I watched Arsenal lose 1-0 to Everton in dispassionate complete belief, in other words: I could totally believe this was happening and probably couldn’t care less.
It’s not that I don’t love Arsenal, it’s that even going into this match, the chances that Arsenal would qualify for the Champions League through the normal route (finishing top 4) was less than 1%. And even the odds of getting into the Europa League (assuming that Man City win the League Cup tomorrow and that Arsenal finish 6th) was 5%. And to do that, we needed to beat Everton without a starting forward and two reserve fullbacks.
Not unpredictably, Arsenal created very little in the match. 14 shots isn’t terrible but no big chances and a total xG of something between 0.9 and 0.7 – which is inflated by the 6 shots Arsenal took from outside the box which had no chance of going in. I know that technically a shot from outside the box is between 2% and 4%, and I even know that Thomas Partey’s career stats from outside the box outperform xG but when I look at the utter lack of quality in those shots he was taking yesterday I feel justified in saying “no chance”.
To Arteta’s credit, Everton also didn’t create anything. That’s Arteta’s first commandment in a sense: defend first. And that he does seem to get from the players, even if it’s typically a passive defense which drives me nuts. But it’s a delicate balance. One small error can undo 90 minutes of decent play. Football’s always like that though! And yesterday the fairly decent Leno chucked one into his own net.
That Leno isn’t as great as Emi Martinez has been this year (Martinez has made errors but has been the much better shot stopper) will do nothing to quell the debate over whether Arsenal did the right thing. Keepers are more than just shot stopping and post-shot expected goals numbers. Does the keeper fit the system you’re trying to play? The short answer is Martinez is a great fit for Aston Villa and Leno probably the better fit for Arsenal, though obviously it’s impossible to say that definitively and that’s why the debate will never end.
What was a bit surprising was how often the Arsenal midfield looked like they didn’t know what they were doing and Pepe looked a adrift on the left. The reason this is a surprise is because when I look at the stats, Granit Xhaka was spraying passes all over the field, leading the team in progressive passing and carries. Both players played on the left but the gaping hole was with Dani Ceballos. Time and again Ceballos was getting himself into unusual and useless positions. And when he did get on the ball, his final pass to Pepe was usually poor – behind the man, rather than to him or leading him.
What bugged me about that was that this turned into criticism for Partey. Thomas was left alone in midfield – a new tactic that Arteta has been deploying for a few matches – which left him exposed defensively and since Dani was taking up weird positions, Thomas struggled to find him. Xhaka passed to Dani 26 times (and Dani passed back 19) while Partey only found Dani 9 times and Partey only found Pepe 3 times. I know that Partey mostly plays on the right but if he’s going to be deployed as the CDM, which he was for huge stretches in this match, the structure around him needs to work better.
And while we are on the topic.. Joe Willock scored another goal for Newcastle. That brings his total to 4 goals for Newcastle, three off the bench. Arsenal fans are right in saying that Arsenal haven’t scored hardly any goals from midfield (though we have also hardly scored any goals from forwards) and that we could use a goal-scoring midfielder. The problem is that I’ve watched almost every Willock game so far this season and he’s an odd player. He’s ostensibly deployed in midfield but he often disappears. He can go long stretches in a game before you see him on the ball. It’s even weirder because when he does get on the ball, he’s got great touch and is a good dribbler. But you can see why a guy like Ceballos is preferred: because he usually demands the ball in tight spaces (not as much yesterday, but..).
As you all know I’m a huge fan of Willock. I’ve almost always sung his praises and defended him from critics. Maybe I’m too easily convinced by a midfielder with great touch but I’ve always thought he had a high ceiling. But watching him at Newcastle has muddied my thinking. Let’s be honest here, he’s not playing midfield for them. He comes on, plays a lot of defense, does a few things in offense, and gets himself into great goalscoring positions. He disappears from games, only to pop up and score.
And you know what? That’s exactly what Arsenal needed yesterday! And Arsenal need homegrown players. I think you (the club) have to ask how much teams are going to offer for him and whether we need that money more than we need the player. Very much like what happened with Emi Martinez. Transfermarkt values him at about £15m, Arsenal fans think we will get £30m for him, which might happen I guess. The question then is what can we do with that £30m and will it be better than keeping Willock? For example, if we get £30m for Willock and use that to buy Ødegaard then that’s great business. But £15m or so? I’d rather keep him. But I’m biased!
Well it’s been quite a week and here we are talking about football. The Arsenal fans living in England put on a really great demonstration before the game and if you get a chance, you should check out some of the fan media. As you know I’m Kroenke Out and have been for a while so I love to see so many people on board. But my cynical self worries that he will never leave (Newcastle fans have been protesting Mike Ashley since at least 2014). I’m not saying don’t protest, but rather that I suspect that when he pumps a few bucks into the club this summer, a lot of people will quit complaining. And when the “UEFA Super League” happens with almost the exact same structure as this one, there might be a few angry voices but there will be even more voices demanding Arsenal at the table.
Ironically, if the new Champions League rules go forward Arsenal are one of the teams who would most likely benefit from the two legacy places. But in order to do that we need to stay in UEFA competitions. That means even if we get dumped out of the Europa League, we need to play in their new European Conference League. That means we need to finish 6th or 7th.
HAHAHAHA. This truly is the worst timeline. Because you know that Stan, Josh, and Arteta are all aware of that. Ok, well Arteta is.
I too am a fan of Willock. We’ve lacked goals from midfield ever since Ramsey was let go and Joe is the closest thing to him we have. In my opinion we shouldn’t even think about selling him below 30m. If we can get a price for him that would get us Odegaard, then yes.
And for the sake of my nerves, can we send Ceballos back right now? He’s infuriating to watch. Takes so long on the ball. What good he does doesn’t outweigh all the negatives about this game in my opinion.
Partey’s best position seems to be base of midfield in a 433. Willock as one of the other two in midfield seems to make sense.
Why we loaned him out at the exact time we brought Partey in is a mystery.
Willock with a good coach could go places. Needs help improving his concentration. May be he’ll become more of a forward as his career evolves? Scoring goals is the most difficult thing in football. He’s got composure and cojones. I’d take his contributions over Ceballos and Thomas this season. Neither have excelled considering their pedigrees when they joined. Some (most?) of that is down to the manager’s systems and tactics but I’d give them both no more than a 5/10 for their team impact.
When Tuchel took over on January 26 Chelski were 2 points ahead of us. That gap is now 12.
Keep an eye on Valerian Ismael. He’s taken Barnsley who have no business being in the top half of the Championship into the Premier League play-offs. Arguably the best performance of any coach in English football this season. I bet he’d get a better tune out of this Arsenal squad.
Tim.
This has been a lost season in terms of our PL performance. I am not suggesting Arteta has been great but I dont think there is any manager who could have done more. At the start of this season we needed mid 20’s in goals from Auba and we needed Willian to be something like the guy he was last season if we wanted to have a chance to compete for a Europa league spot. With those 2 both crashing we had no chance. Saka has been a good story and Smith-Rowe has outperformed expectations but neither of those guys brings as much end product as we need in the penalty box. Pepe has disappointed again. Laca is ok but he is going to finish as a low teens scorer for a 4th season in a row. You can have good games or short runs of good form but over 38 games in the current PL I don’t care if you are Pep, Klopp or even Wenger at his best you can’t expect a top 6 finish with that group as your core attacking players
This is a top 3 squad with Pep, Klopp or Wenger at his best. Only major mitigating circumstance is Partey being injured for big part of first half.
Other than that, the manager is seriously under-performing. Or learning on the job, which is natural for someone as inexperienced as him. It was a bad appointment.
Over a 38 game season there are some basic weaknesses in your squad that can’t be overcome. However, I think its an accomplishment that we won the FA cup last year and we are in the semifinals of the Europa league with a realistic chance to make next years champions league.
I am a bit late to the post about the Super League being dead yet, but I wanted to lay out a few points on that.
From your writing in the past week, Tim, you paint UEFA as some sort of mafia, or at least an independent body that governs football on the European continent. It is not. What it is, is an association made up of 55 members who vote on the people that will run it, but can still call egregious calls into question or even have them investigated and annulled. Just like FIFA, UEFA has those that it is accountable to, and that’s the member nations.
The reason I believe that the Super League will never be, even 25 years from now is that it is a selfish idea that can only work in a country that does not have sports regulated by associations beyond their borders. Basketball in the US does not have continental competition, so it does not have to adjust or sacrifice anything to get what they want. Baseball and the NFL are the same. Franchise concepts only work within a single country or with agreement amongst other associations who will not allow one side to have an overwhelming advantage.
In having said that, I have witnessed a Super League come into place with Super Rugby. For super rugby to come into play though, they started something from a situation where nothing existed, and got three national associations to agree on all the specifics and details. With more time, the association’s were able to alter the competition and change rules, add teams from Argentina and Japan, and subsequently eliminate teams from other associations, as well as Japan. It was always a negotiation for anything to be put into place.
Now, in football, there may be richer nations and leagues that have more pull for players, attention and bring in more money, but every UEFA member’s vote counts, and equally so. Every member is looking out for their league and the future of their football. That is why every change to benefit the bigger clubs, like the new reforms to the Champions League only got through because the reforms also have some benefit to every member nation of UEFA. The increase in sides for the EURO was to ensure that situations like England not qualifying in 2008, or the Dutch in 2016, but that increase means more m emebers make it it through or at least get the chance to grace that stage.
The Super League is a closed competition and the lost of sides you put up, Tim, come from only 5 member associations. Are the solidarity payments going to benefit all 55 members from this Super League? Probably not, so how can UEFA give permission for such a competition? How do you convince 50 member associations to vote that through if they get nothing from it? Brown envelopes maybe? That’s how FIFA works where members with no chance of qualifying for the World Cup have as much say as those who participate in voting extremely important issues through.
I do not see any legal ways that the Super League can ever exist, unless the club’s branch out on their own, leave their national associations, leave FIFpro, and probably leave their national aspirations. Does anyone see that happening?
I get the fear, but at the end of the day, unlike American sports, football is at its very core a sport that is controlled by too many interdependent pieces for a Super League to just appear out of nowhere. These clubs played their cards and the world called their bluff, not for the “Soul of football “, but for their relevance in a sport of billions. Arsenal are important, but not essential and so are the rest of the club’s. They are not special, they just make more money and are popular, but the overall direction of football on the international stage is much more complicated than the simplified American franchise model.
The systems that run football are like the clothes we wear. They went through so many different transformation where the non essentials were cut off or left out and new, more useful concepts were put into place, until now, where we have complete attire built for efficiency and effectiveness in whatever they are needed for. Football is in a place where certain things are not even discussed, they are understood, and the Super League is looking to skip all of that history and organisation.
How can it it ever happen? How do they do it without turning their competition into what we see during the pre-season international champions cup, or whatever it is called? How do they convince UEFA’s 55 members to authorise this? How do they convince their national associations which are run by elected officials, who represent the interests of clubs and fans, to authorise this? Even with solidarity payments? How do they play in their own cities which are made up of fans for whom these clubs were built, especially since this whole Super League thung is based on international fans? Maybe not Arsenal, but the Milan fans will most likely burn the stadium down and stop any games from happening. How do you even get the German clubs into this competition when the club’s are owned by the fans?
More simply though, we know how it works in America, but how does this ever get the green light in Europe, with how European and global football is run?
Excellent and convincing: they wanted to import a 1 nation concept into a multinational environment. That’s what tricked JP Morgan and those big clubs into believing it could work. Amazing that in an era where a few tech savvy people can influence an election, a monster like JP Morgan couldn’t use big data to profile the reaction of the end users (us). Some heads must have rolled in that venerable institution…
£30 million for willock; a bit-part player for newcastle and even less for arsenal? good luck finding someone willing to pay half of that, especially with covid playing a role. to make it in the premier league as a center mid, you need more than good technique and work ethic. you need good tactical skill. without that, it doesn’t matter how good your touch or work rate is. finding a talented player in england is easy. finding a talented hard working player who’s also smart enough to break down defenses is more of a challenge. newcastle will appreciate him because he’s proving pivotal in their campaign to remain in the premier league.
thw14 is right. with a good manager, arsenal are a top 3 team. people go on about thomas tuchel; sorry, but as a dortmund fan, i can assure you that tuchel is a tool. what’s more accurate is jorginho’s statement about lampard the other day, essentially saying he wasn’t ready to manage a top team like chelsea. it’s the same for arteta, who’s come with less experience than lampard went to chelsea with. just like the previous paragraph, where i said it takes more than talent to be a good center mid. it takes more than talent to be a good manager. arteta lacks the experience…which is why arsenal are closer to bottom 3 than top 4 and, with 5 games left, have already lost more home games than at any other time in their premier league history.
I feel like we have messed up so much in squad building over the last few years that selling Willock would be another step in the direction of further mismanagement.
What we have at Arsenal, is a group of young players that range from being potential world beaters, to solid Premier League competitors. These players have experience of not only playing together, but also winning a title together, and the best things is that they cost us nothing.
We have Jordi Osei Tutu, Maitland Niles, Smith Rowe, Willock, Nelson, Eddie, Saka and added to them is Martinelli.
I hoped that we could keep our competent youth as cheap back up to the first team squad. This reduces the amount of purchase that you have to make to build the squad. It also helps you avoid mistakes like Pepe when you prioritise players like Saka. Willock could provide us a saving on a player like Ceballos, who I love but can see that it is not working for him in England.
I hope we do not turn our noses up at our own development products who pout in solid, if not spectacular performances in the very league we are struggling in.
It is my view that behind every purchased starting 11, there should be an 11 fro the academy, supplemented by cheap and talented you purchases like Martinelli.
Willock will not drag the quality of Arsenal down if we play him as a rotational option or as an option when we have injuries and suspensions. Nor will Eddie or others that we have. The problems come from a bloated squad of players like Willian taking up the minutes that should be going to players like Nelson.
I say keep all of them. Sell those that are senior bench warmers and rebuild this squad with our own youth as a foundation. They are competent enough to perform at this level.
This. + Sign Odegaard.
we all love the academy kids. a problem is many of them simply aren’t good enough for arsenal, however, they’re good enough to have a professional career. so, do you potentially stunt a player’s development for the sake of having him sit on the arsenal bench? will 16-year old fabregas choose to sit on the barcelona bench or move to arsenal where he’ll play? can you get an 18-year old serge gnabry to stay or will he got to werder bremen, where he will play? will kdb sit on the chelsea bench or go to wolfsburg, where he will play? it’s not a unilateral decision. the players also have to choose to stay.
how about the young guys coming behind the current crop of youngsters. do you keep nketiah or make way for balogun? do you keep theo walcott or make way for serge gnabry? can you keep gnabry? do you extend a fat kid named harry kane? it’s not all black and white, brother.
Generally yes most youth players are boot good enough, but right now we actually have players that are talented enough to keep and utilize. They are also not a Cesc type of talent so we also do not have that problem. If Balogun is as good as we think, then will he be fine sitting on the bench? If he is and he is better than Eddie, then there is no choice right? You keep who is better, and let go those that are not as good, as long as the good ones can be patient with opportunities.
It is hard and definitely not a black and white decision, but when an anomaly is right in front of your eyes, you make use of it instead of throwing away a blessing just because it generally does not happen.
All I am saying is that as a club we hit the lottery in terms of development. What we have is a group of competent squad players and young superstars. We have to use them instead of spending money on the likes of Welbeck, Lucas Perez, Joel Campbell, Elneny, Willian and etc. It is cost effective with the same outcome, and a way that is being used consistently well in Germany.
So yes, in general it might not be black and white, but right now it kind of is.
Arsenal have a MAJOR squad problem. Let’s look at this from a position-by-position perspective.
Keeper: Leno is great, after that, it’s not unfair to say that we have guys who shouldn’t be playing at Premier League level. Backup needed.
Right Back: we have three RBs and none of them good all around. Bellerin is best going forward but he’s lost a step and can’t defend properly. Soares is older and a decent backup with good defense. Chambers is such a weird player in that when he does get forward he might be our best attacking player but he’s slower than a molasses’ tit in January and he can’t defend anyone faster than Joelinton. Oh and Maitland-Niles.. I wish he would accept the RB role but he has dreams of playing half-assed CM at some mid-table team. Oh hey, he could play for Arsenal!
RCB: I like Holding, he is maybe our best RCB but he needs a stellar LCB next to him. David Luiz has balsam knees and makes more mistakes than Richard Keys. Maybe Chambers is the RCB of Arsenal’s bleak ass future.
LCB: oh boy. Well, the good news is that we have two guys who are left footed.
LB: Tierney is great but I’m starting to worry about his fitness. It’s imperative we get a real backup there. Someone who can challenge him for the starting spot.
DM: We don’t have one.
CM: Partey is good. Xhaka is a tugboat. Ceballos has effectively destroyed his transfer value. The guys on loan haven’t been great. I guess we should pin our hopes on Azeez.
AM: ok, so we have Smith Rowe who I love but after that? The dream is to get Ødegaard but Real Madrid would be morons to let him go at this point.
LW: Smith Rowe has deputized there and it’s ok. Auba is not great there. Saka is good there but we need him on the right.
CF: Lacazette – I wouldn’t offer a contract to him in a million years. Yep, he’s hard working and I love him for that. Yep, he presses. Yep, he scores some goals. But he’s getting older and he’s not a top-tier center forward. Martinelli could be a good CF but we don’t know because Arteta won’t or can’t play him there.
RW: Saka has that spot on lock, which is bad because he should be on the left. Willian has been a disastrous signing and will only get worse, and yes I already know he’s our most prolific playmaker. That says more about Arsenal than it does about his talent. Pepe needs to be moved on. Nelson is never played.
This squad needs 200m in investment over several years to be in contention for top 4.
i won’t speak on everyone but lets talk about lacazette. despite arteta continually dropping him, laca is still arsenal’s leading scorer by a mile. likewise, the attack is clearly more potent with him leading the line than anyone else. laca has played champions league for his entire career before coming to arsenal. the club spent a boatload for him, yet you’d let him go. arsenal’s problem isn’t lacazette, but let’s pretend like it is.
please share with me your long list of center forwards who are categorically better than lacazette, who would want to come to arsenal, and who would make arsenal a more likely champions league contender for a decent price. if you can’t produce a list, how in heaven’s name would the decision to release lacazette be good management of arsenal football club?
Lacazette turns 30 next month. And among our forwards we already have Auba (and Willian) over 30 and on big salaries.
It doesn’t matter what he brings to the team, we have to sell him. If we can’t find an adequate replacement then adapt the team / set up to compensate accordingly until we can.
Josh and THW14 I copied and pasted Tim’s squad analysis in the comment above. I understand that fans often over rate their own players but to suggest this squad as currently constructed has top 3 potential is an overestimation that is almost beyond credibility. In the last sentence, I think Tim underestimated how much money we would need to spend to rebuild a top 4 contender.
Bill, THW14 and JOSHUAD. How about a comparison in terms of player for player with other top four contenders to see where our squad ranks because the argument can be true for both sides in isolation.
there is no legitimate argument to be had. can you honestly say the likes of aston villa, west ham, tottenham, everton, leicester city, and leeds have better players than arsenal? nuts!
it’s not the fault of the players that arsenal are closer to the bottom three than the top 4. people were trying to make the same foolish argument about chelsea…then they got a new manager. arteta is the same manager who we all thought was about to get sacked in december. he got a stroke of luck with a few results but arsenal have reverted to the mean, losing at home to a bad everton team.
We have a top 3 squad.
agreed. what we don’t have is a top 3 manager.
In case anyone thought this was going to go away, the circus is still very much in town:
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/apr/24/perez-says-super-league-clubs-cannot-leave-as-manchester-united-fans-protest?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other
Josh.
The league is much stronger now then it was when Arsene was finishing in the top 4 year after year. The fact that Arsenal is a bigger team and we can say without thinking that our group of players is more talented then teams like Everton, Spurs, Leicester, West Ham are gone. Besides other then Leicester which of those teams you mentioned is actually going to finish in the top 4. Those are the teams we are competing with for mid table places. To suggest that we compare talent wise with Man City, Man U, Chelsea, Liverpool and we belong in top 4 is completely outrageous.
do you believe teams like everton, west ham, and leicester city have better players than arsenal? i mentioned those teams because they’re all ahead of arsenal in the table. do you believe it’s because they have better players?
you mentioned that fans overrate certain players. it’s possible that you overrate arteta as a manager.
understand, i want arteta to succeed but something he’s doing needs to change.
Is anyone really going to suggest that Brendan Rodgers at Leicester City is a top manager?
he’s certainly better than arteta. he was good at swansea city and a bit unlucky at liverpool.
more importantly, he’s been coaching since he was 20; arteta was still only ten years old. rodgers is young but very experienced for a man his age.
We have a few players who are nice complementary players who are facilitators but you but build top 4 teams around difference making match winning players. Add Kane and Son to Arsenal and we might be competing for the top 4 but with Auba’s skills fading we don’t have any players like that. We don’t have an Alexis Sanchez or 2015 Mesut Ozil on this squad. We spent $70M on Pepe hoping to find that match winner.
auba’s skills haven’t faded. he’s had a tough year. first, he was made captain. i don’t like strikers being captain because the hardest thing to do in football is to score goals. the last thing you need is your striker focused on anything other than scoring goals….such as trying to lead the team. his mom’s been sick. he’s been sick. arteta has asked him to be a center forward where he’s always been a striker. he’s had a tough year. i’m sure that he’ll be just fine when things settle down.
His conversion numbers are still up there with the best. He’s just had fvck all service.
I think the jury is out on whether Auba is fading, or just going through a bad spell. But at his age, the longer it goes on, the more it looks like a fade.
If everyone was healthy and performing as well as they could be for all the teams in the PL, we might have the 4th best squad. After City, Liverpool and Chelsea. Based on what we’ve seen so far from these players, I’m not sure how you argue we’re ahead of any of those.
But we’ve got a whole lot of ifs in the squad, and with the manager. I’m afraid I’ve ended up about where Tim seems to be relative to the PL this season. I just feel meh. It wasn’t really that bad a performance given all the players we had out.
On the positive side, the Spotify guy buying Arsenal would seem to have a lot of potential to be a step in the right direction. But I’d be really surprised if it happened.
On Auba: one cannot “fade” so fast. He went from excellent to mediocre from one season to the other. There is something else than age at work: service indeed, style of play, structure (all down to Arteta) or psychological issues (family, integration?). He will be back, I think.
I disagree with top 3. I think we have the 5th best squad. Spuds are slightly behind as their midfield is meh and their defence past it. Still we should be competing for a place in the top 4 this season, especially considering Pool’s injuries and Lampard’s limiting effect at Chelsea.
Leicester +13, WHU +9, THS +7, Everton +6, Leeds +1. The size of these gaps and the teams above us is embarrassing
Leeds were in the championship last season FFS and Bamford is their striker. WHU are managed by Moyes who is the definition of yesterday’s man. Spuds sacked Maureen because they are only 7 points ahead of us (that’s not true but you get my drift).
We don’t have a top 3 squad, Man Utd, Chelsea, Liverpool and City all have better / more expensive squads, and I don’t think that’s controversial. Spurs are roughly comparable to us. As far as Everton, Leicester, Villa, West Ham and Wolves go, I think we should be beating them all, but there are still a lot of good players in there who would get starts for us (You could consider any out of Vardy, Iheanacho, Maddison, Barnes, Ndidi, Tielemans, Castagne, Soyuncu and Evans from Leciester alone).
Also, I agree with Bill that you need your senior players to play to their level, and too many of ours have been disappointing or inconsistent.
But also even if the squad is not top 3, I don’t agree that it’s down to lack of talent alone, Auba, Laca, Pepe et al are plenty talented. It’s more a lack of coherence, balance and depth, and that is because of 5+ years of chaotic recruitment and squad management, something that Devlin went through in detail before. Our first 11 should probably beat most other teams, but it quickly gets sketchy.
Take midfield for example. The churn by my count over the last 3 seasons is 13 midfielders out, 11 in. Xhaka has been the only constant. We are now at the point where if a Real Madrid player hurts his ankle, another Real Madrid player starts and our attack sucks for four matches. It’s a totally unacceptable situation for this club and the level we aspire to.
I don’t know if all of this absolves Arteta for his mistakes, or the board for hiring him instead of someone more experienced. But we are in no way a top 3 squad being held back by the manager.
perhaps i misunderstood what was being suggested. i’m not saying that arsenal has one of the top 3 rosters in the league. i’m saying the roster is good enough for arsenal to be a top 3 side… if they were better managed. i certainly don’t think arsenal are so far away on the player side that they need £200 million spent to get into the top 4.
bill, sometimes i hate your arguments. it’s like you’ve take a stat and try to make an entire argument because that one stat supports your argument. however, you never use qualifiable evidence we see when we watch arsenal play to support your argument. it doesn’t mean you’re wrong. it just makes it difficult to take your argument seriously; like you just made some shit up. there’s nothing wrong with that, as i make stuff up all the time. however, i announce it as something made up. respect the fact that we watch the arsenal games too. there’s no evidence that suggests that auba’s skill are on the wane. how about considering there are alternative explanations that make sense of why his goal output has dropped off other than your theory.
Josh.
It seems to me that by far the biggest reason we have struggled this year is because we are on pace to score on 50 goals this season. I recognize that is 1 stat that I am focused on but that’s a very important stat which directly influences our results
Perhaps there is another reason which explains Auba’s bad year. However in my experience when a player of his age has a really bad year the most likely explanation is the skills are starting to fade. Just like the debates we had about Ozil. You hang your hat on the most likely explanation
high-lighting the anemic number of goals arsenal has scored this season is very legit. however, to declare it’s because one player is on the wane is not. all strikers miss sitters but is auba missing chances at an unusual rate? the answer to that is no, he’s not. the real problem is he’s not getting many chances and that’s down to arteta.
a more legit interrogative is how is the team being managed or what seems to be a pattern of play or strategy where a better player would thrive. tim mentioned it months ago that arsenal were finishing at a rate that was unsustainable…and this was the only thing keeping arsenal out of the relegation zone. arsenal have played most of the season without a recognized #10 in a system that requires a #10; that was arteta. they’ve played with center forwards who weren’t proper center forwards; that was arteta. despite having fullbacks available, arsenal have a center mid playing left back; that was arteta. bottom line, the strategy was poor. arteta was counting on the player’s being brilliant. his job is to give them good strategic direction. any idiot can dick-ride a player’s talent.
even with emery, we all knew how arsenal were trying to score goals. can you see any pattern with arteta other than the crazy number of crosses he employed? how can you blame the players? auba and laca have been fantastic goal scorers/golden boot winners in their respective leagues prior to coming to arsenal. pepe is clinical. saka is getting there. arsenal have plenty of ammo. what they need is a manager who knows how to aim and fire that ammo.
Sorry to keep coming back to this, I just think it’s an interesting debate.
I guess I agree that a hypothetical different manager could have taken us to a top 3 finish this season, but I don’t think it’s very realistic. That would have been a significant overperformance.
Arteta has felt the need to rip things up in order to change a complacent culture at Arsenal. For this reason I don’t compare him to, say, Lampard / Tuchel at Chelsea. Lampard had all the resources, an established squad of winners, top quality recruits, and he couldn’t make the team function. Tuchel comes in and turns it around pretty easily. I think he would struggle to do that at Arsenal.
It may be true however that Arteta needed a first job under his belt before this one, so that he could learn from his mistakes.
On Auba, he’s a player who loves to be loved and he’s one of the ones still adapting. I’d be very surprised if he’s not on the wane, but that doesn’t explain this season, which has been difficult for him in lots of ways on and off the pitch. We bought him in his prime however, and his output has declined year on year by about 0.1 goals per 90 since then, so we should expect that to continue, and we should expect more injuries. So high to mid teens instead of low twenties over a full season.
The biggest problem with the squad is we don’t have enough players who we can count on to score. In the game against Everton I don’t think there was a single player who has scored more then 12goals in their entire career. There is no way you can say a clubs squad is top 6 when it’s so incredibly short of goal scoring fire power
Auba has been poor all season. When a player of his age has a season as bad as this the usual explanation is the skills starting to fade. Only time will tell but it would be a mistake and set us up for another failed season if we go into next season planning on him to somehow return to a Golden boot contender
That was supposed to say 12 premier league goals in their career.
When we did the math before this season we built the assumptions around mid 20’s in goals from Auba and some where around 8-10 goals and 8-10 assists from Willian. Both of them fading so quickly is why we are in 10th instead of competing for a Europa league spot.