Leicester 1-3 Arsenal

Hey folks, was going to write a bread recipe and a match report but the bread isn’t quite ready (I need to make it again, because it didn’t quite turn out right) and I missed about half of the match today thanks to problems with Fubo.

However, I’d be remiss if I didn’t provide you all with a forum to argue about things which you have no control over! So, here are some talking points to get you started.

The lineup! Arteta made a number of changes and it was the right choice for 10/11 because Arsenal were fresher than Leicester throughout. I don’t think he did this to “prioritize” competitions, but just to bring in some fresh legs. Arsenal looked far snappier than Leicester (other than the first few minutes).

The only problem I had with the lineup was including Smith Rowe. He’d been looking leggy for a few weeks and despite the fact he’d been rested against City, when he played against Benfica I was surprised by how slow and tired he looked. I believe fitness has been a long-standing problem with Smith Rowe so I was surprised to see him included today and worried that he would get an injury. Which he did. I’m sure the fitness professionals at Arsenal know better than “some guy watching on TV at home” but I’m just reporting what I saw and felt.

Willian was good. That doesn’t mean that he’s been a good signing. He last assisted in the League in November and while I know a lot of people are strutting (Arteta among them) about his “assist” in the EL that was literally all he did in that game. So, just like one swallow doesn’t make a spring, one good game doesn’t make Willian a spring chicken. And it definitely doesn’t mean that people who have been frustrated with his overall play were wrong. He’s had exactly three good games for Arsenal this season: one on opening day, one in November, and now one in February. I’m guessing Arteta will be crowing about the performance as well.

Pepe also had a good game and got himself a goal. Perfect little tap in, which is a great sign because he’s been playing too deep for too long and recently started overlapping and making runs in the box. I also like how Pepe used his right foot a bit in this game, especially to earn the foul which led to the David Luiz goal.

The first penalty wasn’t a penalty. Because my fubo stream failed, I caught Ian Wright at half time and he showed several angles which conclusively proved that Pepe wasn’t touched by Tielemans. It was a clear and obvious error to award a penalty and VAR should be applauded for reversing the decision. Yet even when we get the right call I heard a lot of people arguing that Pepe should have won the penalty because Tielemans tried to foul. I know that fouls can be awarded for no contact but that’s usually reserved for a player trying to foul as opposed to trying to win the ball – think about a guy flying in to stop a counter but just misses the man causing him to fall over. But ultimately, just apply the following logic: if Vardy had been awarded that penalty, would you have applauded VAR and the on-field officials? I seriously doubt it.

The second penalty. Hey look! We do win penalties! And not only that… but once again VAR got it right. This won’t change the narrative that Arsenal are the worst officiated team in the league, that we never get the calls, that the refs are inconsistent, and that.. uhh.. oh yeah, there’s a bias and/or conspiracy against Arsenal.

We finished the match out, they barely got a sniff, and Mari bodied Vardy at one point. That about sums it up, I think!

Qq

33 comments

  1. Ødegaard put in a decent shift, I thought. It was was Pepe for my money…and Mari, too.

    It’s funny. Every time Arteta calls Pepe, “Nico”, I can only think of someone calling Fury, “Nick”.

  2. A good performance in the end, following yet another dismal start. I really wish that wouldn’t happen time and time again. I can quite see why Arteta wants Tierney to play high up the pitch. The only downside being that Xhaka inevitably fills in at left back. An accident waiting to happen. In this case it only took 6 minutes! Xhaka is the polar opposite to ESR. Whereas Smith Rowe knows what he wants to do with the ball before it even gets to him, the Swiss Tractor wants 5 touches and still hasn’t made his mind up. In the end he gave the ball away. Far too slow to catch up with Tielemans, who had a clear run at goal. Add to this the fact that he literally can’t tackle without giving away a free kick and you have to come to the conclusion that he really shouldn’t be in our midfield. There must be better options.

  3. Thanks for the review Tim. The game started at 5AM my time so I have not seen it. Excellent result beating a top 6 PL team with a relatively weakened starting lineup. Surprised to see Willian played well. Pepe has shown a few flashes. We could certainly use someone not named Auba who is a threat to scoring occasional goals. Smith Rowe may have hit the rookie wall that dozens and dozens of our academy players not named Saka have crashed into over the years. They start out really well but the league seems to figure out what they are trying to do when there is a bit of game film to analyze and they hit a plateau when the initial adrenaline surge wears off and never really are able to replicate the success they have in the first few games.

    I agree with your assessment of VAR in this situation. However I guarantee the conspiracy theorists will misrepresent the overturning of the first penalty as anti Arsenal bias. The whole idea that Arsenal is targeted seems every bit as unbelievable to me as the far right and QAnon conspiracy theories about a rigged presidential election

    1. In fairness to ESR, it looks like there is a fitness issue there. It was telling that he was taken off with what looked like a muscle problem. To reiterate my point above, putting him wide on the left is limiting his choice of movement, which in turn makes him easier to nullify. I don’t think Arteta has worked out how to play both him and MO in the same side.

      1. Arteta shouldn’t be playing ESR and Ødegaard in the same side. Hopefully facts on the ground will put an end to that.

        1. The thing you have to wonder about is whether or not MO will end up a permanent transfer. If he’s just here for 3 months then there is an argument for getting as much value for money as possible. If he ends up an Arsenal player, then really you have to have solved this line up issue. To not get the maximum out of a talent like ESR would be a mistake.
          As I said previously, at some stage I’d like to see how MO shapes up playing deeper in midfield. He seems to have the necessary technique and engine to do a good job. Part of Arsenal’s problems this season has been to get the ball forward out of defence. He has the talent to keep possession, but playing the ball forward into gaps. Might be the perfect partner for Partney.

    2. “Smith Rowe may have hit the rookie wall that dozens and dozens of our academy players not named Saka have crashed into over the years. They start out really well but the league seems to figure out what they are trying to do when there is a bit of game film to analyze and they hit a plateau when the initial adrenaline surge wears off and never really are able to replicate the success they have in the first few games.”
      ___________________________

      You totally made up this “rookie wall” stuff.

      And who are these “dozens and dozens of our academy players” who dominated early in the season and then faded in the second half?

    3. like you said, you didn’t see the game. fyi, emile came off just before halftime with an injury.

      for some ungodly reason, arteta thought it a good idea to deploy smith rowe as a striker. he’s a center midfielder so he did what i expected…just like i wouldn’t expect a cat to fetch.

  4. man, did y’all see what pepe did to that young boy in the first half? he was killing that kid live on tv and nobody bothered to help or even call the police…what a shame, the people in our society. seriously, that kid is gonna need some time on the couch when he reflects on the day he met nicolas pepe…a nightmare in broad daylight.

    tim, i just read the previous thread and today is why i disagree with you on our center forward. you’re absolutely right when you praise aubameyang for his movement. i’ve never disagreed with you on that. there’s a big difference between aubameayng’s movement and lacazette’s. auba’s movement facilitates him receiving the ball behind the defense and scoring and that’s about it..this is the movement of a striker. lacazette’s movement facilitates the team getting forward and playing in the opposition’s final third; penetration.

    for years, i’ve made this point: when auba plays center forward, aubameyang scores more. when lacazette plays center forward, arsenal scores more. the same thing happened at dortmund when lewandowski was playing center forward as opposed to aubameyang. with lewandowski, goals were scored by lewa, auba, reus, kagawa, mkhi, gotze, kehl, etc. after lewa went to bayern, auba’s goals nearly doubled but the teams goals were reduced about 30%.

    there’s a special skill set to facilitate the attack as a center forward. in my opinion, the most important is you have to be able to win the ball and keep the ball high up the pitch. this also includes everything from the timing of when you show, making space for others, playing with your back to goal, winning free kicks, etc. you bring others into the play into the opposition’s final third. this is a clear advantage arsenal has when laca leads the line opposed to aubameyang. likewise, you’re not relying on one player to be the hero all the time. he can count on team mates to save the day. lastly, you’re not defending as much when you can keep the ball in the opponents half.

    1. Poor Thomas!

      Hope he doesn’t have recurring nightmares of Pepe turning him inside out.

    2. Josh – I’m intrigued by this insight – thanks. I waver on this debate. I have a soft spot for Laca and believe he doesn’t get the credit he’s due. I fully agree that our buildup is impaired with Auba invovled. He tends to turn over the ball when asked to be the hold up man. That can result in us struggling to progress the ball out from the back or into the final third. Laca clearly helps us solve this problem. That said, Laca just doesn’t find the spaces Auba does and goals are simply the most valuable thing a striker (or any player) can provide. I hope/assume Arteta is making selections based on how he expects the game to go and whether we will have lots of possession against a team that sits back – in which case Auba’s movement in the box is crucial. Against a team that presses, maybe we use Laca centrally to help in build up and progression? In those games, Auba can play wide or we use Pepe on the left to facilitate build up.

      1. i hear you, lagunner. goals are precious. however, to score goals, you need chances. when laca is leading the line, arsenal have more chances, which leads to more goals. i could care less whether laca scores them or the other team. btw, despite being continually dropped, laca still leads the team in goals. we can’t forget that lacazette knows exactly where the back of the net is.

        there’s this popular belief that your best goal scorer should play more centrally. i can agree, as long as your best goal scorer is also your best center forward. we all saw theo and alexis try and fail. there are a few center forwards like lewandowski, kane and dzeko, just to name a few, who are prolific finishers. the priority is that they’re good center forwards first. however, you don’t have to be the most prolific to be a good center forward.

        when aubameyang won the golden boot in england, he wasn’t a center forward but that didn’t stop him winning the golden boot. in fact, he was in a 3-way tie for the golden boot with salah and mane and neither of them were center forwards either. messi and cristiano are the most prolific scorers of this generation and they weren’t center forwards. what’s true is that all of these players benefited greatly from good center forward play done by someone else. why can’t aubameyang?

        i don’t think it should be a choice of auba or laca. they’ve proven they can play together and they should. if we all accept the fact that aubameyang does not have to be harry kane or alan shearer to be great, things are clearer.

  5. I didn’t see this one, just the MOTD highlights and analysis. By all accounts we were impressive, Willian eye-catching for a change, the team pressing high in threes and fours, setting traps, full of energy.

    When I saw Xhaka and Elneny next to each other again in the lineup I feared the worst. Does anyone who saw the game have an opinion on how come we managed to be so progressive with those two in midfield? Did something change up top to help them? Or did we get possession in their half by pressing and winning the ball back rather than by progressing it from our half?

    1. i don’t know why elneny is talked about as if he’s a completely useless and ineffective player. bottom line, he keeps the ball and he doesn’t hide.

      on the previous thread, tim made the hypothetical that arteta believes possession is one of the best forms of defense. mikel may value elneny’s judicious use of the ball, meaning he’s not always searching for glory by making low-percentage forward passes. even if he completes the passes, a good player recognizes what happens next. there are passes that can be completed that will result in a turnover because the guy receiving the ball is surrounded or isolated from his team mates and is about to get kicked. those are bad tactical forward passes.

      elneny seems to do what the game needs. if that means being patient and switching the point of attack instead of being progressive, that’s what he does. the game is 90 minutes long… there’s plenty of time to make forward passes. every pass doesn’t have to be a game winner. you spend the 90 minutes looking for that game-winning pass. the ability to recognize when it’s not on is the true skill.

      this is some stuff i made up… or, as tim would say, what i believe.

      1. that’s a fair assessment.

        it’s also fair to say that he and Xhaka slow the game down. the difference when Partey plays is remarkable. that’s what I believe!

        1. no question, there’s clear daylight between partey and xhaka or elneny. however, with partey just coming back from injury, what are you gonna do? the decision to not play him the full 90 seemed reasonable. what did surprise me is the decision to bring off elneny instead of xhaka, who’s played every minute of every game. likewise, i liked what i saw with elneny and partey together against manchester united…they were very balanced.

          arsenal only paid £5 million for elneny. they’d be hard-pressed to find someone significantly better than him for that money…especially, someone willing to play the role he’s playing for the team.

          1. I’m not down on Elneny as an individual player, he reminds me a little of Flamini who I loved, although Flamini was more combative and versatile. I’ve just noticed that we normally struggle to progress the ball with the Xhakelny combo, as both of them like to have the game in front of them, and don’t like so much showing for the ball between the lines and receiving on the half turn. That in turn forces Odegaard, Saka, ESR or whoever is in front of them to come deeper, which means in turn they have to link up really well with each other.

        2. It was reported in The Athletic that one of the reasons that Partey wanted to sign for Arsenal was to play alongside Xhaka.

      2. I agree Auba and Laca have played well together. I just don’t remember seeing Auba and Laca playing well together IN ARTETA’S SYSTEM. As I said, I’m biased toward Laca playing that CF connecting role. I was mystified when Laca went to the bench after what I believed was a good run with ESR at 10, Saka on the right and I think Pepe on the left. But I don’t see how Auba stays out of the lineup for significant stretches. I am, however, glad that we are having discussions about which players score the most goals as opposed to the conversations about why we don’t score any – as was the case in November. Feels like we are starting to have options.

        BTW Is it your gut that tells you we score more goals/create more chances with Laca upfront, or is there statistical backup?

        1. lagunner, i have absolutely zero stats to quantify my position; it’s all gut! well, not all gut…we know what we see.

          1. I trust my eyes and gut first, especially when it comes to football. That’s why I come here, to get schooled by Tim and his #&%$!! stats.

    2. Leicester were really tired and slow. Though, that said, their defensive stats looked pretty average for their season so I have to say it’s another nail in the coffin for defensive stats telling us much about a game (other than the style a team chooses to play – which I try to say EVERY time I talk about defensive stats).

      1. the amount of changes arteta was able to make and the quality he had available on sunday (that leicester couldn’t match) is not insignificant; a big “advantage arsenal!”

        as for defensive stats, i don’t know how you would begin to use them. other than shots and goals conceded, what else could defensive stats definitively tell you? even xg is subjective.

        1. Takes me back to the discussions around Arsenal’s passivity in defence – the fact that we do relatively few of the countable defensive actions – tackles, interceptions, blocks, clearances etc. – doesn’t necessarily mean that we are not actively defending. I guess if you are controlling space, that should show up in terms of allowing the opposition fewer chances, fewer key passes etc. but statistically there’s so much that’s hard to count and therefore hard to measure. And as Tim says, individual stats are neither good nor bad, they just illustrate a defensive style.

          Part of my day job used to be working with organisations, especially monitoring and evaluation teams, on what key inputs, outputs or actions the org should be measuring in order to understand whether or not they were doing a good job. It’s much harder than you think (when you don’t have profit as a bottom line), especially in dynamic systems where success depends on the interactions and relationships between many individual parts, rather than the parts themselves.

          At the moment we rely on basic counting of overall team actions which says nothing about relationships between different elements of the team. Systems dynamics view would be that you try to measure relationships rather than actions, but I don’t know how you would get to that place in football. In MOTD analysis you get very nice visual illustrations of, say how a midfield four stay compact, when they draw lines between the players that move around as the players move. But I don’t know of any statistical analysis that can illustrate those relationships. You can see some kind of attempt to do this by categorising different types of pass and showing pass maps and combinations between certain players, but it’s not really getting to the heart of it. I’m emphatically not a statistician but there might be some kind of quotient or coefficient that you could come up with about internal team interactions that might be interesting.

          I think it’s a fascinating subject but then I’m a bit odd.

        2. xG isn’t “subjective” in the pejorative form of the word. it is a stat collected by humans watching a game and deciding an action fits a definition. in that sense it’s subjective, but all stats are. xG is calculated using millions of shots from similar areas and with similar conditions and their relative outcomes. saying that it’s “subjective” seems like an attempt to undermine its usefulness and validity. xg is a probability tabulated from known outcomes which makes it a lot less “subjective” than almost any stat.

  6. I’m not that statistically minded but xG is mentioned so much I looked it up to get an idea of what variables are included. I looked at a few sites that explained the xG calculation.

    Perhaps I didn’t understand; what I took away was that it seemed a one sided calculation based on the angle, build-up, position of defenders etc but no allowances made for quality of the opposition, especially the goalkeeper, or what ambient conditions are like, whether it is home or away.

    Do I have that wrong?

    Has the criteria been adjusted this season for the huge rise in teams winning away games because of the lack of fans?

    Can someone help me understand? Thanks

    1. You have that right. The reason why “quality” of opposition or the person taking the shots isn’t factored in is because

      1. There aren’t many players who consistently overperform xG.
      2. Even if there were, it wouldn’t add a lot to the calculation.

      So, let’s say you have Messi taking a shot in open play. Messi is +36 goals over 156 xG for the last 7 years from non-pens. But that is reduced further because he’s +8 from DFKs and +3 from corners. So, he’s actually “just” +25 from all open play shots for 7 years. That’s 808 shots. So, Messi does bump the calculation up 0.03 over all his shots. Now, that’s a once-in-a-lifetime player who is only adding 3% to his scoring. Haaland is also massively overperforming, about 10% per shot. That’s pretty absurd and I suppose if he keeps doing that we might have to have a “Erling Haaland xG model”. But for most players there’s either virtually no difference (Cristiano Ronaldo is 1/2 of 1% overperforming per shot) or there isn’t enough data to be really reliable (Haaland has only taken 82 shots, which is a pretty small sample).

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