Caligula wrote:
I've always said that Wenger is inept at traditional defense.
What we've been able to do is mask that deficiency by holding on to the ball. If you don't have the ball, you can't score.
But we like to sit around here and talk about how great our defending is even after we'd allowed Barcelona 13 shots on target. Oh! that was part of the plan. We defended stoutly. Fuck off. This team's defending makes me cringe.
This collection of players are poor on the back foot, but that's because we lack quality in key areas, through the spine of the team - that is not the same as Wenger being inept at coaching defence full stop. The 2003/04 team and the 2005/06 run to the Champions League final shows that Wenger is perfectly capable of coaching a a team to defend as well as anyone else, when he has the players with the quality and the attributes to play that way.
What Wenger needs to decide, in my opinion, is whether we are a team that wants to control the game, dominate possession, win the game through technical superiority, or are we a team that is happy sitting back, defending deep and absorbing pressure, and then counter-attacking - because at the moment we are neither, and we can't do either one effectively enough to win games and win trophies. He needs to decide what we are, how we play, and then maximise our ability to play that way.
