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Thread: Match Reaction v Liverpool (home)

  1. #61
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    Quote Originally Posted by IBK View Post
    3 days later and I still feel despondent. I think that its because Saturday's game encapsulated so many of the real problems with our team and manager. It wasn't the loss - Liverpool were very good. It was the way we failed even to compete in any department.

    - Decision making #1. Arteta's set up was a disaster, and I worry that our previous improvement since Xmas was reliant more on individual players - Saka; ESR; Tierney and Odegard - than any settled system. Without 3 of them it was back to November and the mess of a team that we witnessed then.

    - Decision making # 2. F*ck Aubameyang on the left. In fact he shouldn't even have been on the pitch. Extraordinary that his previous favourite, Willian, was dropped just at the time when he had been showing a small bit of form, for the execrable Ceballos who has shown the oppposite. All of the best bits of this season have been made by our young; upcoming and hungry players. The manager is without 2 of them and loses a third but still won't play Martinelli - who has (with 1 exception) only done good things when he has played. Arteta seems incapable of following the simple formula of playing players on form and dropping those out of form, and can't even show consistency with the likes of Aubameyamg who was controversially dropped for the Spurs game, but then that event is undermined by continuing to play him when he has stunk up the place playing wise.

    - Decision making #3. Arteta's best performances have come when he has been positive/aggressive in taking the game to the opposition, but he reverted to a negative mindset in this game - and basically invited Liverpool to do what they do best. The result was predictable from the moment this team took the field.

    - Failure to adapt. We have a manager who (IMO) tries to be too clever and over-analyses the opposition (in this way, he is the opposite of Wenger who gave little thought to the opposition's strengths and weknesses). Yet despite this, he seems not to understand his own team's weaknesses. We have seen this with Leno, who is clearly not comfortable with playing out from the back, and in the Liverpool game in the absence of Luis, he seemed to think that Holding can play a passing out game. He can't. he does basic defending. Similarly, against West ham, Arteta tried to be too clever in setting up a team to play against a West Ham team that tends to play on the counter, and Moyes owned him in the first half by pressing likel hell and waiting for us to self-destruct, which we duly did. This lack of flexibility worries me - and I feel that Arteta confuses our players by continually trying to second guess the opposition - which leads to muddled thinking and is a potential reason for the errors we keep making.

    - Mentality. We have a team whose confidence is brittle; whose concentration levels are poor and whose individual players' decision making is suspect. Plus we have few leaders able to pick the team up when things inevitably turn against them. This has dogged Arenal for years - and we thought this had reached its nadir under Emery, but the past month has seen us drifting back to pre Xmas, and I wonder whether Areta has what it takes to change this on a consistent basis.

    Yes - we have Slavia Prague this week, and we all hope that we see a different team then. But if we are honest, we are more worried about serving up another shit show than confident of a good result. And that's the crux of it for me. Results aside, after 15 months we do not know what team we are going to see, game on game, at Arsenal. And that for me is a real indictment of Arteta. My faith is definitely wavering, and that is a bad place to be in where realistically we are stuck with this manager for teh forseeable future.


    Great post, totally agree with this.

  2. #62
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    Quote Originally Posted by selassie View Post


    Great post, totally agree with this.
    The sad thing is that, in a 'must win' game 5 days later - many of the same points could have been made about last night's game. It was indeed largely the shit show that we feared it would be - and that is where we seem to have come to with Arteta - only ever 2 or 3 games away from the debacle that we saw pre-Xmas. 15 months into Arteta's management this is not the progress we need or hoped to see. It is almost precisely our pattern under Emery.
    Putting the laughter back into manslaughter

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