Originally Posted by
Niall_Quinn
In the closing minutes Martinelli decides to take his man on down the line, gets the cross in, Saka forces a brilliant save. That's how it has ALWAYS been done against teams that park the bus. There's no mystery, you get it wide, get the cross in, take 2 or 3 for the 20 chances. You don't need to be a coach or a tactics maestro to figure it out.
Barcelona fucked up football by convincing people their bullshit patterball was some sort of art form rather than the boredom exemplified. Barca-shitty-lona, the most gifted and utterly boring team to play the game in living memory. Wenger saw it and immediately fell in love so we got fucked up too, transformed from the actual artform of Bergkamp, Henry, Pires, Vieira and co - into the Fabregas, Hleb, Ozil snoozefest. Every season because slumbertime interrupted maybe 10-20 times over the whole course by tose rare moments where the impossible intricacy somehow resulted in a goal. van Persie broke the tedium by reverting to proper football, then fucked off when he realised we weren't a serious football club but more of a vanity project.
Unfortunately Arteta buys into every last ounce of Pep's bullshit. And you saw Pep's bullshit completely exposed once his dancing and prancing primadonna mercenaries got a bit too old and started picking up the injuries.
It's all hype - these "great" managers that have led the European game into the stagnation we have now, where two teams can literally stare across the pitch at each other and tap it left, right, left, right. Yeah, you can bore the opposition to death with retention stats and yards covered sideways, and effectively park the bus yourself (which is Pep's dirty little secret in his "beautiful" game) and sure, if you spend a billion on the squad it even works. But it's not football. That shit we saw tonight is not football, it's something else and there's no excuse for it.
