Arsenal move on in the League Cup

What’s up, hotdog?

I want to thank everyone for their support over the last few days both in the comments sections here and in the personal messages I’ve received in email and on twitter. Arsenal are an amazing club, full of so many good people, that it in a way gives me some measure of hope for our future. Coincidentally, the club itself have recently been providing free advertising for small local businesses in London which is a wonderful gesture. When I used to go to matches I loved going to places like the Tollington and Piebury Corner, usually both on the same day! So, it’s good to see the club using their power to promote those folks. I just hope they get a chance to get to all the local shops.

Nearlty lost amid all that personal business, Arsenal played a match yesterday and won 3-0. I wish I could give you all some insight into the match but it wasn’t carried on any broadcasters here in the States. The only stream I could catch was the one provided by the dot com which was a mise-en-scene of the two Arsenal presenters talking from the press box.

Listening to the descriptions of the match reminded me how much information a match really presents. I’ve done the liveblog for Arseblog before and live streamed some stuff here and on twitter and whenever I do that it’s always felt like I’m only giving you 1/100th of the real story. Even when I take notes for a match all I get are the big points. And I feel like even if you watch a match 2 or 3 times, you miss so much of what happened.

That’s one reason why I love the data from a match. I can often feel like Arsenal pressed a lot in a game just because I saw Auba making a few long pressing runs but then when I look at the data points and see, for example, that Arsenal made just 67 pressures against Burnley (compared to their 160)*. It’s also true that the commentators can drive my perception of a match, even when I know full well that we are all susceptible to being led around like that, I still fall into the trap.

So, I didn’t get much from the match commentary yesterday and when I checked the official site today there were only highlight reels available – which is like looking at someone else’s notes, if they were taking notes on how to build a treehouse and they were already treehouse building experts.

I did have a few observations however. Hey, can’t let lack of knowledge stop me from talking.

Partey starting was a surprise. Given his injury history I would have assumed that he would be rested for Sunday’s big match against Spurs. But Arteta explained the choice after the match saying that it was about keeping Partey’s match rhythm going. I’m not sure what that means. Perhaps it’s about periodization and keeping Partey’s fitness levels up by not letting him have too long a break between matches? Hey, maybe you know!

Nketiah started which was a surprise to some who wanted Balogun to get the look. But Balogun had played just a few days ago with the U23 side and while he was on the bench it was always going to be unlikely to see him start. Arteta also heaped praise on Nketiah after the match saying it was his professionalism and work ethic which were the reasons he started. His goal for the third is a real gem – he side foots the ball in after it’s past his body, so sort of behind him – and is available on the official site.

Some folks don’t want to see Nketiah started because he is almost certainly leaving Arsenal soon. So, they muse, we should prioritize the development of others. But it’s just as logical to showcase what Nketiah can bring to a club to help move him on while we take our time developing the other players.

It’s odd because a few years ago folks were demanding that Nketiah get some starts and now they want him dropped. In a way this rotation of fan love and fan indifference with the young guys can take on a “soup of the day” vibe.

Sections of the Arsenal fanbase can get quite vocal about their thoughts that certain players should be starting week-in and week-out for the Arsenal. I don’t know why, but that never tickled me. Maybe I’m just more passive when it comes to this sort of thing. Or maybe I’m not a “real fan” or I “don’t understand football”. It just seems like it’s really easy to see the top top quality talent and the rest are either big talents who are hard workers or guys who just can’t make it at this level and go on to have careers elsewhere.

Next up in the League Cup is Leeds and that will be a tough match but we can look at that one as we get closer to the day. We’ve got a bigger match to talk about before then, this weekend’s North London Derby on Sunday.

Qq

*These are the actual numbers from the Burnley match. Burnley had 1 pressure for every 4.3 Arsenal touches and Arsenal had 1 pressure for every 8.5 Burnley touches, almost half as many pressures per touch.

11 comments

  1. As I said on the last thread, you didn’t miss much. It was a pretty drab match. Lokonga looked good. I do wonder if he is a bit too much like Partey for them to play together. I like Tavares as well, from an attacking point of view. If you were going to play 3 in midfield, you could almost put him on the left. Laca was painfully slow and didn’t pose a threat whatsoever. He just hasn’t got the pace to get into dangerous positions. He’s playing like a man at the end of his career. As you say, Eddie scored a good “finisher’s” goal but didn’t do much else. I don’t think either of them are the answer to our lack of goals.

  2. I look forward to watching the derby, I’m cautiously optimistic about that game!

    Also, my take on Partey is just to build his match fitness back up. He’s been injured a lot, and his overall stamina is probably not great anymore, so letting him play an extra 60 minutes will hopefully get him more used to a long game and hopefully be able to play the full 90 for the derby. At the same time, I might just be completely wrong and making an embarrassment out of myself, it’s about 50-50 I think.

    My prediction is Xhaka-Partey in midfield with Lokonga replacing the latter an hour-ish into the game. Xhaka tends to come back strong after getting sent off, so I have high hopes.

    COYG!

  3. Great post Tim

    Happy we are thru to the next round of the league cup. Does the league cup winner get a spot in the Europa league. That is certainly something to play for in this competition. I know we did not win a league cup during the Wenger era and I did not follow Arsenal prior to the start of this century. I am sure in our long history we have won the league cup at some point but it would be nice to do it again.

    I completely agree with you about the younger players the fans gravitate towards is like the soup of the day. My own analogy was always the ice cream shop “flavor of the month” but in the end almost none of them has really turned into a difference making player. The fans were really excited about Martinelli but now the hype about him seems to be wearing off. At various times it was Nketiah, Nelson, Willock, Maitland-Niles. I believed in Bendtner and Walcott but my all time favorite was Ox. I truly believed he would be a superstar. Over the years the cast of heavily hyped players like them who never lived up to their potential is well into the triple digits. That does not mean we just give up on trying to develop younger players but I think the club and fans have to be realistic. Its fine to hope for someone like Martinelli or Saka will evolve into top goal scorers but history gives us 100% confirmation that we can’t build our clubs future plans based on the expectation that will happen. I thought that Ox was always on the verge of stardom and if we just give him a little more time he will come good. We put several years into developing players like Ox or Bendtner and in the end it has not worked out as well as we hoped and we lose the production we could have had if we had bought a better player during those years

    1. The number of “experienced” players bought at great expense, who have subsequently failed miserably is also in triple figures:

      Mustafi, Kolasinac, Liechsteiner, Luiz, Willian, Sokratis, Torreira, Mkhitaryan, Perez, Wellbeck, Gervinho, Santos, Park Chu Yung, Squillaci, Sylvestre, Diarra, Gallas, Reyes, Cygan, Richard Wright, Van Bronckhurst, Jeffers, Wiltord, Stepanovs, Suker, Vivas, Wreh, Nasri, Lushzny, Diawara. There was also the Swedish bloke who had a broken back, whose name I can’t remember.

      Do you want me to stop there, or shall I go on?

      Purchases and potential purchases also suffer from the “Ice Cream Shop” syndrome. Look on any Arsenal related website and you will be told in no uncertain fashion who we should be buying, or who we are in “serious talks with”. That changes from week to week. Flavour of the month, like you say. It gets clicks, because people like to read it.

      Does “splashing the cash” necessarily represent a good team building model?

      By the way, we got the Ox from Southampton (12 mil), as we did Walcott (9 mil). Quite considerable sums back in those days. Would you describe that as youth policy? From memory, they went straight into the 1st team.

      1. Brokeback Kallstrom
        Signed for 6 months to “ show ambition “, whereas the only thing it illustrated was ambivalence

      2. Mark, I’ve been using a filtering method at NewsNow Arsenal with their Hide/Highlight Publication feature for many years now. Anytime a site fails expectations (on my personal scale) they get ‘hidden’. Have a very short, select set of sites I ‘see’ daily. When a transfer window rolls around, I keep a second unlogged-in version of it open for all the gossip.

        Helps keep the chaff manageable! 🙃

    2. 87 League Cup, might have been Littlewods or Rumbelows Cup then. Either way, “1-0 down, 2-1 up we f**ked Rushie’s record up”.

      Until then the, at the time, mighty Liverpool had never lost when Rush scored. It was GG’s first trophy and set us on the way back to the big time.

      As a school boy in Islington it was the first trophy I properly remember seeing us win and on Monday morning we finally had something to fling back at both the plastic scousers and Spurs fans.

  4. Arsene used competitions like the early round FA cup, League cup and group stages of the Europa league to give you U23 players a chance to develop. However, as I discussed in the comment above the success of that strategy in terms of developing difference making players has been highly underwhelming. However this year with no EL or CL we don’t have the same fixture congestion and the need to rest the first 11 in league cup games is less critical so I think this is a season we should make a real effort to win the league cup rather then using it as a showcase for developing players.

    1. The League Cup? My earliest recollection of Arsenal at Wembley. Must have been the late 60s. We were playing Swindon, who were in the 3rd Division then, which was about as low as it got. Arsenal hadn’t been in a final for donkey’s years and were red hot favourites. Needless to say, we lost. I can still remember the shame. A bloke called Don Rogers ran the length of the pitch and got the winner. We had a centre half called Ian Ure, who made Senderos look like Pele. I imagine it’s on YouTube somewhere, in black and white. Worth watching just to see the state of the pitch. You could have grown potatoes on it. Apparently, there had been an equestrian event at Wembley the week before and the horses had carved it up. A complete mud heap. Unbelievable. Them was lean years.

    2. The thing is Bill, I do actually agree with you. Very few kids “make the grade”. The statistics bear that out. Unfortunately, the days when we had an Arsene Wenger, who could magically find some “star”, no one had ever heard of, are long gone. Any promising French players are just as likely to end up at Leicester or Wolves.
      Arsenal football club get very impressive match day takings. I sit in club level and watch the amount of money that changes hands. Unfortunately that major source of income dried up over the last year due to Covid. It also can’t compete with the petrodollars available at City or Chelsea, nor the commercial income at United, or even Liverpool.
      When players like ESR and Saka get in the 1st team, it really should be a source of celebration. They shouldn’t be “damned with faint praise”. Their progression sends out a very powerful message to any young kid in the academy and any prospective parent, that there is a future pathway at the club, something that has been desperately lacking for years. I hate to use the phrase “Arsenal DNA”, but it’s gone missing.
      Throwing good money after bad, which is what has basically happened, has got us nowhere. It’s just been an expensive sop to “fans” who like to see a row of noughts at the end of a transfer deal.
      We need an entirely different philosophy and way of operating from what we’ve seen over the last few seasons. Having a productive youth policy would be a step in the right direction. It will be interesting to see if Arteta and Mertesacker can turn things round.

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