Well that could happen sooner rather than later Ramsdale has now signed and I cannot see us paying £24m+ add ons for a number 2 and reports say that Arteta wanted him.
Well that could happen sooner rather than later Ramsdale has now signed and I cannot see us paying £24m+ add ons for a number 2 and reports say that Arteta wanted him.
yeah no way he is being signed as a number 2. it was difficult with Emi as essentially he had half a season of senior football and someone offers 20m, what are you meant to do when your first choice is Leno. He wanted to play regular1st team football and we didnt offer that.Originally Posted by dazthegooner
I would guess it mostly came down to needing to fund the move for Partey - at the time the only sizeable offers we had on the table were for Emi and Ainsley and of the two I guess we felt that we could better afford to lose one of our two decent keepers. Obviously looking back at Partey’s injuries, Ainsley’s rejection of the fullback role and Leno’s decent into PTSD, we couldn’t have got that decision more wrong if we’d tried!
Oh well, it’s done now, and none of it is Ramsdale’s fault - he’s just the one we’re bringing in to try to fix things.
Whenever you cringe at the price, just remember Kepa cost £72m
I don’t entirely agree, I don’t think he was the problem last year.
This playing it out from the back stuff is nonsense. We aren’t good enough to do it well and concede so much pressure from it.
You're right in the sense that Arteta insisted on tactics that hia players couldn't deliver, but that's his whole problem - he's trying to apply a Man City philosophy to a team that can't deliver it...
This is always going to be something that splits fans down the middle. My view on passing out from the back is that it’s how all of the top sides in the game play, so we need to get good at it if we ever want to call ourselves a top side ever again. I think there’s a definite logic to what you’re saying when the season is well under way - if the players just aren’t getting it by a certain cut-off point then you need to default to something more pragmatic - but that all ends for me as soon as the window opens and there’s a chance to upgrade.
The idea of constraining the way we play and our ambitions to suit the limitations of our players just feels wrong to me. Surely it should be the other way round and we should be recruiting players to match a more ambitious way playing? We’ve been working around player limitations for years with guys like Xhaka in midfield, and no one tolerates that, so why should GK and CB get a free pass? If they can’t play the way we want to play then we need to try and upgrade at the first chance we get. Harsh on Leno, perhaps, because he hasn’t suddenly become bad at everything he was doing well before - his job description has just become more complex and he’s struggling with the extra demands.
If we were talking about someone like Nketiah up front, for example, I guarantee there’d be very little sympathy for the argument that ‘he’s
a poacher and no good at hold-up play so we should abandon how we want to play to suit him’ - no one would blame him for being the wrong profile of striker, but ultimately we would still expect the right profile of player brought in as first choice.
We were playing some lovely stuff out from the back with Emi between the sticks, and that was with much the same players (or worse players) in front of him, so it is possible. I don’t even think it’s a technical issue - most keepers are actually pretty good with their feet these days, and we’re only talking about making relatively simple passes. It’s purely a composure issue: Emi was cool as a cucumber and made good decisions under pressure; Leno’s style is more jumpy and frantic - it makes him a fantastic, reflex shot-stopper, but unfortunately it also makes him the goal-keeping Mustafi when he has the ball at his feet and he’s being pressed.
Last edited by I am invisible; 22-08-2021 at 11:30 AM.
That was why Arteta was so dumb to let Martinez go when he clearly was better at fitting in with the way Arteta wants to play
Mr Non-Negotiable was far to loyal to Leno, making him blind to his faults, and we paid the price
It’s a sickener, it really is. Emi was the absolute perfect keeper for us - literally radiated calm and reassurance, and the entire defence seemed to feed off it.That was why Arteta was so dumb to let Martinez go when he clearly was better at fitting in with the way Arteta wants to play
Mr Non-Negotiable was far to loyal to Leno, making him blind to his faults, and we paid the price
Oh well, it’s done now and there’s no going back. I guess all we can do now is hope that Ramsdale ticks the same boxes and can become that same kind of presence for us at the back over the next couple of years…
We shouldnt forget that martinez only played half a season. So 20m offet comes in when your first choice was still doing well seems a no brainrr. I think alot of hindsight is going on here. Leno has declined since then and not it looks a bad bit of business. At the time it made sense.
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