I was only able to catch the final 30 minutes of yesterday’s match and it turned out to be the most important 30 minutes of the game.
I saw the lineups before kickoff and didn’t even notice Partey’s name was on the team sheet until someone else tweeted about how happy they were to see him included. I thought it was an odd thing to be happy about given that he’d played on Tuesday in a draining match which knocked Ghana out of the AFCON in ignominious fashion. Worse, he’d literally flown in from Africa that day. I don’t know how much flying you’ve done but I’m usually pretty tired after a long flight. There was no way that Arteta would use him, I thought, that would be crazy.
Moreover, the rushed nature of Thomas’ inclusion in the squad almost certainly meant that the coaching staff hadn’t had time to properly put Thomas through a training session and evaluate his physical and mental state. So, it’s not even remotely hindsight or outcome-based analysis (is that a bad thing?) to suggest that perhaps including a player in the first team almost literally right off the plane was a bad decision. The only worse decision would be to literally parachute him onto the pitch, though if Arsenal did do that they could use the opportunity to launch another “retro” kit – this time including Addidarsenal branded parachute pants or something.*
And look, Arsenal had a week to prepare for the match and with Ghana one of the major powers in AFCON, and facing the smallest team in the tournament, there would have been no reason to even plan to have Thomas back for this match. So, Arteta had an entire week to get Charlie Patino ready for a substitute appearance or a start and I assume that he did his basic duty and did exactly that.
So, why include Partey?
There’s no question that it was a massive gamble to throw Thomas on in that match. And I wonder if Arteta knew he’d gotten it wrong almost right away? Thomas came on and added very little in terms of movement or passing and if Arteta didn’t know Thomas wasn’t up to it, Liverpool sure did. They didn’t even have to swarm him, just a few well-timed pressures and Thomas lost the ball in a dangerous area. Then he made a dumb foul (dangling a leg out to stop an attack) which was a borderline yellow and then a terrible tackle which was a borderline straight red card. If there were any questions before the match about whether it was right to include Partey in this match, they were definitively answered in just 13 minutes on the pitch.
And it was a decision which ultimately may cost Arsenal on Sunday because now Partey misses the match against Burnley, which Arsenal need to win if they want to keep hopes of winning the Our Father Wenger Who Art in Heaven Hallowed Be His Name Top Four trophy alive. Arsenal now host Burnley with just one first team central midfielder, which will either force Arteta to play Patino or use Ben White or someone else in midfield. Burnley will be licking their chops at either option.
Of course there was no guarantee that Patino wouldn’t have gotten a red card or that he would have even helped. And of course Arteta couldn’t have predicted Partey getting a red card and so on. Of course of course of course. But the plain fact of the matter is that putting Thomas Partey on was an unprecedented move and it was unprecedented for a reason: because it is just a really bad idea. And now we are paying the price. Let’s hope it’s not too costly against Burnley on Sunday.
*Some people seem to think that “Hammer Pants” and parachute pants are the same thing, they are about as similar as thrash and jazz.
Another indication that Arteta is learning on the job. He has had a handful of these kind of decision wrong for most part of the season and it has cost us quite a lot.
He will now give Patino the chance he deserves. As for Partey Ghana crashing outta AFCON against A country I did not now existed, I am from Nigeria, had o take out that anger on some one unconsciously…
“Arsenal had a week to prepare for the match and with Ghana one of the major powers in AFCON, and facing the smallest team in the tournament, there would have been no reason to even plan to have Thomas back for this match. So, Arteta had an entire week to get Charlie Patino ready for a substitute appearance or a start and I assume that he did his basic duty and did exactly that. So, why include Partey?”
Your parachute imagery was funny a/h, but this is part I want to quote
It was widely reported that Partey’s early morning flight landed at noon. That means he got up early, checked out, got driven to airport, waited in a lounge, boarded, deplaned, walked hundreds of metres of corridor at Heathrow (I presume), navigated immigration (which now has covid checks), got in a car and got chauffered to the team hotel. I’d be surprised if he got there before 3pm. For an 8pm kickoff, the team bus would have left the hotel round 6pm. Presuming he’d flown from Douala to London, it was likely a flight of 9 hours or more, with a stopover.
To playing Partey I said “needs must” in the prev post, because I really didnt have the energy to ding Mikel, but the decision to play him was a bad one. Arteta said he wanted to play, but he and the coaching staff should have left him at the hotel, or told him to go home from the airport… in either case telling him to get some rest.
That coaching staff have form here. They rushed Partey back from injury in December 2020, and he literally walked off the field while play was in progress (an action that led to a goal against Spurs). Both Emile and Tomi, who’d been injured, looked short of fitness. Arteta admitted afterwards that neither Tomi nor Saka was able to train. Add Partey to that. How on earth would he know what had been planned tactically on the training ground, if he got off a plane only 6 hours before being subbed into the game?
Btw, AMN has MF and RB versatility. He isnt the best option in either place, but neither Partey nor Tomi seemed optimal choices yesterday. It’s all about a squad rather than an XI.
Really spot on here. I had a lot of reservations about this too, and was a little surprised to see Partey come on. Your point about flying is soooo true. I don’t think anyone is on their game after a long flight – athlete, artist, businessperson.
Having said that, I also thought that bringing him on for 15 minutes was relatively low risk. I was much more concerned about injury than ever imagining 2 yellows in that space of time. I would have been outraged if Thomas had started the match, or come on any earlier. But 15 minutes seemed not so bad. Clearly wrong on that one.
I think what this points out more than anything is the paucity of options we have at CM. Edu and Arteta are at fault for not giving themselves more leeway and depth. It is highly unusual to have BOTH starting CM’s unavailable for a match due to red cards, but we should have a Plan B to lean on, and we clearly don’t.
I would love to send you an email Tim but I can’t find your email address. It would be nice if you can write me so I can have it 🙏🙏🙏
7amkickoff@gmail.com
Thanks Tim, I sent you an email already. Please when you are free find time to go through the twitter threads I I tagged you on. Thanks.
At the point of the game Thomas came in, the game needed him. It was a worthwhile risk to take, just because it did not work out does not mean it wasn’t a risk worth taking. He was the only realistic option to a spot in the final and only 15 minutes was needed from him. Not surprised that people suffer from Hindsight 2020 though.
Like I said in the article, it was foresight and a bog standard one at that. One that literally every other football manager has made. No manager makes a player play any minutes of high quality professional football the same day as a 9 hour flight.
Not surprised people suffer from lack of reading comprehension, though.
Stop making excuses for Mikel Arteta.
Strong first 15 minutes. Then the opposition scored and confidence dropped.
Klopp got his tactics spot on using TAA and Robertson to neuter Saka and Martinelli on the flanks. Arteta didn’t make any in-game adjustments to counter. Combined with some questionable decisions to field players who weren’t ready and a lack of early proactive subs, a disappointing contribution from the technical area.
Jota showed everything we’re missing at the sharp end of the pitch. So much depends this Summer on upgrading the forward line.
Tomi (and others) clearly wasn’t match fit but White got schooled by Jota. The difference in our defence when playing a low block compared to defending when chasing the game is stark.
Considering the pre match ‘seige’ rhetoric from Arteta it was an underwhelming performance. This team can be very good or very average. ‘Pool were without Salah, Mane and Keita and played a 17 year old. After the strong performance in the first leg I expected us to be more combative.
Without cup competitions (first time Arsenal have been out of all cup comps in January in 30+ years) it’s all-in on the league.
Thanks for the review Tim. Unfortunate result. The great run of form that we saw after the Everton game seems to be fading. Hopefully we can rediscover the good form again soon.
I agree that playing Partey was a risk and it did not pay off. At the time we were close enough at 0-1 and there was hope of salvaging a result. We were being outplayed and needed try something to change the game. However, one look at the team sheet and its pretty easy to see how limited and unappealing all of our options were. Patino might have been the best option other then Partey in midfield but many of us thought the Patino/Lokonga midfield was the single biggest problem against Nottingham Forrest and prospectively bringing in Patino against Liverpool clearly seemed like a bad idea. All of the options had potential downside and I doubt there is anything Arteta could have done which would have helped. However, I can’t believe any manager would have shrugged his shoulders and just given up and done nothing. The reality is when there is no right answer the manager is going to be criticized no matter what choices he makes.
The right decision is to not include a player who just came off a 9 hour flight. It’s pretty basic.
The 9hr flight isn’t the worst of it. When players are expected to play on short rest they get tended to by physios and receive hours of massage therapy, something Partey would most likely not get unless Arsenal sent for him a privet jet with a physio on board.
He looked off the pace and what people describe as lazy, or stupid challenges are usually actions when your brain works at its normal speed but the legs don’t.
After a poor tournament with Ghana I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s not at his best for Arsenal. There’s often a hangover. I bet he’s taken some flak.
If you seethe replay of theForest game, Patino did not loose the ball , but was hardly passed to in spite of getting into positions. Soon ,guess it became apparent to him as well that he was not trusted , got his confidence shot and started hiding or moving into spaces where it was risky to pass to him. This was later will again reiterate. Neither did the megaphone on the sidelines bark instructions to remedy this situation of a body in midfield gone waste.
Partey inclusion was a sign of desperation pure and simple, and the he wanted to play part has been trotted out by every manager in history when an illogical player inclusion backfired.
Rescuing the game and possibly getting the club to Wembley, even if its the milk cup, would’ve given Arteta more breathing room( two major finals in two seasons) in case he crumbles in the league.
At least that’s how it would’ve been framed by many.
Not for me. His improvements have to come in the league this season.
Beating three lower league sides, injury depleted Leeds, and shithousing Salah, Mane, and Keita less Pool over two legs might’ve been seen as success by some, and that’s cool, but I just don’t see it that way.
Tom
Players do not have a voice, definitely not at AFC. So we might have to take the opinion that he forced his inclusion, with a handful of salt and a roll of paper of someone trying to save his backside
I think the team that started, if fit, should beat Burnley.
I say this because against a team like Burnley, at home, that midfield should be enough. But some players were clearly not fit, so hopefully we see an improvement.
i know people will say i’m “being mean” to mikel but this is all on him, edu, and the management team. if arsenal don’t win against burnley tomorrow and that result costs arsenal a place in the top 4, he’s got to own that.
the silly thing about it all is i didn’t even play top flight football but i had a bit of a routine that was imperative that i follow to make sure i was at my best for game time…and the prep began days prior. i’m sure most professional players, including partey, have a routine as well and it doesn’t include an extraordinarily long day preceding stepping onto the field. claude gave a good synopsis of how involved the day had to be. then he still had another 8 hours after the flight but before the game. there’s a reason no one does what mikel did.
with that, wenger often did the same thing in champions league games, meaning playing players when they weren’t fit. i went in on wenger just like i’m going in on arteta. it’s ridiculous. if you have players who haven’t trained, they haven’t proven their fitness. why would you play them against a team like liverpool? was calum chambers injured? tomiyasu at 70% is not better than chambers at 100%.
arteta says that neither tomiyasu, emile, or saka trained but they played the full 90. people have complained about their performances. all of this is to say that it’s the duty of the manager to protect the players even from themselves and their declarations of “fitness” and “wanting to play”. it’s the nature of a jock. if he can walk without too bad of a limp, he’s going to want to play. this is why you have physios and managers that tell them when they are not fit to play. these are very young men that are not thinking about things such as chronic injuries or the rest of the season. it’s what managers get paid to do.
I agree with this. Wenger actually overplayed a few guys and harmed their careers in my opinion: Koscielny and Cazorla are two that are most notable from the last few years. And Wenger was notorious for allowing players to decide their own fitness against the recommendations of his physios (players playing in the “red zone”).
The more this Arteta tenure rumbles on the more I think about how losing certain matches is not only ok but should be just accepted as part of the growth. In this case, just play Patino and Chambers and take the L on paper, because the consequences are usually a lot less and the experience that you get from that L is far more valuable (for everyone) than what we learned from Thursday (which is just “don’t play guys who are utterly unfit”).
Tim @ 2:37PM
Fair enough. The fact that Partey got 2 yellow cards and is lost for the next game makes that decision look really bad. However, I can’t imagine any of us or Arteta would have predicted that outcome. I think we have all had many many times where we have been unusually tired for some reason but had to do our job anyway. On paper Partey certainly looked like the player on the bench who was the most likely to be able to do something positive which could give the team a boost. I would think a professional footballer could find enough adrenaline to power thru jet lag for 20 minutes when his team needed something in a semifinal but that is just me.
To me the decision to use or not use Partey had nothing to do with why we looked mostly underwhelming and lost the game. The real issue is similar to the game against Nottingham Forrest. We had a lot of our best attacking players on the pitch and we did not really look like that much of a threat to score a goal.
You’re missing the point, Bill. I’m amazed at how often you manage to do this.
Partey providing a spark that would have made Arsenal turn the game around does not mean that it was right to play him. There IS an argument around whether his mental or physical readiness contributed to his making those bad tackles, but that is not the main thing being argued here. The point is about the welfare of the player.
Do the math. On 9 hours’ travel that puts him in London at noon, he’s taking off at 3am. If as is likely for flights between London and Douala there’s a stopover, his takeoff time could have been as early as 1am. Let’s be generous say it was a direct flight, then we have a 3am takeoff. Let’s be even more generous and say that Arsenal laid on a special charter that cut his flight time. That didnt happen, but that would have meant a 5am takeoff. That means that he’s checking in anytime between 11pm the previous day, or 2 am the same day. Now — whichever your favoured scenario is) wind the clock back an hour for travel to the airport. Now wind it even further back for sleep. Do the math again.
Now scroll up to my first comment (which did not even consider a stopover), and remind yourself what an international traveler has to navigate, and understand why, with immigration and London traffic operating at their most efficient, he very probably checked into the team hotel at 3pm. That is 13, maybe 14 hours door to door. The coach left at 6pm, the game kicked off at 8pm, Partey got subbed into it sometime after 9pm, 6 hours after arriving at the team hotel.
I’ve traveled for a company on less door-to-door time, and rest was mandatory. Even given its global operations, I’d have been considered mad to log in for a meeting the same day, or even the next morning. And I didnt do anything remotely physically taxing like professional sports.
As a matter of player welfare, Partey had no business being at the team hotel, in the squad or on the field of play that night. THAT (for me at least) is the point. Josh is right. Arsene also played players when he shouldn’t; other managers have. It’s still wrong.
Again its just my impression but we had just crashed out of the FA cup against a lower league opponent in a game we were clear favorites and could have won. It was also very clear from the way we played in the first leg that the players were really motivated for this cup tie. It was the semifinal with a one game win or be out scenario and in theory we were in good position playing at home with a very realistic chance to go the final. I can certainly understand why the manager would be aggressive in using his best players.
The world did not have the technology at hand when deciding when players were at risk of injury back in Wengers days, and our team was aluminum foil thin due to no $, and paying off the “New” stadium. He really had no choice, but that is another story.
Arteta is the guy that pushed Partey back on the field when he was injured, I have been watching futbol for a lot of years, and have never seen a coach do that. It was insane.
Same coach just put that same guy in game who’s system was run down, on little sleep, and no pratctice, what the hell did he expect to happen. A plan would have been to play Patino, or move White up the pitch, and Chambers in his spot, and practice that way for a few days.
Now the squad is out of balance again, sound familiar, and he will have to adjust. He knew AFCON was on the calendar for years, and we should have beefed up by buying another midfielder long ago. This is on Edu too.
Will he play Saka, Martinelli and ESR into the ground, even if unfit, of course he will. Have people not been paying attention, his substitutions to keep players from staying in the red zone are atrocious.
The sleep walking continues.
I am worried about Saka being overplayed.
Claude. I am not missing the point, I just don’t agree with it. I have been on several long international flights and I suspect many of us have raised children and hardly slept for 6 months to a year and done all night study sessions during college and grad school years but we still did our jobs. I would not want to do something that required me to be stationary a long period such as a car drive, sitting thru a boring power point presentation or do 10 hours of micro vascular surgery after a long international flight. I also agree using Partey was not ideal but there were no good options. I know some people might disagree but I thinks its reasonable to expect that a 20 something year old healthy player should be able to fight thru jet lag and play 15-20 minutes of a high adrenaline activity like football.
Aaron
Chambers was not available and Patino struggled big time despite having time to prepare against Nottingham Forrest and no one could have expected him to be effective against Liverpool. I don’t think anyone could reasonably expect White to be effective in mid field against Liverpool when he has not played there all season. If Arteta had started Patino he would have been accused of stupidity and if he used White in midfield there would have been a huge number of fans screaming bloody murder about a player used out of position. I don’t believe those were reasonable options when viewed prospectively. Those suggestions are next day armchair manager second guessing
Tim
I hope Saka can play nearly all the minutes when the only games we have left are league games. If Saka can’t handle that schedule then how is he going to survive if we ever get back into the CL.
Bill,
A 19 year old with no jet lag, who did not play poorly in that game, is 1000% the better option.
Ben could play any position in defense or midfield if called upon.
Arteta also loaned out AMN knowing this situation.
AFCON has been on the calendar forever.
Have you watched the Ben’s passing, speed and movement of the ball? I have and the guy can do most things very well.
While I was watching the first half I thought we desperately needed more presence in midfield and I thought Partey might come on for the second half, with Odegaard then pushed further forwards. We couldn’t find any penetration from the back and that’s one of his strengths.
I’m not saying it was the right call to bring Partey on, just that the match was crying out for him or a player like him and I would also have been tempted at least.
It all gets a shrug from me. When you’re down to bare bones everything is a risk, there are no good choices. I don’t think that two yellows in 20 mins for a guy who’s been travelling and not trained is a particularly likely outcome – injury would have been my bigger worry – but there was always a chance of something going wrong, even if you don’t know exactly what.
The better criticism imo is that we should never have been down to bare bones in the first place, and on that I don’t understand the thinking at Arsenal. I don’t know what their contingency planning was for this period, but it has, erm, not quite worked out…
Bill, youre saying that on the basis of Patino’s game against Forest in which he was ineffective, we shouldn’t play him? If you applied that, there’s a heck of a lot of guys who won’t play succeeding games, including Partey himself. He was the squad, as was there for a reason. Im with Aaron. He was the better option given the circumstances
Liverpool played a 17 year old, Kaide Gordon. They also played Caiomhin Kelleher, arguably their 3rd string goalkeeper.
To me, justifying putting on the pitch a man who had come off a long, wee hours of the morning international flight just hours before is making excuses for the coach. The same coach who played him injured in a NLD, and was pushing him back onto the pitch as he walked off (ill advisedly and with bad timing on the player’s part, to be fair. His absence led directly to a goal).
That we didnt plan well enough around AFCON seems evident. What is Ainsley doing kicking ball for Mourinho in Rome before we had done our squad patches? Let me stop the counter-argument before it starts… Im not arguing that AMN is on Partey’s level. Im saying that football is a squad game, and sometimes you don’t have your first choices. AMN, remember, is a player that Arteta persuaded to play in the summer. Give him his wish, but time his departure better. You cant say the cupboard’s bare if you give away your food.
______________
Speaking of Caiomhin Kelleher, we havent talked enough about Ramsdale, who’s looked in the last couple of games like a guy who needs a breather for a couple of games. I’d have thought we’d play our German international in the cup. It seems a feature of Arteta’s management that he trusts a small core of guys. That’s why he had on the bench a guy who was well short of a full night’s sleep and rest, and had done a long international flight. Dont get me wrong… Ramsdale’s been brilliant, and I love the guy a lot. But, squad.
Anyway, time to yell for the guys against Burnley.
Ramsdale was awful today. Almost cost us a point with his flappy handski impression.