Gazza M wrote:
I think you could plop any defenders into our system and they would look shite. It's insane the way we invite pressure onto us despite having a defense and midfield that can't play out from the back
I think that's definitely true to some extent, but better players almost always help a little. They can do more with less. We don't attack well either, but Aubameyang manages to keep things decent for us in that end. I just saw a stat saying that he had scored more than anyone bar Salah in the 20 months he's been in England. He's got two goals less or something like that. Well ahead of the likes of Agüero, Kane, Mane, etc. which is actually insane when you think about how little we create.
We're so mismatched everywhere on the pitch that you gotta laugh though. Emery wants to play out of the back and then makes Sokratis his go-to defender. In a squad that contains the likes of Mustafi he's easily the worst one with the ball at his feet, and we saw today what happens when you put him in that situation. Why do it? Why not get proper players that fit the idea? The emphasis being on proper in this case, not cheap deadline day panic buys.
I suspect the real reason is because there is no real idea, no concrete plan. Captain brought it up earlier, but Emery likened himself to a chameleon when he arrived, and that's what we've become. No identity of our own. We're adapting to the circumstances of this particular weekend, trying to melt into the background rather than dictating the terms. Imagine spending an entire week of training trying to nullify the strengths of bloody Watford... and then getting it wrong anyway.
The few constants we have to our style, like playing it out from the back and utilising width, aren't adopted with a clear and consistent vision. We can't decide how many defenders we want to use, whether we have fullbacks or wingbacks (or sometimes both), if there will be support from midfield or not, and so forth. We just spent €80 million on a new winger without seemingly having an obvious role in mind for him.
You can fill as many USB sticks as you want with powerpoints and instructions, but these are blokes who for the most part are dumb as rocks. They aren't going to switch between difficult tactical patterns that can't be explained in simple terms. They need to have a clear idea of what to do, which space they should cover and where they should pass the ball when they go out on the field. The way you prepare them for that is by picking a system and then hammering it into them training after training, month after month, year after year. Either that, or you hire a van Dijk who's the rare exception who, like Auba at the front, can come in and partly override the shoddy tactics.
I don't think much of Emery as a tactician and I think even less of Carcedo as a coach, but I expected us to at least partly buy our way out of this problem. We've done the opposite instead and banked on the coching staff to show abilities they're just not in possession of when it comes to develop solutions from within and mould players. Thinking back on how we started last season there was a very similar feeling to our football, the biggest difference being that we got more points out of problematic play. This year people are a little more jaded and after the spectacular collapse towards the end of 18/19 games like the one today no longer feel like an oddity, like something we'll sort out as soon as the manager has grown accustomed to the squad.
