Quote Originally Posted by She Wore A Red Ribbon View Post
I'm not sure I buy that, Navas has been brilliant when I've seen him play. It's far from idealised, they spent on a top player and he's provided 3 goals/3 assists, but more importantly, had an impact when he's been on the pitch. Sure you can point out 1 or 2 games where the City team as a whole performed badly, but they certainly have the strongest squad alongside Chelsea. Anyway, comparing our squad to the likes of Man City's is ridiculous because we have very different philosophies when it comes to spending. I'm interested in what Wenger is doing with our squad; I'm not entirely comfortable with him starting certain players and leaving the likes of Walcott out when we have a tough run of fixtures coming up. For example, Cazorla is out of form, every Tom and his dog can see that, why didn't Walcott start yesterday? He came on and instantly gave us width, setting up a goal. Or even against Hull at home, giving Theo 70 minutes would have been ideal, giving us an opportunity to rest Ozil or Ramsey, the latter of which was also turd yesterday.

It's little things like that which make a difference over the course of a season. A fresh Ramsey could have been devastating yesterday but he was hopeless, due to fatigue. Yesterday we were too narrow and tried playing through congested areas. I know we had to keep it tight but we gave Everton an incentive to continue attacking us.

And you didn't answer my Ozil question, is he a machine type player or will he need rest at some point?
Walcott has barely come back. If resting players is that important then having someone like Theo who has barely played, for the second half of the season can only be of benefit. Or doesn't it work like that?

I'm not basing the discussion on Jesus Navas by stats, solely by incosistent performances and that's not a huge slide against him, it's unfair to expect consistency from somebody if they aren't consistently playing. Anyway two of those goals came against Tottenham which is not to be churlish enough to take them away from him but like you say, you can point to 1 or 2 games.

I don't think Man City's squad is as good as it was in 2011/2012. Tottenham have shown that spending money doesn't neccesarily equate to a squad ready to take good results week after week but nobody seems to want to challenge that perception for Chelsea and Man City.

We only had congested areas to play through because Everton pressed us so well. Players do have poor games from time to time, you said that about Jesus Navas not long ago and you're not attributing those games of his due to tiredness and I understand that's because he hasn't played as many minutes but this whole tiredness excuse is becoming so easy to wheel out, I wonder what the point is in coaching players to do anything else other than have physical endurance.

I don't know what rest means. How long for when a player is truly rested? Ramsey just had two weeks off internationals, five games after that he's now physically struggling supposedly. My instinct for Özil is that no, he won't need it. I said Mourinho very often picked which obviously suggests he is fairly robust enough.