Barca v Arsenal - Match Reaction

[Bumble]

How can you score goals when you never shoot from anywhere outside 2 ft from goal. Do people not look closely at our football. It is not at all conducive to scoring goals only to maintaining possession. when you have your main striker. Giroud constantly laying off the ball 4m from goal and players not having the intelligence to make runs through defernce without being caught offside. How will you ever score goals?. We made tons off fun of Lampard. How did he score all those goals?. Wenger thinks he has invented a new way to play footie. Sorry, its a shambles. New players will not solve that problem, not by a long shot

didn't we have 20 shots yesterday and missed the target or had most of them blocked. we need more composed finishers as it isn't just the striker missing all the chances.. everyone seems to be at it. and I don't even think we retain possession that well anyway... any sort of pressure on the player and there tends to be a mistake. Sanchez regularly cuts in only to lose the ball. Walcott couldn't trap a bag of cement. Maybe we just have too high expectations..... if ticket prices were reduced to championship level maybe we wouldn't complain as much.

[Marc Overmars]

How can you score goals when you never shoot from anywhere outside 2 ft from goal. Do people not look closely at our football. It is not at all conducive to scoring goals only to maintaining possession. when you have your main striker. Giroud constantly laying off the ball 4m from goal and players not having the intelligence to make runs through defernce without being caught offside. How will you ever score goals?. We made tons off fun of Lampard. How did he score all those goals?. Wenger thinks he has invented a new way to play footie. Sorry, its a shambles. New players will not solve that problem, not by a long shot

Everything has to be so methodical, no one does anything off the cuff anymore because their natural instincts have been altered. Once in a blue moon do we see a goal like Elmo's last night and I'm sure WUMger had a word with him about that after.

[Globalgunner]

Everything has to be so methodical, no one does anything off the cuff anymore because their natural instincts have been altered. Once in a blue moon do we see a goal like Elmo's last night and I'm sure WUMger had a word with him about that after.

Elmo, is new. Give him a pre-season with us and he will have learnt the errors of his ways

[Power n Glory]

He should have been first choice starting since we bought him in January.

Definitely. Seems to understand how to build from deep but still get into scoring positions. Something we've badly missed with Ramsey because he bypasses the building from deep part. Just bombs forward.

Credit to Wenger for the signing. £8m seems like a bargain. Was really impressed with him in the cup and thought he had anothee solid game yesterday.

[Globalgunner]

didn't we have 20 shots yesterday and missed the target or had most of them blocked. we need more composed finishers as it isn't just the striker missing all the chances.. everyone seems to be at it. and I don't even think we retain possession that well anyway... any sort of pressure on the player and there tends to be a mistake. Sanchez regularly cuts in only to lose the ball. Walcott couldn't trap a bag of cement. Maybe we just have too high expectations..... if ticket prices were reduced to championship level maybe we wouldn't complain as much.

The reason why they missed all those shots is simple. They dont do it in training. In training they are told to continously pass the ball until the optimum chance, 3ft from goal comes along. Thats why when we are desperate and need to score it hardly ever comes off. There is no confidence to shoot as it has been bred out of them. Van persie & Podolski were the last players to shoot with composure and instinct. We soon got rid of them.

[Maestro]

Arsenal FC haven't been seen on Twitter since before the game yesterday, good fucking idea. They have been taking a battering on their social media platforms lately

[Niall_Quinn]

didn't we have 20 shots yesterday and missed the target or had most of them blocked. we need more composed finishers as it isn't just the striker missing all the chances.. everyone seems to be at it. and I don't even think we retain possession that well anyway... any sort of pressure on the player and there tends to be a mistake. Sanchez regularly cuts in only to lose the ball. Walcott couldn't trap a bag of cement. Maybe we just have too high expectations..... if ticket prices were reduced to championship level maybe we wouldn't complain as much.

No, we shoot when we have run out of all other options. So take it as read it's not a genuine shooting opportunity when we let fly. When we get a genuine sight of goal we pass it sideways or backwards. This makes it much harder to win football matches. Wenger's tactics are essentially to make it very, very hard to win a football match. We compete against ourselves more than against the opponent.

Every team has fitter players now, prepared to run more, prepared to cover space and press as a unit. This has rendered Wenger's tip, tap, tip, tap, super secret system almost incidentally ineffective. I don't think the opposition has "sussed" us out as much as we are playing a system that has zero bearing on a game. If you tip tap around enough times you will lose the ball. 1 in a million the ball will ricochet just right and an amazing sequence of passing will end up in the net. This is used to reinforce the belief we know what we are doing on a pitch, but all it proves is statistics work.

We have Theo Walcott in the team and then play a short, slow game. We have Bif in the team and we keep him out of the box with his back to goal, congesting everything through the centre. Our wide men tear down the flanks and the check back, slow it down, pass it back, re-establish the triangle. Our defenders mark empty space and actually seek out opportunities to be double teamed, standing haplessly in the space between two opponents and the running backwards and forwards like a compliant dog.

I haven't a clue what Wenger is trying to achieve, or thinks he's trying to achieve. We've been doing this all season, expect on the odd occasion (like that first half against Utd) where suddenly the team can play. Suddenly we have pace. Suddenly we can pass. So it's not as if the players have forgotten how to play football. Most of the time they are trapped in a hellish system that doesn't give them a prayer. This would all change overnight if we changed the manager. I don't know what else would change, for better or worse, but our football would be a lot more effective.

[fakeyank]

FYP

I have seen this posted before.. but what is FYP?

[adzzzbatch]

I have seen this posted before.. but what is FYP?

Fixed Your Post.

[Power n Glory]

The reason why they missed all those shots is simple. They dont do it in training. In training they are told to continously pass the ball until the optimum chance, 3ft from goal comes along. Thats why when we are desperate and need to score it hardly ever comes off. There is no confidence to shoot as it has been bred out of them. Van persie & Podolski were the last players to shoot with composure and instinct. We soon got rid of them.

You say all this and mention Lampard but not too long ago said it's not Ozil's responsibility to score goals. He's the one player I can single out and say doesn't shoot enough or even attempt to get a shot on goal. Was just looking over his shot attempts over this month and it's like one shot a game if that. Also, I can't blame Wenger or the training on it because Wenger openly said he needs to score more goals.

http://www.goal.com/en/news/1862/pre...ore-more-goals

"A player of his calibre, you want him to add goals to his assists. He is world class

But he replies with this.

http://www.standard.co.uk/sport/foot...-a3160496.html

"It doesn’t really matter if I’m scoring or assisting, as long as we win.

"I don’t think I will be doing myself any favours if I focus on scoring more, or becoming more arrogant in front of goal – and certainly not my teammates

."

It flies in the face of what the boss is telling him we need and what a player of his calibre should be producing hence the comparison to other top attacking midfielders. Certain attacking midfielders you wouldn't want to give too much space to on the edge of the box. Ozil doesn't seem like much of threat there. Mark the runners and players in front him tightly and I don't see him punishing the opposition for giving him shooting space.

Plenty of other guilty parties for the lack of goals but I'm pointing out Ozil today. Unlike Giroud who can't create space for himself to shoot or guys like Welbeck, Campbell, Walcott and Sanchez who just seem to lack the composure, technique or finesse on certain occasions, Ozil is the one player that has Hleb/Chamakh syndrome when in on goal.