Claudius wrote:
Mirth wrote:
But he's never been a manager who ever figured out how to get his teams to defend well over the course of a season.
and now he's doubling down his attention and resources on defending at the expense of attacking. Unfortunately, it appears that's killing us on both ends of the field.
I feel this has been the case since day one though. "I'd rather win 5-4 than 1-0" is probably one of those throwaway quotes that people in the media have made a meal out of, because it doesn't accurately describe his philosophy to me. Emery has built a team fully capable of shipping the four goals, but we never look like we're going to score five.
It's true enough that we've scored a healthy amount of goals this season, but we had a good goal record the season we first fell out of Champions League too. When you score matters just as much as goals in football. It's a sport built around capitalising on small, isolated opportunities to swing the game in your favour that appear a few times throughout a 90 minute match. The easiest way to do that is to make sure you create chances, and above all that you can create them in more than one way.
We have a few outstanding individuals, like Aubameyang, who are so incredibly good that they can score 11 goals with 11 shots on target or whatever it was, despite being starved for service, but that was never going to be a sustainable strategy. We outperformed our expected goal ratio by two full orders of magnitude during the fall and everyone knew it, even if a few chose to ignore it.
