The League Cup run is over for Arsenal. Wembley Wanderers beat us 2-0 on a night when all things considered the score could have easily been 2-2. They scored both of their clear-cut chances and Arsenal missed all of theirs. It was as simple as that.
Except not as simple as that. Let’s try to be fair to the entire story for a second. In the first minute of play, Nacho Monreal was clearly held by the arm for Mkhitaryan’s header. That probably should have been a penalty. And later in that same first half, Mkhitaryan was scythed down in the box by Lucas, as clear a foul as I have ever seen. Even the “he won the ball” folks have to admit that Moura didn’t win the ball, that his “tackle” was about waist high, and that he got nothing but Mkhi’s shin.
And for their 2nd goal Dele Alli was offside.
I don’t want to complain about the officials, those of you who know me know that I’m not one to have a go at the officials. That said, they (especially Jon Moss) were crap. But officiating in England, especially in cup games where the referees are clearly given a directive to “let them get on with it”, is often crap. And if you were thinking that VAR would save us from the crap officials, VAR was supposedly in use in this match, and it didn’t save us. Probably because the same crap officials who are on the pitch are in the VAR room.
But even without VAR and the officiating decisions, Arsenal should have scored more than a few goals in this game. The biggest chance of the first half fell to Mkhitaryan. A fabulous backheel by Ramsey set the Armenian free in the box and unfortunately, he panicked a bit and shot right at the keeper.
Ramsey had a shot set up by Iwobi, who was industrious in the first half, which flashed just wide. And Ramsey had a glorious chance in the 41st minute when Auba closed down on the keeper forcing a botched clearance which Ramsey should have had a shot from, but instead elected to backheel into the defenders. And Lacazette hit the post in the second half, after a well-worked pass and move by Aubameyang and Monreal.
So, yeah, I mean, we just didn’t finish. Which is going to happen some nights. I’ve already warned you a million times that this is especially the case with Aubameyang. He’s wasteful in front of goal. But so is Mkhitaryan. And Ramsey. And even Lacazette.
One thing that struck me in this match, however, was the visceral Iwobi hate. I’m not the biggest Iwobi fan on the planet and I understand why people don’t like him – because he tries too hard some times. After his failed World Cup campaign, which followed on one of his worst ever Arsenal seasons, I felt like his Arsenal time was coming to an end.
But right out the games, he had a goal and two assists for Arsenal and it was clear to me that Emery has found a way to use him this season. This newfound position doesn’t always show up in the gross stats – like assists and goals – but he’s been impressive to me in his ability to get the ball into the final third and set up the player who is making the assist.
I’m not a “pre-assist” guy, I barely like assists as a stat (because they are often just the last guy to make a pass, intentional or not) so, I’m not making a case for Iwobi based on “pre-assists”. But my observation is that Iwobi is often there, intentionally making that througball pass to the overlapping fullback, so that they can cross for the assist. It’s a pattern of play that I have jokingly referred to as “Emeryball” but all jokes aside, that’s how Unai Emery wants his team to play and Iwobi has been a big part of that. It was that exact defense-splitting pass which set up Lacazette for the equalizing goal against Liverpool.
But yesterday, every time he lost the ball on a counter attack, Arsenal fans rained down hatred on him. Even though he was easily the best player on the pitch up to that point. Things got so weird on twitter that some people blamed him for the Spurs first goal.
I get it, I really do. He’s Arsenal most dispossessed player, 2.1 times per game and has the most “loose touch” of any player, losing the ball an additional 2.4 times per game. He also is Arsenal’s only player who attempts to dribble (in the Premier League, the young guys in the Europa League go nuts, and I LOVE IT) but is about a 50% dribbler so that also means he’s losing the ball. And against Spurs, he was the most profligate player, losing the ball 8 times in just 58 minutes.
But blaming him for the first goal is a new level of weird. Hey, I get frustrated when players like Ozil turn the ball over, then stand around with their hands on their hips before putting on a good show of pretending to track back. And Iwobi even had one of those yesterday – when Sissoko just kind of walked through the Arsenal midfield and Iwobi even at one point stopped before realizing that Sissoko was his man. If Sissoko wasn’t a joke finisher, they could have scored.
So, I get it. I do. But they scored from a throw by the keeper. And I don’t care what happened to get the ball into their keeper’s hands. If they score off a keeper throw, your defense and midfield have done something terribly wrong. Which is what happened. Monreal was sleeping. Cech looks old and tired. Sokratis didn’t clear. They scored.
And while I was frustrated with Iwobi trying too hard yesterday, and losing the ball in the defense, when you watch that particular play over again, Auba loops up a weird pass to Iwobi, who needs an extra touch to control. In the moment it takes him to get control, Danny Rose runs over and just literally steps on Iwobi’s ankle. They got away with these kinds of snide fouls all game – and as I said above I’m not complaining about the officials. But yes, Iwobi booted the ball to the keeper. Let’s be generous and say it was a shot?
But that goal still isn’t his fault.
Maybe he’s not good enough to be at Arsenal. He frustrates me and I certainly won’t complain if Arsenal go out and buy some top talent to play in midfield/forward. But blaming him for that goal was really strange.
What I wonder is if there isn’t a bit more criticism sent his way because of the Ozil stuff? I know that Ozil has his ardent supporters and I think the situation with him at the club has become untenable which is driving them crazy.
Yesterday, Emery was clearly annoyed at having to answer questions about Ozil and why Ozil didn’t play. And looking at the fixtures list, Ozil has been benched twice, dropped from the squad 7 times, and sat out with back trouble an additional three matches. I’m reticent to make any proclamations about Ozil and his future at Arsenal but I’m comfortable saying that there is certainly something going on. And from my perspective it looks like a good old fashioned “star/manager” showdown.
How he handled that at PSG with Neymar was to have a long “heart-to-heart”. How he will handle this with Özil is going to be telling in terms of both men’s future at the club.
Anyway, it’s just the League Cup. Not a competition that matters to big clubs. Only something that guys like Jose Mourinho and clubs like the Wembley Wanderers celebrate.
Plus, I mean, this is a match in which Arsenal played a CM as a CB, a CB who is returning from Achilles surgery, a LB who is not first choice, a RB who is not first choice, and a keeper who is clearly past his sell-by date. Emery has a lot of work to do with the regular first team starters, and clearly even more to do with the backups. Time to move forward and take on Burnley this weekend.
Sources: Transfermarkt, WhoScored.com
I’m curious how the team will respond the next couple of weeks because we seemed tired and I get the impression Emery is not a fan of quite a few players in the squad that he feels forced to play now with injuries and fixture congestion. Against Southampton I saw Emery furious with AMN a couple of times because AMN wasn’t moving and providing options. I’m not sure if he would have played AMN if Lichtsteiner were available. I think Emery has completely written off Elneny and Ozil. He’s giving Cech token games now, but Cech is done. I think he likes Ramsey for certain situations, but the club has written him off.
I’m really curious what happens the next couple of weeks and what Sven and Raul decide to do in January… if anything.
As I said on the last post – if Rabiot is getting benched at PSG, offer a straight swap for Ozil. Rabiot will come in at 180-200k/week, 2/3 of what Ozil is making and we get a 23 year old that, from what I understand, enjoyed playing for Emery. A midfield three with Rabiot, Torreira and Xhaka is practically a carbon copy of Rabiot, Veratti and Motta.
I like it, Jack. Even if PSG doesn’t take Ozil (one of the only teams who could do so) adding Rabiot would be a coup. He would be a substantial upgrade over the promising but callow and lightweight Guendouzi. He probably has his sights a bit higher than us though.
I like Guendouzi too. And I like AMN… in the middle. Adding Rabiot would, to me, just solidify the midfield corps for the next few years and we can focus on upgrading the CBs. It’s become clear that whether through purchase or development, we need a stud at the back, desperately.
Looks like Ozil, Elneny, Kos, Monreal, Cech are clearly not his first choices.
Hesitant to include AMN and even to an extent Nketiah yet. If they show improvement/football intelligence (for the lack of a better word) in training they will be involved more. Both have good pace and workrate which seems to be the basic standards of a ‘Emery type’ player.
I like this idea, Jack!
That’s a really bad idea, especially at £180k a week. Rabiot has an attitude issue. See what happened with the France team in the summer. And he’s an overrated player (his stats are not impressive). The Arsenal staff could easily find a better player than Rabiot for much less than that. Remember, Torreira only earns £50k a week.
Nah, what could go wrong? He likes Emery and he looks like Justin Trudeau!
Yeah, I see this as an “Alexis for Mkhi” swap all over again. Rabiot has an atrocious attitude and he’s basically like Guendouzi but without the defense.
No thanks.
I would take this swap in a heart beat
I take it the Iwobi hate was on Twitter? I’m so glad I’m not following those ridiculous fringe opinions any more. They don’t represent Arsenal fans and they don’t represent solid judgment or even reasonable logic. There’s this weird thing where fans need an individual to scapegoat after a loss and I see it all sports, and I don’t even think it’s limited to sports. It somehow makes it easier to process and move on to say individual XYZ is to blame instead of trying to understand the complexities of systems and situations and giving appropriate credence to probability and chance in all outcomes. Iwobi is only the latest victim and he won’t be the last. But I agree with you, he is a strange choice for scapegoating. I thought he was our only consistent source of danger against their defense after they got back and got set, and we were totally toothless in the final 3rd after he was withdrawn.
Yes there were lots of mitigating circumstances in this loss. Mostly though I thought they were just a better team from front to back, a better balanced team and one that looked more cohesive. They probably have more attacking talent as well. As Emery pointed out in his post-game, this Spurs team is further along in their progression than Arsenal at this point and it showed. I thought we put in a pretty good performance overall but fell victim to two identical situations: quick, long goal kicks (which were extremely accurate, ups to Gazzaniga for that) followed by blown offside traps. I thought Xhaka did well overall and that kind of rapid decision making, whether to hold or to go in that split second is something even seasoned CB’s get wrong from time to time.
The Ozil thing is getting more and more worrisome. We need him fit and firing if we are to finish top 4, it’s that simple in my opinion. This team doesn’t have enough creativity without him. The catch 22 is that with him, the team doesn’t have enough energy and it’s clear which of those two things Emery prizes. If he doesn’t play on Saturday against “Deep Block Burnley” that I think really would be the deathknell for his Arsenal career under Emery.
Saying that twitter is one thing only is like saying that only corrupt people live in New York, based on personal disdain of Trump. There is a lot of thoughtful stuff there. Let’s leave out folks I follow like David Frum. 7am, Yankee Gooner and Tim Stillman are hardly fringe spewers.
On Iwobi, the loud rah-rah gooners love a scapegoat. I remember the crowd getting on Ramsey’s back 5/6 years ago for Hollywood balling. It wasn’t pleasant. BTW, I thought the backheel in a crowd was the wrong option (maybe he was still thinking about the successful one to Mhki) but to me Spurs defenders had already closed the door. Alderweireld was magnificent, and the best player in the game.
Tim makes a good point about Auba’s pass to iwobi. Sometimes I think we overplay. A flick or trick where the simple ball — or holding it up — would be better. Auba guilty on that occasion. Agree with Doc, they were better back to front, and Gazzaniga looks a better keeper than Lloris, imo.
Im having some issues with Emery’s rotation decisions. Laca starts a dead rubber in the Europa league, but is on the bench against Southampton. Give him a start against Saints or Spurs. Give Auba a rest. He looks beat. And we cant play Torreira every game. We’re going to lose him for 2 months if we keep working him so hard. Emery talks about respecting competitions by playing as strong a team as possible every time. But the competition he needs to acknowledge is the Premier League. Especially over the festive period.
***YankeeGunner, not Yankee Gooner. Look, my American friends for the last time… gunners are players, gooners are supporters. Thank you 🙂
I know, you’d think they’d get it. After all, no one in America goes around saying they are a Seahawk or a Dolphin (though I guess a fair number claim to be a Brown).
And Trump supporters at MAGA rallies are goners
Sure, there are more reasonable voices on Twitter, just like there are reasonable voices on Fox News from time to time but nobody cares because the platform is defined by something else entirely. The viewers go to Fox News for a specific kind of content and that applies to CNN, BBC, and Twitter as well. When you go there, you know what you’re going to get. Even the moderates recirculate fringe ideas because fringe ideas are what Twitter is built to perpetuate with its speciality for instant reactions and short character counts. It’s not a forum designed for temperate discussion. Fringe ideas begin to seem mainstream very quickly because stupid ideas are preferentially recirculated: everyone says retweets are not endorsements but that’s precisely what you do when you give a dumb idea more visibility. People begin to think it’s more pervasive than it really is and suddenly we’re having a conversation about something that never deserved the light of day, then flaming each other over it, no matter how subtly or cleverly. That’s twitter. It’s fun but it’s also toxic.
What I found while I was following football related accounts on twitter is that I would get mad every time I logged in because no matter how carefully I tried to pick the folks I followed, they were interacting with the same types that I was desperately trying to avoid and thus it was just being removed by a very thin degree of separation. Moreover, even normally very thoughtful folks kind of adapt to the culture and become a different version of themselves, especially when disagreed with, more spiky, more obdurate. Owners of very popular accounts say the only way to survive on twitter is to never check your mentions. That says everything about the platform, IMO.
Doc, you can’t avoid the (so-called) riff-raff. On twitter, on the New York subway, or in real life. If you try to, they’ll only spoli your enjoyment of an overall good thing. Dont go into Central Park at midnight. Instead, enjoy it in the afternoon. Instead of getting angry over some silliness someone writes, best to glory in the good stuff. I find Tim’s play by play tweets hugely entertaining, for example.
And hey, I used to work for the BBC. The beeb isnt perfect, but no one comes to it for rabid, pre-conceived, uber-partisan, political viewpoints. Fox is a pox. It has done more than any American institution I can think of damage race relations, bipartisanship, comity and fact-based reporting and absorption of information. Never the twain shall meet, Fox and the beeb. In fact, UK regulators found Fox too extreme for UK audiences — which is saying something given the dismal standards of Murdoch’s The Sun.
The Iwobi hate came from major bloggers/vloggers/podders.
An astute observation about humans needing to simplify things rather than attempting to really understand them. I believe conspiracy theories are another phenomenon explained by this odd tendency.
Heart-to-heart with Neymar? Lol… Emery was given no choice. Adjust to Neymar or we have to look for another guy. Ozil looks slightly different. May be he feels his voice is louder here and feels he has the majority of players backing (many new faces here). Best is to win the games and give the journos something to talk about. One thing the English press (not all) do when teams lose is to look into anything other than the performance on the pitch.
(Re-posting from last thread. Sorry Timothy)
We need other players besides our 2 elite strikers to reliably supply goals. When they are not firing, you need your goalscoring wide players — Iwobi and Mkhitaryan — to step up. Neither is up to the task. Mhki gets into good goalscoring positions, but misses far more than he scores. Yesterday against Spurs, he needed something likeThierry’s trademark curl. Dion Dublin on TV commentary described it as one of the worst 1v1 attempts he’s seen. Gazzaniga was excellent, but the shot was 2 feet to his right at saving height. His save from Ramsey’s snapshot WAS something special.
Against United, Mhki skied over from right under the bar. Against Chelsea, he skied one over the bar from the penalty spot. Yes he got 2 good goals against the Saints, so it feels a bit uncharitable to criticise him, but do a google search “Mkhitaryan miss”. He’d been doing this for a long time. He’s nudging 30. He’s not going to become more efficient. Iwobi? Said enough.
We miss Welbeck really badly. He was doing an outstanding job supplementing the main frontmen. Ozil is a really smart taker of goalscoring opportunities, so his rift with the coach is denying us goals. Whatever the coach thinks of his lack of contribution other areas, he’s losing goals and creativity. I really wish that Mesut had helped his cause with a more committed effort after giving away the ball against Southampton. Ramsey can get you goals too, and was unlucky not to score yesterday, but he’s not getting consistent minutes. It leaves they guys who are getting those minutes with the responsibility, and they’re not taking it.
Ozil can score but he’s a passenger defensively. I don’t care much for Mhyk, but I will say he does get back as does Iwobi. Emery wants more emphasis on effort and on a team that still cannot defend well, do we want one less defender out there?
Iwobi didnt exactly cover himself in glory in tracking the run of the Southampton player who crossed for their 2nd goal. Neither did Guendouzi. And oh, I’ve called out Mesut many times for his lack of defence. Just standing there after losing the ball against Saints (something that led to their winning goal) was a particularly egregious example of that.
The level of players like Iwobi and Guendouzi has noticeably dropped in recent games. Tiredness?
Iwobi is a defensive liability, I’m afraid. Certainly no better than Ozil.
Ozil doesn’t even attempt to run back while Iwobi does an Elneny after losing the ball 😀
I’m not so sure about that, Tim. Have a look at this Squawka comparison:
http://www.squawka.com/en/comparison-matrix?c=p7916e190423,p7910e190423&s=401,402,403,404,405,406,407,409,410
I’m not sure I agree with that either Tim. Certainly Iwobi hasn’t shown the same defensive workrate as Mkhitariyan, but I know I’ve seen him tackle more than Özil, and I’ve seen him track back, sometimes.
What we call “tackles” are often broken into four categories. Here are each player’s p90 stats in those categories;
Iwobi: Tackles, 1.2; Was dribbled, 1; INT, 0.6; Blocks, 1.1 – Total positive: 2.9
Ozil: Tackles, 0.9; Was Dribbled, 0.4; INT, 0.1; Blocks, 0.5 – Total positive: 1.4
So, yes, Iwobi does “tackle more” but he has the same propensity to quit on defensive plays as Ozil/Ramsey/Xhaka
“Dion Dublin on TV commentary described it as one of the worst 1v1 attempts he’s seen”
It was bad but I’ve seen way worse.
Besides, unlike the two Tottenham goals where both players ran on to the ball with a clear vision of the last defender and had time to pick their options, Mhki had every right to expect one of the defenders to make a last ditch tackle. Not realizing of course that they all stayed frozen stiff behind the play.
What were the chances Arsenal getting the better of Chelsea over two legs and City in the final ?
Pretty slim I’d say.
Emery might’ve wanted to win this game but I’m glad we lost and are out of the Mickey Mouse Cup.
I’ll never forget the expression on Klopp’s face when in his post game presser after the first leg of the league cup semifinal against Stoke in his first Liverpool season someone had asked him about the second leg.
“There’s a second leg?” Said klopp.
Arsenal’s chances of making top four just went up by a few ticks.
I’m not sure about that. Even when our top players get a week between games, they look leggy and out of sorts, while Spurs seem to be able to play every three days without noticeable effect to any of their players (who, unlike ours, also never get injured for some reason). As far as I’m concerned, you can call 3rd, 4th, and 5th right now, and it’s Chelsea, Spurs, and Arsenal alllll daaaaaaay looooooooong. Actually, I’m not certain about 5th. If only Mourinho was still in the job!
Solskjaer isn’t much of an upgrade. I think they’ll get some “new manager bounce” from the relief of not dealing with Mou and then quickly return to form. I honestly think that Man U team is just poorly constructed. So is ours but in a head to head with Emery and Solskjaer I think the edge goes to Unai.
You’re preaching to the choir brother.
I’ve had Arsenal in fifth since day one of the season , but those extra two games in February ( is it) wouldn’t have helped the league standings for sure.
I remember the day Emery was appointed, an article went up on the Guardian (think it was Jonathan Wilson) that included a line predicting Ozil would be the Oil in the new waters. And so it has come to pass.
At this point, I’d be fine with him leaving in January. The sooner we replace him with someone who can further The Process the better. Of course, I’m at a loss to come up with a club who’d take him on those wages, particularly at his age and with questions over his form…
I too was very worried about this since the beginning of the season. In Europe it would have to be a club who are so dominant domestically that they don’t have to worry about his lack of defensive contribution and have unlimited funds to swallow his mammoth wages which would not be commensurate with a projected reserve role. This season, that’s really only PSG, Barcelona or Juventus. I would have said Real Madrid or Bayern except neither club is actually winning their league right now and Ozil would never go to Bayern, he burned too many bridges in Germany and particularly with that hierarchy. PSG’s system also doesn’t use a #10 and they don’t need him to win the league, but maybe they’ll see him as a piece that could help their cause in the UCL. He doesn’t seem like Tuchel’s type of player though. Madrid might be a reasonable landing spot for him but they need to figure out who their manager will be, I don’t think they will buy any players before that. Juventus are similar to PSG, they already have a dominant squad but might consider padding the roster with Ozil if the deal is sweet enough. I think Ozil would fit well in Italian football actually.
A Chinese club might be another possibility but he might reject that for PR reasons, it would be a big step down for him and his image would take a big blow from that.
I think China is out, too many marketing opportunities would be lost unless Adidas tells him it would be good for selling shoes in Asia.
Inter want a marquis signing and have been linked.
I think the wages are a non-factor if he goes for basically free – what you would have paid in a transfer for him (what’s his worth these days… 45m?) and instead pay him in salary it’s a wash. It’s Arsenal that lose because once again we’re losing a player for nothing.
That’s why I will circle back and say we can do another Sanchez-Mhyki deal here, except the roles of the clubs are reversed. This time we are the club with a want-away star on big wages and long term contract, and PSG are the club about to lose Rabiot for nothing. Supposedly he wants to go to Barca… but we can match Barca’s wages, no question.
That’s a good reminder, Jack, about how to get around the wage issue in terms of a transfer. Cheers.
Yeah, Juventus is a good shout. I bet Ronaldo would like to play with him again! Inter also keeps popping up in the rumor mill. Agree that Italian football might suit him nicely.
I watched Inter a couple of times recently, they do actually play with a #10 type of player behind Icardi in a 4-4-1-1, a role that would suit Mesut. That’s a bit of a weak spot for Inter right now as well, when I watched them it was Nainngolan and Borja Valero playing in the hole, he would certainly be a more natural fit there than either of those two and they have a very hard working midfield unit already.
OK… so would they swap us any player? Because they’re never going to pay a transfer fee AND his salary. I don’t see many that they’d want to let go and we’d want. Miranda maybe, and that wouldn’t be great for our average age.
Dunno Jack. Doubt they would consider weakening themselves elsewhere to get Ozil in case he doesn’t pan out, and I don’t know enough about Miranda to know if he would be an upgrade over what we already have.
Chambers would be playing now if he had stayed.
“And Iwobi even had one of those yesterday – when Sissoko just kind of walked through the Arsenal midfield and Iwobi even at one point stopped before realizing that Sissoko was his man. If Sissoko wasn’t a joke finisher, they could have scored. ”
That’s the problem here. It’s not just the lack of end product or the high turnover rate. Iwobi simply doesn’t work his socks off. Iwobi always has weaker defensive stats than Mkhitaryan. When Oxlade-Chamberlain was still at the club, fans were not angry with his lack of end product or his turnovers because the Ox would always put in a shift.
I see Iwobi’s defensive predilections the same way I see Ramsey’s-hes a capable defender, he has the motor to defend, but he’ll occasionally just switch off and not track back, not fight for possession when he turns the ball over. It seems to happen if he’s tired or has been doing a lot of running in attack. Last season he was terrible at that. He’s looked better under Emery. Ozil, OTOH, has never looked remotely interested in contributing anything defensively, which I suspect is a lingering consequence of Wenger having asked nothing of him in defense.
It’s easy to forget how good and effective Iwobi was in the first few months of the season. He is key to the left-sided buildup, and has established a very productive partnership with Kolasinac. Ive seen a stat floating about where he’s 4th in Europe for key passes, 2nd best in EPL after David Silva.
https://www.konbini.com/ng/lifestyle/alex-iwobi-is-reportedly-europes-fourth-best-passer-this-season/
But he’s been poor for 4 or 5 straight games now. And to me he looks a bit heavier, his runs look more laboured and ponderous, and he’s not getting about the pitch as much as he did before. And from watching games, he’s a so-so tracker-backer and, for a guy his size, an oddly un-assertive tackler. But when he’s on his game and running at defences and into the box, he’s a handful. I sometimes think that if he went full-bore instead if checking, he’d get penalties. Even when having a bad game, he can find Monreal on the overlap, like he did for Nacho’s cross to Mhki fora goal.
My issue with him is that either he isn’t working hard in practice on his shooting, or he’ll never be a good one. He really sucks at it, to a degree that’s inexcusable for a forward play at a major club. There’s a story of some guy from the NBA wanting the improve his shooting, so he turns up like 3 or 4 hours early; only find Kobe Bryant, an already great player, already there doing the same. Same with Ronaldo C, same with Beckham. They were obsessive practicers. I’ve never been to the Arsenal training ground, but I’d be surprised if Iwobi puts in the time. His shooting is rank awful.
But there is much about his game to like. Someone mentioned Ox, I’ll mention Gnabry. Two young players we should have busted a gut to keep (I was wrong about Ox). But we have Reiss Nelson coming back.
I think it’s a combination of heavy minutes for the first time in his career and opponents getting better intel on him. You see this with rookies in other sports, they fade down the stretch because they’re not used to the grind and defenders take away the things they like to do.
The real issue is not Iwobi, it’s that we have to rely so much on him. At this point in his career he should be a part time impact player, not an automatic starter. A club like Arsenal should have more options but nobody else among the forwards can carry the ball between the lines with speed and strength, so he has to play. Yes, Oxlade-Chamberlain would be playing for us right now as well and he would make a good platoon option with Iwobi out there. Reiss may be too young for the PL but he would give us another option off the bench that we don’t have right now. I’m not optimistic that we’ll sign any impact player in January. The only solution is that Ozil and Ramsey have to give us quality minutes and end product in those AM positions until the end of the season.
That Konbini piece is misleading. They focus on a specific type of pass: pass into the area from open play. It’s a less telling stat than an assist. It’s no coincidence if Hazard leads the PL with 9 assists while Iwobi only has 2 assists and is even behind Ramsey (6) and Bellerin (4).
And even if we look at key passes in general, Iwobi is miles behind the best passers in the PL: Hazard 2.9 key passes per PL game this season according to whoscored.com, David Silva 2.6, Eriksen 1.9, Iwobi 0.6. The only positive of the metric used by Konbini is that it eliminates key passes from set pieces, used by players like Xhaka to inflate their offensive stats.
Similar results with the Squawka matrix. For some reason, David Silva doesn’t come up in the results when I do a search, so I used Bernardo Silva instead. Hazard 2.91 chances and 0.55 assist created from open play per 90 minutes in the PL this season, Eriksen 1.56 chances and 0.31 assist from open play per 90, Bernardo Silva 1.82 chances and 0.21 assist, Iwobi 0.74 and 0.11 assist.
I wonder if the “tactical reason” that kept Ozil out of the game is an agreement that’s already in place to sell him in January, provided he isn’t injured. He’s been kept/skipping the games VS aggressive/ish teams recently
Also, can we talk about this list for a second?
https://www.theguardian.com/football/ng-interactive/2018/dec/18/the-100-best-male-footballers-in-the-world-2018-nos-100-71
I don’t care about the top 10, everyone can agree on that more or less. What I want to know is, why is every Croatian or French or English player who was half decent in the world cup in the top 100? How is Jordan Pickford #62? De Ligt and De Jong are already better than Nabil Fekir and Mesut Ozil? Is Gabriel Jesus really a top 100 player when he doesn’t even start for his club? Is N’Golo Kante really no longer a top 100 player after being #17 last year (but Marcos Alonso is)? Would anyone take Edin Dzeko or Romelu Lukaku or Mauro Icardi over Aubameyang? Because they are all ahead of him on this list. I would even take Lacazette over those three strikers and he doesn’t make the list at all. Would anyone think Keylor Navas was a top 100 player if he didn’t play for Madrid? Giroud at 97?
I have so many questions about this list. Mostly, why don’t they compile it based at least partly on metrics instead of only subjective opinions?
“Mostly, why don’t they compile it based at least partly on metrics instead of only subjective opinions?”
To steal a line from “Babe”, because that’s the way things are. [A line chased by “‘The way things are’ stinks!”]
It’s essentially one of those award ceremonies, the kind where on opinion Messi is only the 5th best player in the world because it was a World Cup year (the winners in that played no more than 7 games. 7 games in an entire year carrying that much weight for an individual award covering the entire year’s play). Or the other year Messi almost certainly beat Ronaldo to the Ballon d’Or, until Ronaldo scored in a couple of World Cup qualifying playoffs (literally scored in TWO matches against Sweden) and Blatter reopened the voting – which Ronaldo then won. Or the year a semi-retired Giggs was voted PFA player of the year for simply existing. The list goes on.
Emery is to be blamed for the loss and that’s it, except he had some weird reason to lose. There’s no better opportunity to actually play a youthful defender on form, and sub on Koscielny in the 2nd half if we had the game won already. It’s worse than Wenger’s Elneny trick from last season. I guess Emery is human and he is prone to error, but I have preferred a 4-2-3-1 with Medley/Pleguezuelo pairing Sokratis at CB, while AMN and Jenkinson played as FBs. Xhaka and Torreira in midfield and the front 4 filled like it was. It was a great opportunity to increase our defensive quota from the academy in a high stakes match, which was also a north London derby and it would have helped us and any chosen youngster to step up and provide cover until January’s transfer window, but Emery contrived to play Xhaka at CB.