Quote Originally Posted by HCZ_Reborn View Post
I think you’re missing my point which is at this exact moment in time it’s completely and totally academic. I’ve said until I’m blue in the face that most of the time we absolutely do not need to be playing two defensive midfielders, and in fact my last post actually fulsomely agrees with your point that actually ironically the contradiction between wanting to play this controlled game which makes our attacking inefficient which means we have to overcommit and as a result get caught too high in possession.

But given where we are at the moment in terms of the players available to us, we have two choices….continue to play the way we are doing and make ourselves vulnerable to conceding on the break, or we play more conservatively and hope against hope to get a scrappy goal. The luxury is not there to play the ball quicker. I’m literally the person who always moans about us playing Rice at 8, but I’m in no expectation that if we swap Rice and Partey around everything is going to get magically better and we will create far more chances which our second string attack will put away.
'Academic' debate is all we do on here

I do understand where we are - and that is a good part of my concern about where we can get to under Arteta. I think that we have set ourselves up - both in terms of our system and our players - not to be able to adapt to the more efficient and effective way in which many of our competitors are playing the game. I agree with you that swapping existing players will not achieve this. More generally, we have too few creative players; to few runners to receive the ball in advanced positions; and no reliable finishers.

We have spent on players and have a high wage bill. The quality we do have has been enough for us to finish second with a following wind. But our system is now too easily neutralised - even with all our forwards available. And even the potential transfer targets we have been linked to are unlikely, IMO to see us champions.