Happy Monday to you all. I hope you had a good weekend. I spent the entire weekend at Stanford University for a conference.
Stanford is the largest university I have ever seen which isn’t real weird considering it’s the 6th largest university in the USA. But it’s a massive 8,000 acre campus, with sprawling red buildings, linked by roads and bike paths.
My hotel was down the street from a Mclaren dealership. You know, in case someone was like “Today I think I’ll buy a million dollar car. I guess I should go to the million dollar car store. Honey, get my toupee and viagra, we are going to the million dollar car store!”
I also liked the way that the road between the Mclaren dealership and Stanford’s main gate was lined with old RV’s. There were a spate of articles a few years ago about how wealthy retirees were living out their dotage in multi-million dollar RVs. It was billed as a new freedom for the Boomers.
These weren’t nice RVs, these were quite old and broken down RVs. Some of them were just vans. Many were just cars. This is the new reality of the USA: blocks away from the million dollar car store working people can’t afford housing, so they live in a van down by the river. Literally. I’m billing this phenomenon as a new freedom for the working poor!
Anyway, speaking of the wealth gap, the new Premier League season kicks off this weekend!
As part of my season preview, I published a piece over on the Arsenal Review about whether we can get both Auba and Laca up to 20 goals each this season. I think we can.
I’ll be doing some more posts like that over there and over here this week.
Starting NEXT week I’m going to go to a set publishing schedule:
Monday: here
Tuesday: none (book)
Wednesday: here
Thursday: none (book)
Friday: The Arsenal Review
Saturday: here
Sunday: The Arsenal Review
I may take some liberties with that here and there in order to post a post-match BTN article over on the Arsenal Review (for example, Saturday) but I’ll just switch days with you all.
Anyway, no real Arsenal news. Lots of guff about players coming and going but as usual I don’t believe it until I read it in the BBC, the Guardian, or officially on the dot com.
Have a great day and I won’t see you tomorrow!
Tim if I had known you were in the neighborhood…. (mine was the white RV).
But seriously, i laugh at that MacLaren place too. The fact that they have like 10 cars on the lot… is someone spending that much going to just “buy off the rack”?
The cars are there for show for the regular people that can’t and never will be able to afford them. The thing with products like this is that they have to have the plebs salivate over it, create aspirational/dream value, to make it worthwhile for the high rollers.
The other way to do it is to make something just completely obscure and ‘pretend’ it is super-duper exclusive, but cars are meant to be a public display so won’t work with that.
Stanford, eh? Moving up in the halls if academia. Well done. As a Canadian I feel my “ehs” are underused and I need to inject more eh in my vernacular, written and spoken.
Look I know it’s very early days and it will take time for Emery to stamp his imprimatur on Arsenal. That being said, why are are we looking so Wengerous in this preseason? Especially defensively, eh? I’m going to crack me a Nilson why you ponder that. Thanks (we say thanks a lot too).
Molson, not Nilson, though I really like the musician from 60s and 70s.
Ah, the days before microbrews. My late teenage years were awash with Molson (Canadian and the underrated Export) and Labatt Blue. That’s what the REAL hipsters are drinking these days!
Lots of microbreweries popping up now in Ontario. Not a microbrewery anymore but I still like Creemore. LCBO now carries one of my favorite American brews, Anchor Steam.
interesting observation concerning the trailers.
continuing from the previous thread, i don’t love or hate aaron ramsey. if he leaves, i’d be indifferent. i don’t think he should get much of a pay raise and should have been shopped around. you give exceptional play to exceptional players. sure, he runs around a lot but he’s not a true dominating force in midfield, a prolific play maker, or consistent goal scorer. in fact, the arsenal midfield often looks unbalanced when he plays. we’ll see.
…exceptional PAY to exceptional players.
That’s a good piece in Arsenal Review. That would be amazing if we could get 20 goals from each this season.
Increasingly, however, my concern is not with the attack (which seems to me — blinkers firmly attached — to be one of, if not the best attack in the Premier League…on paper: Aubameyang, Lacazette, Ozil, Mkhitaryan. Zing!) but rather with the defense. To my mind, watching pre-season, I still saw too many scrambled eggs for my liking. Bellerin continues to look indifferent as a defender, Mustafi is still worryingly prone to brain farts, and the left side is a serious problem (even when fit, Kolasinac doesn’t look convincing as a fullback). Sokratis impressed me as pre-season went on, particularly with his aggression, and here’s hoping he rediscovers his 2016-17 form. Fingers crossed, but even if he does, he’s just one man. That back line needs to improve drastically.
I welcome the links to Ricardo Rodriguez (with whom we were linked before we bought Kolasinac), but I’ll eat my sweaty old hat if that amounts to anything. As for Living La Vida Loca, I just don’t see why, and frankly I think it would be terrifying to go into a PL campaign using a senior CB pairing with zero PL experience.
It could get ugly in the first two games, but [sigh] I’m not going to freak out if that’s the case. I recognize this is a transition season, and the old faults will not disappear just because they’ve had a few weeks under Emery. I just hope we temper our expectations accordingly. We need an overhaul at the back (not to mention a central midfield that is in the midst of an overhaul, tactically at the very least), and that’s going to take more than one season to accomplish.
Yeah the Vida and RR rumors don’t make any sense to me. We already bought a nearly 30 stopper type CB this summer and it’s not like Nacho and Kolasinac will be injured forever; why buy an expensive, obviously first choice attacking minded left back when you’ve already got one under contract for high wages? As with Andre Gomes, I think this is all agent talk.
I didn’t see the CS match but I do think it can be misleading as a nearly meaningless match; yes, City are and will be a terrific football side but we also beat Chelsea in the CS quite convincingly a couple of years ago and that certainly was not a sign of things to come, though in City’s case it might well be. I’m just saying we won’t really know until we play them. I do think the WC fatigue is going to be a factor and their decision to recall players early could bite them. I’m going to leave this one up to the performance and recovery experts, just saying it could bite both ways.
RR is an awful defender. But he is a great forward. So these links MUST BE REAL!
Also, can I just add: I had pinned any optimism for the City game on their having a slew of World Cup stars still on vacation. It appears, based on their Community Shield squad, that my hopes were stupidly misplaced. Quite why we didn’t force the early return of the likes of Torreira, Xhaka, and Monreal (as City and other clubs seem to have done with their WC players) is beyond me.
Glad you’re finally working on a book, Tim. Best of luck with that.
What was the conference about, if you don’t find me asking.
PS. I’m having a slight issue with the site. Keep having to fill in my name and email address before posting any comment. They used to be saved earlier.
Having the same problem.
Too many posts from you, bredda Shard. How else do we limit you? 😉
I just knew you would say that 😀
Hey, yeah, so, that’s one of those new EU regulations. I suppose I could turn it off.
I was there for ISAM.
That’s quite the busy publishing schedule. Didn’t you just do one article per week over on Arseblog? Also I’m sure you have a good reason for this but I don’t totally get why you post on Arsenal Review instead of Arseblog or even here if the idea is to generate lots of traffic for your writing. Anyways, not my business, just glad you’re still doing it.
The article itself is intriguing and I don’t disagree with your conclusion, but please allow me to comment on a few points:
-Did you include penalty or non-penalty goals? Lacazette in particular scored tons of his goals from penalties for Lyon before he came over and would certainly skew his numbers.
-Is there any way to adjust the shot conversion metric for the difficulty of the shot? I ask because I watched a highlight reel of all of Auba’s goals for Dortmund and anecdotally they were not difficult shots. There were no thunderbastards or curled Coutinho shots from outside the box, he just made solid contact in the right positions time after time. Contrasting that with Alexis Sanchez who took on the whole world to generate his shots and I think we might be biased by the ability of Dortmund vs. Arsenal in those seasons to create clean looks for their forwards. I think this is a hugely significant confounder in this case. Particularly with Xhaka and Alexis, I think our shot selection had to be poor compared to other teams.
-Following on from the previous point, I know Real Goals count, but as you point out, we are projecting imaginary statistics forward. In that situation, wouldn’t it be instructive to think about this problem in terms of expected goals (or your flavor of them, SiP or Big chances) instead of actual goals which would account in some measure for the variance between goals that should’ve been scored and goals that actually were scored.
-Finally, to tie this all together, my point of view is that it doesn’t matter who our forwards are, not really, if the midfield cannot control the game and create clean looks for them. We have not had a functional midfield in several seasons now and in my view that determines most of how our forwards perform. Sometimes a really transcendent talent (like 2011-12 van Persie or Henry, etc) can pull rabbits out of hats with enough regularity that his goals plus a reasonable defense is just about enough (as it was for Fergie’s final season in charge). Although I’m high on both Lacazette and Aubameyang, I don’t think either of them can do that at this level because I think they are both more predatory than creative. To me their success will be predicated by the success of the team structure as a whole, and that starts with the heart of midfield.
1) i published twice a week at Arseblog, often taking hours upon hours to compile data
2) i was there for 6 years? Maybe more.
3) i don’t care about traffic.
4) i like the idea behind the Arsenal Review – fan generated content – and was offered a chance to help build something new and took it.
5) i specifically excluded pens from conversions
6) i could do xG but xG is really just a fancy way of saying “conversion rates”. Something I thought I have explained before but I guess needs re-explaining is that xG just aggregates conversion rates. So, a shot from outside the box has a 3% chance of scoring a shot in the 18 yard box in front of goal is 10%, a big chance is 45%. If player A takes 10 shots outside the box (0.03*10 = 0.3) and 10 shots in the 18 yard box in front of goal (0.1*10 = 1) and 3 big chances (0.45*3 = 1.35) his “expected goals” will be 2.65. So, I chose to just use conversion rates. xG is great to show underperformance, I guess. Though if I tell you “on average all teams score at a 10% rate (which is really fucking close to average) and Arsenal scored on 8% of their shots” for some reason it doesn’t sound as “statsy” as if I say “Arsenal’s expected goals for the first three games was 10 but they only scored 8.” It’s the exact same math though.
7) I agree on the midfield – but Arsenal created al those chances with the weird midfield last season, and with Ozil bunking off every away game. So, I don’t know, man. Just going with what we got.
Thanks so much for the detailed response! Good stuff.
My one observation is: who the hell cares if you sound “statsy.” Isn’t the numbers thing your niche in the Arsenal blogosphere? People can go to dozens of other sites for “proper football man” nonsense and subjective hot takes. Why not just double down on what you do well, especially if this is not meant to be a livelihood thing and you don’t care about traffic anyways?
It may indeed end up biting them, but probably not early in the season, which, unfortunately, is when we’ll be playing them! At first I thought it was a draw that could work out favorably for us, but having watched pretty much every video and match of pre-season, I can see how it would have been much better for us to ease into the season against lesser opposition. Ah well.
Yeah, I may have been wrong on that call…
Maybe it still holds for Chelsea. Sarri didn’t have much time and they do not look like a happy bunch. I hope Hazard moans and whinges through the whole season. Courtouis is as good as gone and I hope they’ll lose Willian as well before the window closes.
Alexis, whatever his faults and his ratio, did give us productivity from wide. And although his time continues to be re-assessed, he did give some defence and workrate too.
Imagine if we got 20 goals out of both front men, and 15 from wide left. That makes us top 3 challenges, if you factor in Miki with 8, Ozil with 10, and Ramsey with 12 – 15. That’s top 3 goalscoring form, provided you can lock the back door. Don’t worry, PFo… Im not going to pencil in Xhaka for 8, though I hope he surprises me 🙂 Over the corse of the season, we can expect the odd free-kick goal from Torreira, and a few headed goals from Mustafi, who’s surprisingly good in the air offensively.
Good Arsenal teams have always had wide goal productivity, i.e. Bobby Pires and Alexis Sanchez. That would complete us nicely. Just don’t think it would be Dembele, though. Iwobi has looked good in pre-season, but his goalscoring is one of the weakest parts of his game.
Quick question: is it a requirement that you have hair and a hard-on to buy a McLaren? In an odd way, that doesn’t seem too odd.
Chambers is going out on loan?? Well, that is unexpected, hot on the heels of him signing a new contract with us, and lends more credence to the Vida rumors. You have to say that doesn’t look good for Callum’s longer term prospects at the club if he is deemed surplus compared to the competition he’s got; it’s not like he’s up against ’98 Tony Adams. A few people were talking up his chops playing as a utility midfielder or right back, but the club’s recent purchases in those areas have put paid to that and I think AMN would be preferred in that role anyway. I rate Callum both as a defender, when switched on, and as a passer from deep areas but he does sometimes give the impression of a newborn foal just finding his feet for the first time when isolated against quicker players. I get the sense that he needs to develop more of a ruthless streak to mitigate his lack of hip fluidity and slow first step, and perhaps some yoga would help too.
Also the “microsite” access on the .com to view the KSE story is downright scary. What the bejeesus is up with that? I’m not accessing nuclear codes and the same thing is being reported widely elsewhere…
Must be some legal requirement since they were disclosing that they had made an offer and received an undertaking that it would be accepted by such and such time. Preventing trading of shares based on that information? Probably market rules. Weird though.
Yeah, why not just sell him? The loan is very weird, he’s 22, either we think he has the quality to be our third choice CB or not, there’s plenty of playing time going around this season. Parking him – again – is strange. Or is it us dumping his wages?!
The £1m loan fee? Seen some reports about how Emery still rates him highly & wants him to get more first team experience as he won’t be a guaranteed starter under him. He’s going straight into the starting lineup for Fullham’s opener Sat.
Agree that it’s a strange move. And what of our HG quota with potentially Ramsey, Welbeck, and Jenkinson being sold, and Macey on loan now.
AMN, Nekitah, and Nelson would count as under 21 players but we would only be left with Martinez, Holding, Iwobi, Bellerin. That’s 4 out of 8 required spots?! Bringing in Vida as a CB doesn’t help those numbers. Would assume the club has a plan for this but who knows at this point?
It’s a crazy Tuesday. Let’s set aside for a brief moment Chambers, Vida (who would buy the shirt of a guy who looks like an extra from a zombie movie) the Kroenke news and Dembele rumours for a minute.
One interesting bit of transfer news is Chelsea chasing Kovacic. That means no Ramsey. And I think that the Croatian — who is a superbly skilled midfielder and has tremendous ferrying skills — has the potential to be a better player than our Welshman. The only reason we didnt see him featuring for Croatia are Modric, Rakitic and lack of game time at Madrid.
Ok, set aside done, let’s talk Kroenke. No one thinks that a full takeover is good for AFC. It feels like a funeral in goonerland. Only the (long long shot) arrival of Dembele would improve the mood.
No one thinks that a full takeover BY KROENKE is good for AFC. A lot of people who are complaining about this really wanted Usmanov because they thought he’s going to be like Abramovich (despite him never having said so. In fact, the opposite)
I’m not too concerned about it. It doesn’t change much. Maybe he now takes money out of the club. But he could have done that anyway and there’s nothing we could have done about it. Hey, maybe he puts in money when needed. (Hah!) My guess is, we’re going to keep on keeping on. If there’s an opportunity for Dembele, maybe we spend our (in)famous cash reserves and buy him as a ‘statement’. Unlikely though.
Also, Ramsey to Real Madrid? No idea how Lopetegui plays but I could definitely see him fit better at Real Madrid than at Barcelona. Still sticking to my prediction that he’s staying.
Hey look, if he gets the opportunity for a Real Madrid career progression, I’d say fair enough, and good luck to him. I cant see it, though, not with Casemiro (hold), Kroos (conduct), Modric (ferry). And unless they sell Kovacic, they have a fantastic midfielder sitting on their bench. The only way Ramsey comes in is if Madrid sells one or both of their Croatians. And if it’s Kovacic, he’s not displacing any of Modric, Kroos or Casemiro from the starting XI. Ramsey would probably find himself in exactly the position that Gareth Bale is in now.
You mean was in under Zidane. With Ronaldo and Zidane both gone, Bale will be first choice IF he can stay fit.
Being the ‘6th man’ for Real Madrid in midfield may not be the worst thing for Ramsey with his own fitness issues and as he settles in. He may not be as technical as any of them, but he can hold his own, and with Ronaldo gone, Real need goals. Ramsey can give them 10-15 goals from midfield if he’s used correctly.
Btw, not that it determines anything, but Ramsey’s wife is pregnant with twins. Is he really looking for a change of scenery at this point? Giroud decided to stay in London for similar reasons. Of course he could run down his contract and move next year.