Arsenal vs Brighton - Player Rating and Match Reaction

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Originally Posted by 21_GOONER_SALUTE

We insisted on blooding this Rookie and well it can definitely be argued that by Rookie standards he's achieved amazing things.

But to say experienced managers, who've made most of the mistakes he's still going to make with us, cannot improve this team...as it is now...is quite silly to me.

Whatever happens, Arteta will probably get one more season, but I cannot currently fathom how he will be able to get this team to perform better in the league next season when they'll be playing the best in Europe every other week. Who knows, it'll probably be all over in January as usual.

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yes, this is why i think if we were Ambramovic's Chelsea we'd be showing Arteta the door and getting someone in who has CL experience, knows how to rotate players and adapt tactics and style to suit the circumstances.

we won't though and sure, we probably should give him the chance to show he can learn from his mistakes, but i think we could well fall disastrously short next season.

tbh if we do terribly and it means he goes, then it could well be a blessing in disguise, rather than have years of his just doing well enough to keep his job but us always being fundamentally flawed

of course the irony is that at the piont when he is a genuinely good manager (if he ever gets there), he'll bugger off from his own personal training ground to Barca or somewhere

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Originally Posted by 21_GOONER_SALUTE

I do agree with you that Emery didn't know his best 11 when he was with us, but as shown again with the Villa stats, it was pretty much of an anomaly for him.

It might be that coming directly from PSG (where face it, he was forced to rotate a lot) he carried that bad habit with him.....but all the things we criticised him for, silly rotations and poor defending have been corrected in his subsequent clubs pretty fast.

We insisted on blooding this Rookie and well it can definitely be argued that by Rookie standards he's achieved amazing things.

But to say experienced managers, who've made most of the mistakes he's still going to make with us, cannot improve this team...as it is now...is quite silly to me.

Whatever happens, Arteta will probably get one more season, but I cannot currently fathom how he will be able to get this team to perform better in the league next season when they'll be playing the best in Europe every other week. Who knows, it'll probably be all over in January as usual.

Lets see though, we've waited 19 years, another 5 or 7 years in the wilderness should be ok for us to bear, no?

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The problem you and Mac76 have is that you talk of this better, more experienced coach

But you can’t name him

Chelsea make moves to remove their coach if they can be guaranteed a better person…in the past that might have been true but they replaced Thomas Tuchel with Graham Potter

There just isn’t this parade of experienced and top managers to choose from.

PSG for example replaced Pochettino with Galtier from Nice.

I genuinely wish there was an outstanding candidate to go for. The way there was ten years ago when it was obvious we should have moved Wenger on and brought in Klopp


At this moment in time it would feel like ditching Arteta for the sake of it and as much as part of me would like to do that because I don’t like him, it doesn’t feel like a sustainable move when there isn’t a glaringly obvious replacement

It can’t be denied that despite the crushing disappointment of how this season has ended, Arteta has delivered something meaningful and that’s CL qualification for the first time in 6 seasons. Will probably be our highest points tally in a generation too.

Far too early to talk about moving on from him, he’s earned the right to carry on. Whether he will learn from his mistakes or not remains to be seen, but his rookie years are over now and he should have gained enough experience to evolve as a coach. He’s won a cup, rebuilt the team and flirted with the title. Roll on next season.

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Originally Posted by Marc Overmars

It can’t be denied that despite the crushing disappointment of how this season has ended, Arteta has delivered something meaningful and that’s CL qualification for the first time in 6 seasons. Will probably be our highest points tally in a generation too.

Far too early to talk about moving on from him, he’s earned the right to carry on. Whether he will learn from his mistakes or not remains to be seen, but his rookie years are over now and he should have gained enough experience to evolve as a coach. He’s won a cup, rebuilt the team and flirted with the title. Roll on next season.

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I do agree, my Chelsea point is just another way to explain how short he is of where we need him to be

if he does learn then great, but by then we almost certainly will have lost Balogun, Tierney and Nelson, all of whom are players we should be hanging on to IMO, and that will be significantly down to him - so in other words we'll continue to be suffering from the mistakes he's made already - but again i recognise a new manager, unless we got them in quick enough to prevent those players from leaving, wouldn't solve that

and no HCZ i don't know who it is, but that won't stop me from saying Arteta is far from perfect

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Originally Posted by selassie

I think a lot of these debates per say come down to us not having a strong enough squad. I am not suggesting that if we kept our starting XI fit all season we would have won the league, but right now the system and the performance level is reliant on pretty much our core starting XI being fit. As we have seen over the past few months and especially yesterday, our performance levels drop off a cliff when we have core players missing. MO touched on it earlier but our defensive record at home or more importantly recently has been actually really bad, we are conceeding 2 or 3 goals on average in a lot of games.

We have run out of steam and we are clearly not quite good enough when it comes to mounting a challenge on City to the final day.

This summer is going to be really crucial in terms of recruitment, we need to get it right and we need to purchasing players who are capable of slotting straight into the First XI without an obvious performance drop, this summer is not about finding gems, it's about finding quality players who are ready to contribute right now to a CL and PL challenging team, that's the standard we need to aspire to.

Obviously other factors come into play such as Arteta and the coaching staff and even the players within the club continuing to develop / improve, but we need to get the basics right first otherwise next season may not be anywhere near as enjoyable as this season.

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Pretty much. Your comments re our home form are correct as well - and we were shipping goals when saliba was in the team too. The problem is that we press high - and this is exposed particularly when at home, the onus is on us to attack. Funny how 2 seasons ago we were much more effective defensively but we don't seem to have found the balance - does Arteta trust too much in our ability to retain possession further up the pitch?

I am also worried a bit about last season. For all our successess this season - it can't be denied that several of the stronger teams have underperfomed from where they would normally be expected to be. That said, the main disappointments for us have come against teams in the lower half of the league.

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Originally Posted by Mac76

I don't - he often gives the ball away in dangerous positions and gets the opposition onto the front foot - you could pick this out 2-3 times in every game, so he doesn't provide safety and when he isn't giving the ball away, he just slows our attack down by clogging up the midfield, taking too many touches and often not doing much with his passing

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Not sure I agree wholly. I think that Zinchenko offers passing options that a more traditional LB simply doesn't provide. He takes risks that can expose us yes - but by the same token we are not the same going forwards without him. This for me is the dichotomy with Arteta's current team in general - the fine balance between attack and defence sometimes goes wrong. And here is where I feel we need to find more ruthlessness in finishing chances. It certainly seems as though we create many goal scoring chances but are not efficient in putting them away. A proper no 9 might solve this?

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Originally Posted by IBK

Not sure I agree wholly. I think that Zinchenko offers passing options that a more traditional LB simply doesn't provide. He takes risks that can expose us yes - but by the same token we are not the same going forwards without him. This for me is the dichotomy with Arteta's current team in general - the fine balance between attack and defence sometimes goes wrong. And here is where I feel we need to find more ruthlessness in finishing chances. It certainly seems as though we create many goal scoring chances but are not efficient in putting them away. A proper no 9 might solve this?

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I think the "Zin v a traditional left back" arguement isn't exactly my point - there's two different aspects to what i think is wrong with Zin

1. i think Arteta should be better at picking the right team for the right game - in other words Tierney, as a proper LB, should have had a lot more game time this season, not because he's a better/worse player but, for example against Southampton at home, Liverpool away and Citeh away, plus other games i don't have time to try and remember, he'd have been a better starting option to give us more on that flank - an extra person in midfield was not what was needed in those games, which patently proved to be the case

2. Zin as a player isn't up to it, he makes too many high-risk errors and so we pay too high a price for what he allegedly gives us in midfield (which even at the best of times i think is exagerrated)