I will reply to this here to not derail the AFC Coaching thread off-topic.
Gunner89 wrote:
RC8 wrote:
Last year we finished 12 points away from Top 4 and were nowhere near challenging for it, even.
This year we finished 1 point away and should have comfortably made it if not for specific fuck ups and a bit of bad luck. This in spite of having a much worse squad than our rivals according to pretty much every neutral observer. It baffles me that some posters here are talking as if it weren't crystal clear we have a worse team than our competitors to begin with.
These were the odds for winning the Premier League before a ball was kicked. If you take off your rose-tinted glasses you'll see everybody had us as the [size=small]6th best team[/size] in the country and with good reason:
Manchester City -162.50 (8/13)
Liverpool +400 (4/1)
Manchester United +750 (15/2)
Chelsea +1,200 (12/1)
Spurs +1,600 (16/1)
Arsenal +2,500 (25/1)
Klopp's pool also shipped in 50+ goals in his first season. I can't find it in me to act all surprised about our season this year, nor do I think it's sensible to jump to conclusions at this stage about whose fault it is that this group of players failed to become world beaters overnight.
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/may/15/premier-league-season-review-predicted-happened
Klopp came in mid-season and if you look at his first full season he conceded 42 goals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016%E2%80%9317_Liverpool_F.C._season
How many 'facts' do you want to make up?
Klopp came in October and had a mediocre run from then until the end of the season. That was his first season.
If you would like to insist that Klopp's 'first full season' is what counts, you should give the same courtesy to Emery, who had not worked with any of our players before the start of this one. Now that he knows what he is dealing with we will learn how he plans a season properly.
Poch also conceded 50+ goals in his first season at tottenham. It means nothing.
And if your barometer for success is doing better than Wenger's worst season and the one that actually got him fired even and that too hardly a lot better considering he had
1) Auba for a whole season as opposed to 6 months
2) 3 new defensive starters and upgrades on what Arsene had (Leno for Cech, Sokratis for Mustafi, Torreira for Elneny/AMN/Coquelin etc.)
then I suspect you have pretty low expectations in general.
Again, this is nonsense. This reminds me of how Spurs fans would argue they had a world-beating squad back when they obviously did not.
We got Auba to replace Alexis, who had scored 30 goals and had 18 assists the season before. Smart (timely) move, but not an upgrade.
In practice Sokratis did not replace Mustafi, but Koscielny. Mustafi had more appearances as an Arsenal player this season than in any season prior. Think about that.
Torreira is a cool prospect but ultimately we got an untested 22 year old who showed a bit of promise. Leno is an improvement on last season's Cech, but not on Cech from the season before that.
Obviously I have low expectations of this squad, I expect them to do worse than our rivals because they are worse than our rivals. I made this point when Wenger was still around and I will happily continue making it: if by every objective measure you have the 6th, 5th, or 4th best squad, you should expect to finish 4th, 5th, or 6th. It made sense to lose Wenger because he was directly responsible for us having sub-par squads, not because he was a bad coach.
Emery experimented a lot this season, which arguably cost us points, but which - if anything - should pay off next season. That's the whole point of experimenting. It makes zero sense to go through the process of experimentation and then not see what results it produces when applied.
