Arsenal cruised to a win over the Cherries at the Vitality stadium and we have plenty to discuss but I want to start with something that bothered me: Unai Emery took Lucas Torreira off in the 79th minute and the Arsenal away fans booed. The booing was loud enough that I could hear it on my TV and certainly loud enough that the players and the manager could hear it. You could see the look of confusion on Guendouzi’s face as he high-fived with Torreira and came on the pitch.
It was, no doubt, meant to communicate love for Torreira and possibly a desire for Emery to take off Mkhi instead. Or maybe they were just “taking the Mickey” as they say in England. Whatever the intent, it was poor form from our normally excellent away supporters. The manager is right to rest Torreira – Arsenal play a match on Thursday in outer Vorskla and then Spurs on Sunday. But even more important, Torreira has played 750 minutes for Uruguay this season, his first year being called up for national team duty. That’s after a season at Sampdoria where he played 3300 minutes in 38 matches, or the equivalent of 87 minutes per game. Added all up, since August 2017, Torreira has played 70 matches for a total of 5197 minutes. Resting him for 10 minutes at the end of a match that we have won is not only a good idea it’s one of the best ideas. Booing that decision, and simultaneously undermining Guendouzi’s confidence, is unbelievable.
The love for Torreira is understandable and even laudable even if it’s a bit over-the-top. He was even voted Man of the Match today, despite only playing 79 minutes and putting in a rather weird performance.
For the Bournemouth goal, Torreira was actually Arsenal’s furthest forward player. When I saw the goal developing I thought that Arsenal would certainly snuff out the attack but it was left up to the three center backs and Granit Xhaka to stop Bournemouth going forward and that’s probably never going to be a winning defensive combination. I immediately wondered where Torreira was and had to go back through the play several times to find him. He was here in the center forward position:
You have to admit, as a Gooner, that this is a bit strange to see from Emery’s Arsenal. We’ve seen this sort of thing before from Ramsey and even Coquelin during the Wenger era but I think this is the first time I’ve seen Arsenal’s “real DM” this far out of position. I’m not blaming him for the Cherries’ goal. I’m just stating a fact: Emery wanted Torreira to play high up the pitch, all three of his tackles were in the Bournemouth final third and he had two shots.
In terms of “blame” (which we must do because I will get stick if I don’t “why do you always hammer _____ and here you didn’t say anything about ______”) I would put most of it on Kolasinac, etc, who did zero tracking back on the left. Those two Bournemouth players on the left side of the image above are the two who combined for the goal (King and Brooks) and there is no excuse for them beating everyone back to the goal.
I’ve heard things like “uncharacteristically sloppy” for that goal but as I’ve been saying for a few years, sloppy defending is a hallmark of this Arsenal team. I “trust the process” and expect Emery to iron that out eventually but man, we are difficult to watch in defense.
Mustafi gets all of the blame from the fans, and he committed another errific foul on the edge of the box (I thought it was a pen) in the final second of the match to gift them a shot, but again I think Arsenal suffer from a very similar systemic problem to Chelsea.
Xhaka is a lot like Jorginho in that he’s great with the ball but really slow and a massive liability in defense. A lot of folks forgive him this and perhaps we should here too, but systemically what happens is that these players need space around them to work so managers like Sarri and Emery then deploy the real DM (Torreira and Kante) in a more forward position and ask them to tackle high up the pitch. This works fine for most matches but when your fullbacks are playing all the way in the 18 yard box, and when the two wide CB’s are playing in the opposition final third, and when your defensive midfielder is playing as a striker, you’re going to give up the most valuable commodity in football: space.
Good players don’t need space, mediocre and bad players do. This is the theory behind pressing and behind all of those teams that sit back and hit you on the counter. Sitting back creates space for your forwards, pressing limits space for the opponent’s defenders which causes them to panic a bit.
Managing space is exactly what Tottenham excel at. Against Chelsea this weekend, they pressed from the start and man-marked Jorginho, both methods of controlling space. Chelsea were able to play out of that press because most of their players are very good but once Tottenham scored (off a set play) they were able to manage space in the third way, by playing deeper. That eventually led to a one-v-one between Son and Jorginho and when the Italian failed to tackle or foul (fouling is the Man City method) Son found himself in a lot of space. Luiz put in a comical tackle and Son scored.
Against the Cherries I thought Arsenal controlled space reasonably well. Bournemouth didn’t create a single big chance, that’s the first time Arsenal can boast a “big chance clean sheet” since the 3-2 win over Cardiff. The goal AFCB scored wasn’t classified as a big chance, and though I might quibble with that, I defer to the stats folks.
The only real big chance Bournemouth created was marked off for offside. The NBC crew were adamant that Bournemouth’s disallowed goal for offside should have stood but only came to that conclusion with the aid of extreme slow-mo and an extraordinarily generous interpretation of when the ball was played. In real time, offside was exactly the right call. And even VAR probably wouldn’t have overturned the call. But I do want to say right now, before VAR is introduced, there need to be VERY CLEAR rules about how the official will decide what the moment is that the ball is played forward. Is it when there is a sliver of air between ball and foot? Is it the moment that the passing player makes contact? NBC took the latter as their method of interpretation.
I noticed that the NBC crew were strangely quiet on Arsenal’s penalty shout. Late in the game Ramsey was clearly shoved over, twice, but the referee waved off any claims for a spot kick. It was a stonewall pen for me and I was surprised that we didn’t get it. When we use VAR next season I expect that fouls like the one on Ramsey late in the match will be called a penalty 100% of the time, right? RIGHT?
There are two more points to make (sorry this is already so long): Kolasinac and Mkhitaryan.
Kolasinac is a super weird player. He basically had two assists today* and he had a number of other good stats (4 tackles) but he tends to disappear in defense A LOT and he’s one of the worst passers on the team. His tackles were all in the first 20 minutes. After that he didn’t put in a lick of defense. And while he had two assists* he only completed 37/55 passes. That’s 67% passing, folks. And from open play he was 63%, that’s just one point higher than Aubameyang. And they weren’t all in attack, he completed an astonishingly poor 7/16 passes in the middle third of the park. 44%. FORTY FOUR PERCENT. Eddie Howe targeted Kolasinac and scored one goal off that tactic, he honestly could have cost Arsenal more.
Mkhitaryan is now just a hate figure. Most of the supporters I respect are publicly bashing him now and I understand why, because in this match (stats be damned) he looked incredibly poor. I say stats be damned because he led Arsenal with 7 shots, but only got one on target (unless the target was the parking lot, in which case he was 6/7). He also led Arsenal with 2 key passes, he was 2nd in final third passes (22/26), and had more than one pass that should have been a shot go begging. Understat also had him leading Arsenal’s xGChain with 1.24 (meaning he was involved in 1.24 xG of Arsenal’s 1.68 xG) and had him 3rd in xGBuildup (meaning he was involved in a lot of the buildup play). Yet it seems that every bad pass (all 8 of them, 6 in the first half) and every bad shot was greeted with a twitterstorm of anger because they weren’t just garden variety bad passes (or bad shots) they were truly awful to watch. I think the moment that summed his match up was when he was played clean through but couldn’t control with his first touch and then took a weird stubbed shot into the ground from an impossible angle before falling over. I’m not going to tell you who to support or how (other than booing Emery when he takes Torreira off, I mean come on) so I’m just saying that the level of anger Mkhi gets is strange to me. I know he’s not amazing, that he’s really far off the form he had at BvB, and that we will probably sell him this summer and bring in a real wide player, but I’m not sure what he’s done to deserve so much anger. He’s not an awful person off the pitch and he’s not anywhere near as bad as Kolasinac (who is a truly awful defender who also can’t pass) on the pitch AND he’s a damn decent backup for Ozil. So I’d love to hear a reason for why you hate him so much. And you can’t mention his salary.
In the end, it’s a good win over a good opponent in an away match. Howe’s Bournemouth boast a top four xG record and it’s well deserved. It’s also no exaggeration to say that “last season we would have lost this match” because we did.
Despite tinkering with things constantly (we played another new system today) and despite another lacklustre start Emery already has as many away wins as Wenger managed in all of 2017/18 (4). And that’s got to be a good thing!
(Right?)
*Own goals don’t count as assists, it’s a failed pass. They also don’t count toward xG.
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