we are going to be on the back foot. I was hoping Emery would get the tempo up by now even with average players it makes an effect. Look at Wolves

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The football is fucking dire.

But I can’t hate on him that much on reflection as he is actively trying to play our good players and bench our shit players.

Xhaka aside. Mustafi for example seems to have been binned sharp-ish which is great. But obviously unluckily for him and us, 2 of our starter defenders have done their ACL.

And at least a few seem to be injured at all times.

So the intentions in that aspect are good at least

Now onto the bad news:

Smh Emery

Smh that’s the real reason he flew to the US.

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We were 22 points off city at this stage last season. Only 9 now. Clear progress. :santi:

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Wow this sounds like a good time.

He probably thought our players were pussies with their helium bullshit.

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Is this just some made up bollocks? Sounds absolutely ridiculous.