I’ve been taking notes for every Arsenal match this season and I have finally figured out how to get the most accurate and useful matchday notes.
First, you need to turn off the social media. Having twitter on and watching the match at the same time is a distraction at best and can negatively affect your objectivity at worst. This is especially true if you’re reading your timeline, posting, and responding to your posts. “The game” you’re watching at that point is twitter.
Second, this is difficult to do when watching on TV but try not to watch the ball the entire time. We get dragged into following the ball like a cat to a mouse but there is so much going on in the game that just watching the ball and the people on the ball limits your perspective.
This is especially true with Arsenal right now. When we were an attacking team (many years ago now) it was easier to pay attention to what the whole team were doing because most of the action took place in one end of the pitch and we were the ones with the ball. But now, when you’re watching, say Southampton dominate possession, it’s a little more difficult to watch what your team is doing if you watch the ball.
It’s almost like one of those “magic eye” paintings that were popular in the 80s and 90s: you have to “zoom out” from the ball or you will miss how few runs the Arsenal forwards make, how often Elneny is surprised by the ball coming near him in defense, and how often Arsenal players are caught switched off and so far out of the play that it causes turmoil, and many other actions and inactions that you would miss if you just watched Southampton dominate the ball.
Pressing is a great example of an action which requires you to watch the entire field of play. For a few minutes during yesterday’s match against Southampton I got irrationally excited watching Nketiah, Pepe, and Aubameyang press Southampton. The thing I’ve been crying out for all season – for Arsenal to play proactive defense – was finally happening!
But when I looked back at the bigger picture what I saw were a few individual pressures, some really bad pressing by some individuals in the pressing scheme, and quite a few players who weren’t pressing at all. Which made it look like we were pressing hard (and in a sense some of the players were) but in reality it was a pretty easy press to break.
Here are a few examples from my notes:
Pepe – was running at players quite a bit but often approached from the wrong angle and with the wrong body shape. Also, often pressed out of synch with the others. Though that was a common theme across the front three: all three forwards led the team in pressures but the lack of coordination in the press meant that Arsenal won just 19/101 pressures, their lowest percentage pressure regains of the season. I noted early in the game that the trigger for the Arsenal pressing seemed to be when one of the Southampton CMs got the ball. But that broke down quickly, when Southampton just bypassed the midfield with direct long passes.
Elneny/Ceballos – oh boy. You can see why Arteta doesn’t trust them to play in his double-pivot. You could see the frustration on the forwards when they would press the ball and then Elneny and Ceballos didn’t follow up with both players often seemingly unaware of where they were supposed to be to help “close the trap”. Ceballos lost all 4 of the tackles he attempted, Elneny attempted one “tackle” (which was more of an attempted interception) and lost it for their goal. Elneny made zero interceptions, 1 blocked pass, and just 1 pressure regain from 8 attempts. Where Elneny didn’t even get involved in the defensive schemes, Ceballos at least tried (sometimes) making 0/4 tackles against dribbles, 2/7 pressures, and picking off 4 interceptions.
Gabriel/Holding – both seemed to be told by Arteta to attack the ball on long passes. This is an older, Wenger-style, defensive scheme and felt very familiar. As did the end result – one of the CBs getting too tight and either being rolled, caught out of position, missing an interception, or various other flaws. Holding was quite lucky as well, switching off and literally just shoving Redmond as the Southampton player ran past him, into the box, and got off a free shot for what should have been a second goal.
Attacking through the middle – Saka’s perseverance in driving into the box from a wide position set up the Arsenal goal but throughout the game the Arsenal forwards and wide forwards made a good pattern of coming across the box without the ball. Pepe, in particular, looked really good running in from wide right to the middle, confusing the Southampton defense who were probably expecting him to have more of the ball. If Arsenal can get someone in the midfield, just behind these forwards, someone who can help out with the ball-handling and add some chance creation, there’s a good chance we can get this attack back up to “pretty good.” Though I have to say that the kind of player who can do all that will be quite expensive and may prove difficult to lure to a team who sit in 15th place.
In the end, though, the most important thing to learn when you are taking notes is “I am watching Arsenal”. Because at any moment you may need to simply rip up your notes and throw them all away when one of the players (or several!) do something incredibly stupid.
Arteta’s big problem
I’ve been pretty down on how Arteta has set the team up this season. However, I’m not just some complainer. I understand:
- We are in a pandemic
- We play a match every three days
- This eviscerates training, making it difficult to bring in new ideas
- This means that pressing is down for every team because they just can’t
- The players
- Many were purchased for Wenger’s, older, system
- Some were purchased for Emery’s system
- The team needs a clear out, really
- A lot of the players we have aren’t very physical
- A lot of the players we have (in crucial midfield and defensive) areas aren’t very quick
- Obviously there are a lot of deadwood players and players with massive attitude problems
That said, one odd thing about the last two matches is that for the majority of them I’ve felt like we were in control of the game, or that at least I could discern some new pattern of play from Arsenal that I find hopeful.
It looks to me like Arteta is trying to find a way to get his team playing attacking football without sacrificing too much of the defense that he’s built up. Arteta knows that we need to score and is trying to forge a path forward, so I’ve been much more hopeful about Arteta than at any time in the last 6 months. But the big problem here is that in order to get his attack working, Arteta needs to change the way that we play defense.
This season, the Arsenal system has been extremely simple – regain shape, sit back, don’t attempt to win the ball back very often (because you may lose a challenge and then the whole system collapses) and attack down the wings. But over the last two games, we’ve seen Arteta try to get the team attacking the ball more out of possession, while also running some new patterns of play (mostly centrally) in attack.
What’s happening is that the team seems to be struggling implementing these new ideas. That’s not a surprise if you consider that we have literally half a training session between games right now.
A lot of the old-school pundits have been saying that the red cards at Arsenal are the result of team discipline breaking down. That could be the case, especially with Xhaka who still hasn’t apologized to the fans for choking. But it’s also possible that a lot of the problems we are seeing are from players trying to implement new ideas and failing.
Now, this doesn’t completely absolve Arteta. The biggest problem that I see at Arsenal is that either Mikel doesn’t have a way he wants to play or that he’s floundering with the players he has. Or possibly both. He is a new coach and sometimes I wonder if we would be having all of these problems at Arsenal if he’d spent 3 years at another team, learning how he wanted his teams to play, learning some alternatives, and learning how to get the best out of players who don’t really fit his systems. But as it is, what we have here is a coach who is getting on the job training.
Another, more established, coach would come straight in and give this team an identity. There’s no question for me that Klopp would have us playing Klopp ball, Mourinho would play his way, Hasenhuttl would play his way, even Roy Hodgson would come straight in and have Arsenal playing a defined style of football. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they would be successful. And that’s because the really really big problem, the Death Star problem at Arsenal, is that if you want to rebuild, you should cut every single one of the players on this roster – except the Hale End kids. They aren’t necessarily “god awful players” but they are a gestalt assembly and definitely don’t fit a single style of play, nor seem to have the flexibility to play multiple styles.
So, I think that we keep muddling on. Arteta keeps learning on the job and we slowly get rid of the detritus from the last three management teams. Six players will be gone this summer: Ozil, Mustafi, Luiz, Sokratis, Ceballos and Matt Macey. And if we have any brains at all at this club we will clear out the guys whose contracts expire in 2022: Lacazette, Kolasinac, Elneny, and add Xhaka to that list (he’s under contract until 2023, which makes me physically ill).
Just like my notes, you’ve got to rip it up.
But that would require the owner to actually put money into the club (invest and write off massive losses) rather than take a break from NFL games to authorize the club to spend its own money.
The point you make about training is a good one. Not only was the summer screwed up, but the constant matches this season have probably made it difficult as well. I heard that mentioned relative to Saliba…because we have so many matches and so little training, sounds like he’s not even getting much training time with the first team. Sigh.
As far as unloading deadwood, I’d pretty much agree with your list. I’d certainly add Willian if we could. If we got rid of most of those players, we’d have enough for a significant rebuild without needing a lot of additional cash from the owner. But at this point, I’m not sure I have a whole lot of confidence in the management team to get a lot of either good incoming or outgoing deals done. We’ll see. I’m willing to give a little pass to last summer’s transfer window, as it was very screwy due to COVID. But more mistakes like Saliba(not referring to his playing ability in the PL, which is unproven) and Willian next summer will be clear evidence that they don’t know what they are doing.
Summer 2020 was not perfect, but Partey? Gabriel? Auba? Smith Rowe? So far those look like either good or great business (my own doubts about Auba aside).
On top of that Soares is a good squad player to tie down, Mari likewise looks dependable and basically hasn’t put a foot wrong.
Also the noises were all good about the positions we were trying to address and the other players we were looking at.
OK, Runnarsson looks a bit pants and Willian has not punched his weight as yet. Saliba was the year before, but failing to get him back on loan was stupid.
Overall though I’m fairly optimistic and confident that there is finally a plan in place when it comes to transfer business. Executing that plan is another thing…
I firmly disagree about Soares. That is a truly baffling signing; we have real depth in RB without him and he is easily worse than Lich.
Runnarson is a disaster of a signing: if you’re going to take a foreign player spot, that guy needs to be good enough to start.
Willian is an absolute disgrace. Not just the shit way he plays but the ill discipline he brings to the team. That flight to Dubai should have ruled him out of the squad for the rest of the season.
It’s a bit unbelievable the double-standards that Arteta has in this squad.
I could not agree more. In my eyes, our transfer policy looks worse than ever. We not only wasted a boatload of money, we wasted what are turning out to be valuable foreign player spots. When Partey has been on the field, he’s looked much better and more effective than I thought he’d be, but (and it’s a big but) we waited until the 11th hour to sign him for his full release clause when we could’ve done that much earlier in the window.
Our “leadership team” is a joke in terms of pretty much everything away from the pitch, including transfers. I’ll give Mertesacker the benefit of the doubt with the academy, and I do think the difficult situation Arteta was put in needs to be taken into account, but Edu and Vinai increasingly seem like they have no idea how to run a club, much less one that is a mess and needs itself pulled out of the mire.
That said, I love this club and I love the Hake End kids. My hope is that we start investing in younger, cheaper and riskier players while leaning on our academy. Fingers crossed.
Not sure about Soares yet. I’m willing to give him a little more benefit of the doubt than Tim seems to, at least until we’ve seen him in more PL matches, particularly since Bellerin hasn’t been great. Gabriel looks good. Auba…TBD. He needs to get back closer to where he’s been, or that giant extension is going to be another Ozil-like albatross. Partey looks good, but he’s really only payed a few matches for us. Pretty hard to tell yet just how good he will be long-term. Also hard to say on Mari at this point. ESR was Arsenal academy, so doesn’t come into the transfer discussion.
Even giving Soares the benefit of the doubt, and even if he turns out to be useful, we absolutely overpaid simply by paying for him at all when we could have simply loaned and then bought or waited until he was free. Terrible use of resources.
Yes, this is pretty much exactly where I am. It’s serious but you can sense some kind of change. A more experienced coach coming in may have been able to make the necessary transformations while avoiding this kind of collapse in form, but maybe not.
And likewise, I see no alternative but to keep going until the backlog of issues we are working with are slowly dealt with.
One match at a time, next up Everton who got a great win away at Leicester this week. I’ll be holding my breath for the rest of the month, every match is potentially huge. One poor performance could finish us off psychologically; but on the other hand if we make it to 2021 intact, we may turn a corner.
Everton is interesting to me because they show how much some shrewd, and not necessarily expensive, transfer business can quickly improve a team. Fully expecting Iwobi to make a mockery of our midfield.
Well, you’ve talked me off the ledge a bit here, so I’m thankful for your more sanguine assessment of Arsenal. The rebuild needs to start soon though. If we are fighting relegation in May, and the players are more frustrated and unhappy than they are now, I don’t see who’d want to come play for this manager. Also, not great timing for a rebuild after you’ve just gutted your scouting department. Oops I’m going Debbie Downer again. I’m sure we’ll turn this around and take 3 points from Everton. There – much better!
Tim: Another fantastic and well researched post. Everything you said is accurate.
The one thing you did not mention which I think is our biggest problem of all is the fact that other then Auba there was probably not a single player who started the game for us yesterday who has scored more then 5 total PL goals in their entire careers. If you add up the total number of PL goals scored in their careers by the 10 players on the pitch not named Auba it might not even hit 10. There is no manager in the entire world and no amount of creativity that could compensate and get consistent results with a squad so totally devoid of goal scoring players.
Is it possible that Arteta’s age is a detriment in that he might lack the confidence to stand up to the club hierarchy, agents and senior players? He certainly projects confidence, but I know from first hand experience, as a department head that I can feel like a fraud on a daily basis and its a daily struggle to balance roles as leader while acknowledging that you may not have all the answers people are looking for.
Is it possible that Arteta says he wanted to sign Willian, but really he’s saying that because he knows Edu and Kia Joorabchian wanted it? Is it possible he let Luiz continue to play with a concussion because he’s wary of stamping his authority on a popular dressing room leader with a reputation for turning on managers? Is it possible he wants Ozil in the team, only to have the hierarchy say no, we need to punish him for not accepting the pay cut and agreeing to move on?
Is it possible that Arteta wants to mime City more in terms of playing style, but is having trouble forcing the issue with some of the players and backed off?
I’m glad you went into the discussion about pressing; Klopp had resistance at Dortmund too in the first year and he tried to bring his vision from Mainz to a club that had fallen on hard times. He got the green light to clear out players, and then later got that same green light at Liverpool (even though players there were much more eager to give his vision an honest chance). I agree – I’m not seeing any proper pressing, it’s almost like it’s being brought to the team as a high-level ideal, but there’s no working on actual execution and the details that would pull it off.
For me, more so than Arteta, it’s Edu, Sanhelli (thankfully gone) and Vinay… a recruitment policy built around agents bringing prospects to your doorstep is never going to get us the tools to do anything good. Luiz, Soares, Willian – all Joorabchian clients. Last January we were strongly linked with Kurzawa, another Joorabchian client. We need a new Technical Director with no ties to agents and fortitude to walk into a dressing room and clear out the trouble makers.
Tierney, Partey, Gabriel, Saliba, Mari and Martinelli I think had nothing to do with Joorabchian.
I’m not saying Edu’s relationship with him is not a concern. It’s also a concern that we decimated our scouting network.
But the flip side is apparently that Arsenal have long had a reputation among agents and representatives for being bureaucratic, unrealistic and difficult to deal with. With Edu in place the feeling is that there’s someone there who they can now work with. That might be beneficial for the club in the long run and we may miss out on fewer targets. I dunno.
What’s more important to me I guess is that we have a proper transfer strategy that goes right to the qualities that we need.
I will give you Partey and Tierney – but they were actually scouted pre-purge of the scouting department. And my understanding is that Gabriel and Martinelli were transactions ‘aided’ by agents. Mari is a Canales client. The Saliba deal has all sorts of question marks around it and anything Sanhelli touched has to be suspected as being dirty.
When we fired the scouting department we became an agent-driven club. Just like Wolves and Valencia and others that have embraced super agents.
Agreed. And sometimes those agent-driven clubs can be quite successful (see Wolves), but that is because they are balanced by a very clear identity. That said, if o were a wolves fan I would be terrified – all it takes is a few bad deals, a slight dip in performance and/or loss of interest from ownership and BOOM, you’re Valencia.
I’m going to disagree with you Tim. Rip it up isn’t feasible or a strategy. Not even City’s petro-dollars can throw the team away and start again. What we needed this season was to be successful. If we qualify for Europe there’s more money for transfers and we’re a more attractive proposition for players to join. Potentially we would also realise higher values for the players we look to move on (the rising tide analogy).
I understand where you’re coming from and it’s symptomatic of what feels like an effing big hole at the moment. But we have a team that should be fighting near the top places. They won the FA Cup last season, hit 70 points the season before. Damn in Wenger’s final and worst season our home record was P 19 W 15 D 2 L 2 F 54 A 20.
There are several EPL coaches who have had the same timeframe and similar constraints to implement their playing style and coaching strategies (Mourinho and Hassenhutl in particular). They cracked it, why haven’t we?
The fastest and cheapest solution is to change the coaching team. If this season carries on it’s current trajectory I fear we will be properly fvcked for many years.
I think at some point we have to come to terms with the fact Arteta is not a good coach.
We currently have 14 points from 13 games. All metrics you look at show that this is exactly where we are supposed to be. Since I became an Arsenal fan we have never been close to this bad. These are relegation battle numbers. I get we like Arteta and as a former player we want him to do well but the numbers don’t lie. These players, no matter what mental gymnastics you want to perform, are much better than 15th. Most of these players were in the team that finished with 70 points in Emery’s first season and the players that were sold from that squad were players the fanbase broadly did not care for. We added players in the Emery’s second summer that we all agreed were good or upgrades to what we had before. The question that summer was whether we would challenge for a top 4 place, not survive relegation. Deals we made since then were all at the behest of Arteta. He decided which of the players he liked and the ones he needed upgrades on. He could have strengthened any position he wanted to but he decided on Mari, Cedric, Willian, Gabriel, Partey, Ceballos and Luiz. Any suggestion that this isn’t his squad is ridiculous. Any manager would be doing better with the players he inherited and that’s a fact because others did. We are where we are solely because of Arteta’s management/coaching and we need to come to terms with that. Anything else is just sticking your head in the sand.
Great comment but my take is that it’s mainly the coach’s fault and additionally some of the blame lies with Edu )who I’m still unclear what he does with most of his time) and the owners for their lack of oversight and governance. Let’s be honest would you employ two guys with no track record to run a multi billion $ business?
There’s a slow drip of stories to the press that ours is not a happy squad. And the root of the problem is the vastly different treatment of players. For me that’s not a rookie coaching mistake. It’s just basic common sense.
I take it you assume that Arteta picked all of the players we signed since he came on?
Maybe you have more information than I, but I’m not aware enough of Arsenal’s transfer protocols to believe that he not only identified the positions he wanted to strengthen, but also blessed the individuals that the club would sign for those positions.
i didn’t realize quoting you would result in such large font :/
Let’s not create head canon to protect the people we like. Arteta has come out multiple times to say he was happy with the way things were going. If he had the power to not register Ozil, the highest paid player at the club, he’s not some innocent lamb in this process. If we work with actual information and not hypothetical scenarios, where the buck stops is clear.
Weirdly, we can rate your articles now, Tim.
I appreciate your measured take. It’s measured isn’t it? I mean, it’s pointing out some clear negatives, but it’s also offering a bit of hope, too, and also that, regardless, we should probably all resign ourselves to the fact that Edu isn’t going to sack Arteta anytime soon, so we should probably just strap in and see where this goes. We did all agree in the summer that there would be lows and bumps along the way, as is to be expected given the state of the current squad and the long-term project of rebuilding. I don’t think, however, that anyone envisioned that the lows would involve languishing in the lower half of the table for weeks. This has been quite a shock.
I now start to wonder what it would take for Edu to finally get rid of him? Like, maybe if we actually dropped into the relegation zone and nothing changed for a spell? I don’t know.
Also, just wanted to say how awesome and sad it is that Saka’s emergence as a clear standout player is coinciding with THIS season. He and Gabriel have been the only two bright spots in this morass. As you rightly suggest, with the ending and soon-to-be-ending contracts of so many of our problem players / situations, there’s a real opportunity within the next year or two to revitalize the squad. I generally like the players we’ve brought in under Arteta-Edu, so there’s that.
Also, morass. Heh.
It’s not clear to me that Edu alone could sack Arteta. Seems like that would need approval from Tim Lewis and the Kroenkes, maybe Vinai too.
This is me being measured, yes. I have never been Arteta out (despite what Doc thinks) for a lot of reasons but also because I don’t think the Kroenke’s will pull the trigger.
As for Edu, word this morning is that Willian and Luiz want Arteta out. If true that means Edu’s buddy, the agent Kia Joorabchian, has two clients at Arsenal who want Arteta gone. These are guys Arteta went to the wall for to sign at Arsenal. That right there is some Shakespearean court intrigue.
Feel like Kiago is more and more pulling the strings at Arsenal while the poor Arthello slips into madness.
This is incredibly depressing if true. Getting rid of both at all cost would send a powerful message, but I doubt that’s happening. What. A. Joke.
If it’s true the additional thing they have in common is that they have been part of a multiple title winning side under different managers. Maybe they just recognise when the right ingredients are missing?
If you are telling me to choose between two 32+ year olds who have have looked an absolute shambles this season and who are on absurd salaries and a head coach who is a multiple-title-winning-assistant coach with massive upside.. my gut and head says the latter.
tim, if you want to take good notes, you’ll have to watch the game twice. second-time watching, you’ll already know what happened, meaning your assessments will be more objective and less emotional. i know it’s tough as the games are not exactly entertaining. good luck.
as for arteta, he’s over his head but he’s still got a job to do. the best thing he could have done was, after the game, tell his assistants do the recovery workouts the following morning. second, call wenger, telling him he’d be at his house at 7:30 a.m. on thursday morning to listen; bagels and doughnuts in hand. look, wenger’s management career began well before arteta’s playing career. the old man has forgotten more about management than arteta knows. being tactically brilliant doesn’t make you a brilliant manager. show reverence and respect for wenger’s experience and i’m sure wenger would give him some major pointers.
arteta, so determined to change the culture of the club, decided to treat everyone the same. you can’t do that. when my daughter misbehaved, i could give her a look and she’d straighten up. however, that mini-me joshuad needed my whole size 13 up his backside. likewise, you can’t treat your highest paid player and world cup winner the same way you treat an academy kid. while he may be egomaniacal, he’s earned the right to be treated better than smith-rowe. you don’t have to love him but you simply can’t disrespect a man and expect them to respect you…especially when they’ve won bigger trophies than you have. imagine being an instructor and having a new dean come in that shows no regard for your tenure…the idea of treating everyone the same may sound good but it’s not.
everything doesn’t need an overhaul. some things should be, for the most part, left alone. imagine wenger coming in back in ’96 with his good ideas for the arsenal back 5. HA! wenger didn’t try to fix that. he just told them to stop eating bullsh*t and go to bed earlier. arteta’s a new guy, super-determined to take charge. old heads like klopp and wenger don’t have to take charge. they know they’re in charge. they know what works and what doesn’t. the best thing the youngest manager in the premier league can do right now is to simplify the game and let the boys do what they’re good at. if they’re bad at something, ala hector and his throws, you help them improve…and get out of the way. don’t be on the sideline with a notional playstation controller trying to play the game. shut up and let them show how good they are.
Watching a game on TV will never give you a proper idea of what is happening on the pitch. It’s a bit like looking at a house through the letter box. The camera follows the “action”, it can’t possibly give you the big picture.
I guess you don’t know but up until this season I always watched the games twice, sometimes more than twice. I’ve written about that here and on twitter quite a bit. I suspect that I was the one who actually started all these other bloggers on watching the games twice, which is a recent phenomenon.
i used to watch all of the games twice as well…and i’m no blogger. it actually allows you to be more objective as you’re less emotional. however, the football was at least entertaining back then. now is another story as i only watched half of the southampton game and i didn’t even bother tuning in for the burnley match.
Watch it twice? You’re a better man than me, Gunga Din! I can barely bring myself to watch it once. Currently, about as entertaining as watching the paint dry.
No one has yet tried to explain how Arteta can possibly get this team to produce positive results when he has almost no players he can count on to score a goal once in a while.
there are players on this arsenal team that can score goals, bill. the problem is arsenal’s play has become slow, labored, and predictable. there’s no off-the-ball mobility in attack. players used to make runs but they get tired of making runs and not getting the ball…so they stand around waiting for something good to happen.
there’s an old adage in many sports that require passing. soccer, football, hockey, basketball, handball, etc. that is everyone loves to play with someone who knows how to pass. ljungberg loved making runs when dennis was on the ball. adebayor loved making runs with cesc or hleb on the ball. walcott loved with either rosicky or cazorla were on the ball. even alex song was more direct and less creative but still a great passer of the ball. there’s something unsettling about an opposition player with brilliant vision and ball-distributor on the ball in your final third…terrifying, actually. arsenal don’t have a player like that…well, that’s not completely true, they just don’t use him because he doesn’t run fast or tackle hard enough.
I pray to the gods you’re not referring to Xhaka…
Worse, you’re referring to “he -who-must-not-be-named”
More likely. Was it Klopp that said a team that presses well is worth more than a number 10?
Speed up the play by going more direct and pressing higher and more aggressively in cohesive manner. That said, we likely don’t have the energy and legs to take this approach…. unless we lean heavily on the academy kids and Pepe. Actually, Willian would likely benefit from such an approach, but for all the talk of him being a “good guy,” he seems like a bit of a cancer to me.
Arteta won the FA Cup and beat all the ‘big’ teams in his first 6 months at the club and they weren’t lucky wins.. I personally don’t think he’s suddenly become a shit coach.
Our best player last season by some distance and talisman has hit a dip in form which has led to a confidence crisis. It happens to almost every striker at some point.
The fact is, the whole team has been so reliant on Auba producing that his dip has brought the whole team down. And I mean psychologically. A happy, scoring, smiling Auba lifts the whole team, especially the younger players.
I think his form and confidence will return. And the team’s form and confidence will follow.
Foho, the plain fact of the matter is that at the moment Arteta is failing. And his results are so bad, that a firing before the new year would be an unsurprising outcome. Like you, I’ve regularly said here that his FA Cup win and his wins over the big teams give him credit in the bank.
But we are so bad at the moment, those look far, far away.
He cant import a whole new squad of technically and tactically perfect imps. He’s got to improve incrementally, while working with what he has. And what he has includes Xhaka, who is a poor midfield player, but who Arteta starts nearly every game. There has perhaps been too much squad bad blood created by sending too many players into exile. You blank Mesut, a popular squad man, in circumstances that go against natural justice. But Willian 2020, your creator, is absolute pants. You mismanage Saliba but Rob Holding looks B grade. You take another option on Ceballos, and bring back Elneny. Tim’s description of their play says it all.
“Poor Arteta, a genius served by fools”, is not a storyline that I buy. That’s an OK squad of football professionals, not a squad of bottom third of the league quality. It is also a squad that got a significant number of players that he, Arteta, chose.
A long, long time ago, when I was a cocky young hotshot with no fear, they moved me upstairs to take charge of the whole shop. Yes, I was considered to have considerable smarts and innovative. No, I wasn’t ready for management of a big team of guys who were my peers only yesterday, and a few of whom were old enough to be my dad. I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
I think that a lot of intangibles besides his smarts (including an iffy grasp of interpersonal relationships) are sinking Arteta. It does not help that the club all around him is a mess.
He could fail with his first club… he wouldn’t be the first. That’ll be a valuable lesson, for a man who folks who know this game consider to a great coach in the making. He’s not showing it yet, and is running out of time to show it in North London.
Josh
I said this earlier but other then Auba the 10 players that we started against Southampton probably have a combined total of somewhere around 10 PL goals in their careers. No matter how you rationalize what’s happening, we can’t run out a group of players who have never scored goals in their career and expect them to score and produce results. You know that as well as I do.
it is arteta’s job to manage the resources arsenal currently has. this includes players, coaches, and funds. they have enough resources to be much closer to the top of the league than they are. that failure primarily due to decisions arteta has made.
you speak as if the arsenal players simply can’t score or are without talent. this is untrue. both pepe and bukayo scored about 7 goals last year. gabriel has already scored two this season. both ceballos and elneny can finish. david luiz has certainly scored more than 10 goals. what really delegitimizes your point is the fact that most of the team has limited league experience; your point about their goal history isn’t argued in good faith.
arsenal are struggling because they are led by a man, once a brilliant player, yet to prove himself a competent manager. i am rooting for his success but i can’t ignore his lack of managerial experience being the more likely cause for arsenal’s current predicament.
Goals don’t come in isolation. They come from:
Im sure there are more. All of these are coachable things. I absolutely do not accept that Aubameyang is the only means of scoring goals. I hope Arteta doesn’t either, or he may as well give himself another job description besides “coach.”
Don’t want to pensonalise this debate, I appreciate everyone, and won’t ever be downvoting anyone. Im sometimes reminded, here, of guys in the long meetings who continuously cut through the waffle, and get to the bottom line. That’s valuable, and necessary sometimes. But in my industry, a creative industry, they can sometimes not see the whole picture. For example, I had to talk my board at a paper I worked for, out of cutting all the star columnists, and bringing in unpaid contributors to fill in. Yes, it helps the bottom line. No, it’s not practical, if you still want to call yourself a paper of record. Cut a few, not all. Reduce the contribution of x from 2 days a week to 1. You prune in other areas. Op-Ed is the heart and soul and conscience of your newspaper. Yes, ripping it out saves money, but what do you have left if you do? You have to make bottom-line man see the whole picture.
So it is with Arsenal. You have to see the bigger picture. Goalscoring is a problem, but a host of other things feed into that problem. The tip of the spear isn’t the whole spear.
FWIW from now on I’m upvoting all of Bill’s comments
How can anyone make the argument that we have a reasonably strong squad when we go into an important PL game starting Elneny and Ceballos as our central midfield and the 10 players not named Auba have around 10 combined career PL goals?
Bill, we all saw that comment the first few times you’ve posted it.
1. limiting to PL goals is the kind of statistical chicanery that makes me laugh. Why not just limit to goals scored at home against teams that have ‘ham’ in the name?
2. Nketiah is 21 and has 17 senior goals and 27 PL 2 goals – he assisted for Laca’s goal
3. Pepe has 52 career goals
4. Saka is 18 and already has 10 goals – and he provided the pre-assist for Lacazette
5. as for the two CMS – yes, they have a poor scoring record, though they are also pretty inexperienced. Also, who was he supposed to play? A lot of teams play a lot of CMs who don’t have great scoring records.
6. Your arbitrary “five goals” is super weird because while Fernandinho has 18 PL goals (for example), he’s also been in the league for 8 years and playing on a Man City side that has scored 657 goals in those 8 seasons. This same pattern repeats for many of the MFers that play in the League.
7. Yes, we need players to score goals. Where will they come from? Players getting shots! Where will the shots come from? A system which maximizes chances.
Relax, buddy, we get it; the team is shit.
tim, regarding the press, i don’t think it’s really a press. it appears to be more of a delay, allowing the midfield and fullbacks to transition back on defense. a disclaimer: i don’t know this as i’ve not watched all of the games this season, i’m simply stating what it looks like to me in the games i have seen.
this season alone, arteta has changed formations from a 3-4-3 to a 4-3-3 to what looked like a 4-4-2 the last couple of times i’ve seen arsenal. he’s tried wingbacks, inverted wingbacks, double-pivots, overlapping fullbacks, aubameyang as a center forward, lacazette as an attacking mid, etc. he’s desperate to find a solution, as he should be; arsenal are in a dire situation. players being unavailable due to injuries and sendings off doesn’t help. with that, if it’s a 4-4-2, i think it will be really difficult to press from this formation. i think you need a front 3 to press but that may simply be my creative limitation. maybe some folks here are smarter than me and know how to do it with a 4-4-2. i’d love to hear answers. but, like i started with, it doesn’t look like a real press so you can probably stop getting upset about arsenal’s awful press.
Hey JOSHUAD, I was preparing to post one of my long comments because it’s it’s slow day with work and found your comment. Funny thing is that I was bored and decided to check into my old files from past year’s and I found a file that I prepared for an u/20 side that I worked with for a bit and it contains pressing in various formations, but most importantly it includes pressing in my preferred formation which is 442/4222.
It is not about creativity per se, but what you have developed over time for your side to work both ways. My teams press because it helps our attack and our attack is the way it is because it helps our defending/pressing. Over time tactics are refined and my 442/4222 is a bit developed from the file that I am looking at now, but it still makes me smile at how far I have developed it.
If Tim doesn’t mind, I could send it to him via email so that he can make it available to you guys if you are interested. I have no social media (on purpose), and I don’t know any other way to make it available. It not much but very simple with some graphics (low quality though).
Tim: Thanks for your comment.
1) I use PL goals because we are talking about our form in our league games. its clear that its much easier to score in the non-PL games and using the stats accumulated over all competitions greatly overestimates a players probability of scoring in a league game. That seems indisputable to me.
2) I went and did the actual math and those 9 outfield players outside of Auba have made 397 PL appearances and scored 16 total goals which is 1 goal every 24 games.
3) If you just include the 5 more forward players and exclude the back 4 they have played in 189 PL games and scored 12 goals which 1 goal for 15.75 games.
4) To say that none of our players are capable of scoring a goal is obviously poorly worded overstatement on my part. However, the probability that any of those 9 players will score a goal in any PL games is clearly very low
5) Eddie and Saka are both young and might get better someday however, that does nothing to help our chances of winning right now.
6) If Auba does not score the most probable outcome by far is we get shut out and since Auba has not been scoring much this year we have very little chance to win most games which is why our PL form has been so bad.
You did a lot of work!
The league thing is not a settled debate by any stretch. Some folks have been looking at League goals/shots/ expected goals etc and are trying to model which Leagues are most difficult to score in so that they can adjust xG but if it was as simple as you think, it would have been done by now. Bottom line is that yours is a widely held belief that hasn’t been backed up with evidence.
SHOTS SHOTS SHOTS SHOTS SHOTS!
average return is about 1 goal per 10 shots. Goals per game isn’t really a reliable measure but goals per shots is proven over time to be extremely reliable and repeatable.
Auba – 3 goals on 24 shots, 0.8 is well below his career average of 0.22. He’s suffering because he’s not getting those big chances which are crucial. He got one against Soton. That was his best (non-pen) chance of the season.
Saka – 1 goal on 21 shots, this is underperforming by quite a bit but again, I can’t stress this enough, we aren’t creating those big chances that are crucial to scoring.
Laca – 3 goals on 15 shots but all came early in the season. He’s now been deployed as a 10 to help create some chances.
Pepe – 1 goal on 11 shots, not great but not bad.
Gabriel – 2 goals on 10 shots, outstanding, especially for a CB
Willian – 8 shots, no goals
Holding – 6 shots no goals
Xhaka – 6 shots, no goals
etc.
If you look at the teams at the top of the table, there are a LOT of teams who have players with a lot more shots than us.
Our system has limited our chances. And if you think that we should score more with MFers who have one or two shots, well I don’t know what to tell you.
I don’t think our lack of shots/goals is necessarily a “system” thing. I actually don’t see goals coming, whichever way we line up. What I’m seeing is a mentality thing. A complete lack of confidence and belief. When I watch the team coming out, the thing that first strikes me is the body language. Half of them look as if they’re just about to take a long walk to the guillotine, most notably PEA, whose face is an absolute picture, and he’s the captain and leader! These players go out seemingly thinking they can’t score/ won’t score. Is it any wonder, when they don’t score. Watch any great goal scorers. When they go out, it is perfectly obvious that they “expect to score”. You can sense it. Witness Kane, Son, Vardy and others. The first few yards is all in the mind.
Mark, it’s 100% a system thing. Systems are how you get shots. Maybe this is a definition problem.
The opponent is trying to prevent you from scoring, they deploy a method for doing that. That will include some one-on-one duels, but the vast majority of goals are assisted via an intricate system of play. You (the attacker) need to have a method (system, tactic, etc.) for working the ball forward, getting the ball into dangerous places, and getting your scorers in those same places.
Mentality does help, but only in as much as making sure that the players are in synch with each other, working hard for each other, etc.
Kane and Son are scoring EXACTLY because of the system that Mourinho plays.
Man it feels like we’re in really bad shape and, seeing as we no longer have a ‘style’, I worry that more money is going to be wasted on players for whatever system Arteta is implementing that are going to be square pegs once the next manager comes in who wants to implement THEIR system.
I’m actually kind of worried now that none of the higher ups seem to think it’s important, or even beneficial, to have a set Arsenal style going forward that we’ll stick to so that, if we’re going to go through managers, the players we buy will at least be being recruited for the Arsenal System instead of for whatever random system the next available manager chooses to implement for the couple of years they’re in change.
Whatever we’re doing now certainly doesn’t seem like the attacking style I thought had become, and would continue to be, synonymous with Arsenal Football Club.
I didn’t mind Stan so much because when Arsene was around I trusted that he’d be the one calling the football shots and I was happy for the owner to stay out of it and let Arsenal football club be self sufficient.
Now I really worry that, without a motivated owner setting the tone, changing players and managers can only accomplish so much when there’s no real leadership and all the positions that aren’t owner, manager or player just seem like a revolving cast of game of thrones villains waiting to stab each other in the back to acquire their own power.