Apologies for the title. Or not. HAHAHAHA.
Rapid Wien rotated their starting squad heavily for this match. Dropping regular starters Taxi (who’d scored against Arsenal in the first meeting) Knasmullner, Kara, Stojkovic, Barac, and Grahovac, Rapid looked like a side that struggled for cohesion and energy and Arsenal picked them apart with relative ease showcasing what players like Nketiah, Maitland-Niles, and Lacazette can do when they are given time, space, and the ball in the middle of the park.
This game felt odd. It felt like a match in which Rapid were not there at times. Like there was no resistance to what Arsenal were trying to do. That wasn’t the case early on. Rapid did pressure Arsenal in midfield, causing several annoying turnovers and bad passes but Lacazette cropped up with a 30 yard cannonball and that seemed to kill the game off.
I don’t want to ignore that goal. It was wicked, venomous, dipping, swerving, and all of those adjectives. I nearly forgot “fun”: it was also a fun goal to watch. I applaud Arsenal players picking the ball up 40 yards from goal, running at the defense 10 yards and unleashing one. I don’t mind right now if that’s a low percentage shot. At this point, if we get the ball into the final third I say shoot as soon as you can! Don’t look for another pass!
Rapid still seemed interested in the match (a bit) until Pablo Mari cropped up with a perfectly swiped header from near post to far post off a corner delivery by Reiss Nelson. But it was after that goal when I felt Rapid just caved in to the game. It was a reserve team who knew they were out of the Europa League.
Rapid attempted just 90 pressures last night, with just 10 in our final third. That’s the 2nd fewest number of pressures against Arsenal in a match this season. And Rapid only won 17 of those pressures, the fewest pressure regains against Arsenal this season.
Rapid only won 2 of their 13 tackles against dribbles, which is the lowest of any club this season. They did attempt 20 tackles, third highest of any side against Arsenal this season – in fact the top three “most tackles against Arsenal this season” go to Dundalk, Molde, and Rapid. But in that first match against Arsenal, Rapid won 10/15 tackles overall and 9/18 tackles against dribbles. A contrast to the 7/20 tackles last night and 2/13 against dribbles.
And what’s very odd is that Rapid attempted 168 pressures against Arsenal in the first meeting with 52 pressure regains. Both of those were the most of any team so far this season. One of their high pressures led to their goal. So, this team has it in them and their coach knows how and what to do to. They just didn’t do it last night.
And if you look at all of the possessions regained by Rapid (through pressures, tackles, and interceptions) last night they only made 32 total and in the first meeting they had 74.
And as if that wasn’t enough…
Progressive passing distances so far this season (in order):
Rapid Wien (last night) – 3344
Rapid Wien – 3032
Wham – 3025
Molde – 2976
Molde – 2944
Sheffield Utd – 2787
Fulham – 2779
Dundalk – 2749
Arsenal won every one of those matches.
A lot of the players looked like they could tell that Rapid weren’t up for the game. Pepe was playing cat and mouse with defenders. You will see various dribble stats out there but StatsBomb (via fbref.com) had him winning 5/8 with 2 nutmegs. Those are his only two megs this season; he had 6 last season.
Meanwhile, not showing up on the stats sheet (because – I think – no one tried to tackle him) Ainsley Maitland-Niles added “legs” to Arsenal’s midfield and in my favorite moment of the game, collected from Reiss, slalomed through a bunch of Wieners, dropped the keeper with a slight feint, and then tried to chip him. He missed but I have to applaud his audacity!
By the way the “leggs” thing comes from Maitland-Niles’ post-match interview. When asked what he added to the midfield he said “leggs” which was probably an unintentional swipe at some of his less mobile teammates.
He was more mobile, though. Picking the ball up in spaces far higher up the pitch than we are used to seeing. (Passmap via Scott Willis aka @oh_that_crab on twitter)
Nketiah and Maitland-Niles occupied the same passing space and Lacazette was just near them. This is contrasted to the match against Leicester:
There you can see three CMs all far too deep and no one on the right (Willian coming in, Nketiah too).
Obviously the issue here is that in the match against Wien, we were playing against a team who weren’t playing with their best/fastest attackers and against Leicester there was much more threat. So, leaving Thomas alone against Leicester might have been something of a “very Wenger high line” tactic. But there is a clear problem with the Arsenal midfield and has been for years.
At this point I used to opine about how the fans will react to this game. I would probably caution against “hype.” But I’m tired of all that. If you feel like hyping something, well, go for it. These are your mental attention points. Spend them however you want.
Overall, it was a fun match to watch. I love seeing youngsters come on and play well. And even moreso, I love seeing Arsenal players having fun. Who knows how Spurs will play this weekend? Who knows how Arsenal will set up? Maybe good, maybe bad luck. You never know what will happen. It’s football.
A fun match without much consequences, but the high-scoring first half was ruined by all the buffering and audio issues on CBS All Access (here in the USA).
The Europa group stage has definitely contained most of the “fun” matches this season. Great to see these young men showing their talent. What it all means, only time will tell. We’ve had plenty of success in European group stages with nothing to show for it at the end.
I hope the final Euro group match against Dundalk will be equally fun because I don’t think S#$s on Sunday will contain much fun factor for those of us watch through their fingers behind the sofa.
LLoris, Kane and Lamela are injury doubts but they’ll still have available plenty of bodies capable of doing damage to us, including Son. And there’s Mourinho. There’s always Mourinho to be our nemesis after Fergie’s retirement. And I haven’t stopped hating him. Not one bit.
I’d guess Mou is playing mind games relative to Kane. I’d put 10 down that he starts. The more interesting question… is Arteta doing the same with Partey?
Just to be clear I definatley haven’t been lurking for years waiting for a good performance from AMN in midfield to ingore all of his other performances/career trajectory only to jump back into your comments section just to say ‘I told you So’ only to then slink back off into the night when he no longer plays in midfield. Because nowhere on the internet is anyone ever that petty…..ever. 🙂
lol
it really wasn’t a good performance, it was against the backups from a farmer’s league team, they had given up and put zero pressure on him, and he’s nowhere near the level we need from a b2b MFer.
but I do really like him as a person
Maybe Partey’s presence can level him up a bit
Look, I just think he’s nowhere near the technical level that is needed at Arsenal.
He’s definitely fast and I like his passion for the club and audacity. But he has a tendency to have a mixture of both crazy bad touch and sometimes really good touch. And he is often out of ideas in the final third and just stands around doing nothing. In short, he’s a frustrating mixture of great stuff and terrible stuff.
Look at the almost no pressure game against Rapid this week: when they applied pressure early in the game he made a lot of notable errors and got caught on the ball. He also didn’t seem to do much for huge portions of the game. He ran around a lot but for most of the game he went missing. And he was literally our worst defender on the pitch: he made no tackles, interceptions, or blocks and virtually no pressures. And worst of all, his weird positioning exposed Elneny multiple times. Against a team that pressures? They would target him and he would be badly exposed I think.
That said, he also made an incredible slaloming run through the middle of the bad guys which he capped off with a chipped shot. I know he assisted ESR’s goal but that was my favorite move of the game.
But ultimately with him there are just a lot of questions. Can he take control of a game? Demand the ball? Shield possession? Wiggle out of pressure? Read the game and defend without having to sprint back? Play long raking passes? Splitting balls? I don’t see any of that from him. At least not consistently. What he does give is some speed, a lot of versatility, and the occasional moment of brilliance. That is the perfect recipe for a backup on a big team like Arsenal. That is NOT an insult. He’s still in the top 5% of all players in the League! Just not the top 1-2%.
The big issue is that he may actually be better than Xhaka in a lot of ways. Certainly not in the long, raking pass, way. But Xhaka has had the ball taken away from him by Arteta because Arteta realized that he was a liability with the ball. And Xhaka can’t shield the ball, dribble, get out pressure, nor defend anything that isn’t just controlling space. So if you want someone in there to play more as a pure DM and NOT get forward as often as he did against Rapid: or maybe make those forays slightly more often and with I would say WAY better effect than Xhaka then I think Maitland-Niles makes a good case.
So, should he start? Maybe.
The next question then is is he better than Ceballos? Definitely not. Not consistently. Not in my eyes.
Did you see Ceballos’ 28 minutes against the limp Wieners? 41/41 passes, led the midfield in progressive distance passed (which is just nuts), 118 yards progressive carries, 5 shot creating actions, 4 passes into the penalty area (tied with the best on the team), and was 3rd in total distance carried among all players! This is the kind of technical, progressive, ability that you don’t get from Ainsley Maitland-Niles. Now, maybe the two of them should play together? I don’t know. That would be a bit lightweight for me. It’s a real problem for Arteta. I might try him with Partey and maybe (not in the same game, or perhaps in a 3, again, I don’t really know) with Ceballos. There’s really no reason not to at this point. He could turn out to be the exact magic dust that we need, like Coquelin was.
Coquelin is also a good example of one which I could tell very early on had incredibly good touch but lacked a bit in technique. I was really happy to see him get a first team place. I’m a bit of an outlier here but I’ve never seen that same level from Maitland-Niles. And I’m not alone: none of the previous Arsenal managers have seen it either. If he’d been so great in the game against Pogba (which is usually touted as his exemplar match) Wenger would have picked him. No question about that in my mind. And with all of the turmoil in this squad, with all of the problems in midfield, it’s odd he hasn’t been picked. Almost like maybe he’s not really good enough.
Cazorla aside, who do you think was our best attacking MF and holding MF, post-Invincibles?
Lurker! It’s been a long time, mate! 😉
😅😅😅
Thanks for the post Tim.
Games like yesterday and basically all of the group stage games in the Europa league have been fun to watch and we have won almost all those games in dominating fashion starting with Wenger, Emery and now Arteta. Same thing usually happens in early round league cup and FA cup and preseason games for the last 15 years. I remember how much we all looked forward to the Carling Cup games in the early project youth era. Players like Bendtner, Merida, Denilson, Song, Frimpong, Afobe, Walcott etc etc etc dominated those games and we all thought those players were destined for greatness. Defense by both teams is mostly an unused option in those games and because of that the performances and production we see in those games has never come close to being replicated in our league games.. The league games are played differently and the defenses we face in most league games don’t let us do whatever we want.
Your table of progressive passing distances demonstrate the difference. All of our best progressive passing games are against Europa league or arguably the 2 worst teams in the PL. I am certain we would love to be able to play the same way in the other league games but we have 15 years of history which demonstrates that the opposition defense won’t let us do the same things against most PL teams as we can do against Europa league or early league cup level opposition.
Arsenal beat limp Wieners
Wieners become less limp.
I think maitland niles is calmer in possesion than coquelin could ever be, honestly he has some bad touches but not to the extent where it defines his game. I have trouble seeing either xhaka or elneny as better options in midfield than maitland niles although i concede he hasnt shown the raking pass. Xhakas raking pass either doesnt appear or is sideways and ineffective. In fact i’d give that same critisim to all other midfileders bar partey.
On another note,😅 the eye test tell me bellerins performances have massively improved since arteta. Although I am biased, I do think bellerin has been literally the right side of arsenal since his introduction into the team. No one consistentley has helped in defence or attack on the right side. To be specific i always see him having to provide the final overlap to the byline while also having to cover the right side of defence 2 on one. On top of this, he rarely has someone to play with, interchange with, incorporate him into the team in an attacking sense although reiss nelson plays with him a bit in the europa. Does this bear out statistically?? I see hector bellerin as being used as opposed to being utilised, igonored because hes the good kid and the problem kids always need attention. Am I wrong??