Watching the game from behind a pile of unmarked English books, I was almost thankful that I had my student's written words to wash the taste of my own out of my mouth.
Ah the wide eyed naïve optimism of 7:15. What a young fool I was.
I want this blog to be about positive things, but this is difficult when there is nothing positive to blog about. Nevertheless, I want to give my 2 cents.
I will never be someone who calls for the managers head or the execution of our best players for poor performances, etc. Arsenal is what it is. We have good players. They're not performing consistently. Hopefully that will change soon. If it doesn't, I'll just recede into my bubble and ignore the more professional blogs out there.
Allow me to indulge you with my tactical knowledge, or lack their of. Arsenal's problem tonight can be boiled down to 2 key issues:
1. None of our players played as well as we expect our team to play.
2. Our tactics/formation is top-heavy.
Starting with the first point, I know that Ozil will continue to come under great criticism in the wake of tonight's performance, and indeed a measure of criticism is justified. He hasn't been playing well. That trend continued tonight. Let's put tonight alone at least into perspective. Our arguably most consistent players: Koscielny and Mertesacker were awful tonight; Szczesny was also pretty shocking; Arteta had a howler and we can almost always count on him to at least have a 90% pass completion; Ramsey has, through out this season, performed about as well as Ozil has, albeit with a few goals to his name which gets him a bit of leeway. This was a poor performance in a lot of areas.
Secondly, in parallel with our unbalanced, attacked-heavy squad, our formation, or at least the implementation of it, is not balanced enough. I would surmise that tonight, Wilshere and Ramsey were so eager to get in and make a difference they didn't negotiate well who should hold back a bit and be ready to cover.
Regarding the tactics, I believe last years Arsenal would have faired much better. This is not a consequence of our new signings but a consequence of our approach. We were away from home to a very good European side. I don't like to use the word respect but we should have at least adopted a more cautious approach and tried to find our feet. This should have been the default response when it became apparent we couldn't string 3 passes together. Settle down, take a bit of stock and pounce when the opportunity might arise. We did it so well last year, and the ability to do that is present in all successful teams. Chelsea did it to Liverpool in that crucial game last season, Man City did it to us in the early stages of our game on Saturday, the invincibles would frequently bide their time to strike on the counter attack when they were not clicking as irresistibly as we might like them to.
I hope this changes, less and less for my own joy of Arsenal. I love Arsenal and I enjoy reading about them but the misery on offer when things go wrong is not fun to read. It feels that the team we thought might be ready to have a real go at winning things, have actually taken a mental step backwards. That's not simply based on tonight but our start to the season. The promising display at Man City now feels like a false dawn. It doesn't seem to be from want of trying, even tonight, but the performance tonight was amateur. Not because the performance was poor, but the failure to recognise that things were hard and to change our approach to suit the situation and ride out the storm...
I digress. Last season we responded fantastically to setbacks, so I look forward to us smashing Villa to bits next Saturday.
For the second time this evening,
That's all from TheArseAndAll
No comments:
Post a Comment