I had two big issues in this game. The midfield 2 and Lacazette.
Lacazette was a critical breakdown. He is supposed to be a pivot man. But he / Arteta do not enable that function. All of his successful passes made were in our half. Only one of those went diagonally forward early on to AMN. Otherwise, they all went backwards centrally. The problem is they would be going back to Xhaka / El Neny, two non-progressive players.
El Neny and Xhaka together were a critical flaw. El Neny had about 95% pass success, but again, 28 of his 30 successful passes were in our half, mostly sideways and backwards. Xhaka had 1 positive pass in the opposing half and none into the opposing half. So you had 2 conservative passers who also aren’t good at driving the ball sat behind Lacazette who is passing the ball backwards.
What would work better is to set up like City where someone like a KDB can progress the ball off the striker.
By far our most progressive passer was David Luiz who sent the most balls into the opposing half. If we had Aouar or Ceballos high up in the 10 or the left 8, he would be able to get balls from Luiz and redistribute them to Lacazette and Aubameyang. That would be much more efficient than this ping pong that we had set up.
This is the problem with our team. It has these vertical and horizontal ping pong tables where the ball keeps bouncing back and forth without progressing anywhere productive. There’s this midfield dead zone and the back and forth in the back line at times.
