Quote Originally Posted by HCZ_Reborn View Post
I think IBK is correct in that the momentum we built up from the beginning of 2024 is gone, however it’s equally true that a) I think performance like last night was an outlier, I think even against Bournemouth we didn’t start great but we’d started to establish control before the sending off and b) we have won every game bar one where we have had 11 men on the pitch. It’s not worth dwelling too much on the red cards…I think we all agree that at its most generous we can say we have fallen afoul of officious refereeing

I think overall we look better than we did a year ago, but there seems to be an obsession with control over creativity. Jesus was probably the only player that offered something a bit vaguely different and even then his confidence is through the floor.
But absolutely we can see that he has potential playing on the right.

Nwaneri is not going to get much from ten minute cameos when we are doing game management at the end. If he was meant to be Odegaard’s understudy than us him as such. Stodging midfield the way we do actually means we have to push up more and leave ourselves exposed.
I would say that most of our performances have been below our normal standard with the exception of City, Villa & PSG games.

Against Leicester we had a brain fart for some of the game and let them back in and against Southampton we were awful, made them look like a top 6 team at times!

Arteta said he wanted us to be better defensively but we seem to have sacrificed most of our attacking nous to focus solely on that.
The team need to realise they need to keep doing the other things well on top of defending better.