Has Arteta Truly Turned it Around?: Page 212 - The Arsenal discussion forum and community: One More in the Tolly

Has Arteta Truly Turned it Around?

Ray

This will be a learning curve for Arteta for when he joins City.

Burnwinter

Edit: actually, I've got no idea what's going on. We sure were shit yesterday, though.

Anzac

Kurt Eisner wrote:
If Arteta's still here next season he needs to learn from this and start rotating more frequently, because while it is true that a guy like Cedric is just a terrible football player, no one's gonna look good playing 90 minutes after months of barely getting any playing time. It's no wonder Lokonga looked a lot better at the start of the season, he was actually in game shape.

This, along with positional play being as fragile as AW's player intuition style. As for player rotation = little and often rather than many and rarely.

AAStyle

Seems that the only reasonable defense to Arteta is "shit happens" and just hope that this is just an anomaly. Well, I feel that things will prove to be different

Don Pacifico

Wenger lost to Forest in the cup a few years back and to League 2 Bradford. Occasionally, these kind of aberrations happen in cup competitions from time to time, yes. Does it mean the performance should be ignored? No, but I also don't think it's as problematic as when we lose in the league at Goodison Park in the manner we did a few weeks ago.

If we get back into Europe this season, I'm not going to be that bothered that Forest knocked us out if the cup. However, if results in the league like the Everton game persist, then that is more concerning.

Burnwinter

We've had two shitty results, injustice and uselessness in succession. Those come in the context of an apparent trajectory of improvement and holding fourth place in the league.

There's incomplete information about why so many aspects of the Forest match were abysmal, from selection to preparation to performances to match day management. It's all quite damning for Arteta, though.

Whatever strength we now have it seems to be fragile ... it's a huge job to turn it around over the next fortnight.

Don Pacifico

The flakiness is a problem; like I said, I see the cup result as more of an aberration but it still remains to be seen how consistently we bomb in the league. Hoping that it's more to do with a young team than anything else

KurtEisner

Anzac wrote:
Kurt Eisner wrote:
If Arteta's still here next season he needs to learn from this and start rotating more frequently, because while it is true that a guy like Cedric is just a terrible football player, no one's gonna look good playing 90 minutes after months of barely getting any playing time. It's no wonder Lokonga looked a lot better at the start of the season, he was actually in game shape.

This, along with positional play being as fragile as AW's player intuition style. As for player rotation = little and often rather than many and rarely.

With Wenger, there was always the chance the players would figure it out eventually though, because he gave them the freedom to do so, with Arteta it seems like our players either can't stick to his instructions, or he's asking them to play super accurate long balls through the lines, and I don't think that's sustainable. Someone said it in the matchday thread, the distances are all wrong, and it's been a feature of his entire tenure. Unlike with Wenger we also know it's not because he gives the players too much freedom, it's because they either can't follow his instructions or he's asking them to play super accurate long balls through the lines consistently. And that worries me.

In the last few weeks we played a lot more through the middle, Xhaka, Partey and Odegaard always offered a passing option and we actually saw some proper combination play all over the field. It's worrying to me, that as soon as a few starters are out, all the same problems from last season and the beginning of this one resurfaced immediately. Win or lose, against Liverpool I want us to try and play the same way we did against City, if we do I'm prepared to accept the cup exit as an off day. If we don't, a lot of the excitement I built up lately will be gone for the moment, because it'd seem an awful lot like we've just reverted to type after a purple patch of form.

Fully agree with your second sentence.

flobaba

One of our worst attacking performances comes right as soon as he gets back on the touchline…

AAStyle

Arteta lovers will just prefer to ignore that curious fact

Sicario

Lol yep Arteta was just WFH during the 5 big wins ahead of City game.

KurtEisner

I still think taking off Tavares after half an hour wasn't helpful at all. I doubt it motivated the likes of Patino or Lokonga, I'd wager it intimidated them instead. And I don't like the double standards, you can't make an example out of a 21 year old, while letting the likes of Holding and Cedric play 90 minutes when they weren't any better. I've warmed up to Arteta lately, but his disciplinarian streak still pisses me off and I don't think it's productive either.

Bring Back Kerrea Gilbert

Pathetic yesterday. I'm still angry. Why are we so fucking Jekyll and Hyde in our performances?

banduan

Bring Back Kerrea Gilbert wrote:
Pathetic yesterday. I'm still angry. Why are we so fucking Jekyll and Hyde in our performances?

the simple explanation is our core team is composed of kids.

the not so easy explanation is that Arteta hasn't figured out how the team could still work well without hitting every beat perfectly unless the players themselves are able to improvise.

jones

Kurt Eisner wrote:
I still think taking off Tavares after half an hour wasn't helpful at all. I doubt it motivated the likes of Patino or Lokonga, I'd wager it intimidated them instead. And I don't like the double standards, you can't make an example out of a 21 year old, while letting the likes of Holding and Cedric play 90 minutes when they weren't any better. I've warmed up to Arteta lately, but his disciplinarian streak still pisses me off and I don't think it's productive either.

Bang on. He can't help himself, a poor performance of a player who has barely played in the last month and he has to do this. Feels with him it's prescripted, as soon as one of the fringe players would play badly he'd humiliate him to "get a rise out the rest". Still can't stand the prick, should put down the management books and start learning how humans work

Burnwinter

One empirical fact is that Tavares getting dragged didn't make us play well. Arteta's anxiety about that fact was quite plain in his post match comments too.

banduan

Honestly I felt that Tavares had to get dragged off before a more spectacular implosion. He really was absolutely dire, and it's simply not true that Cedric and Holding were just as bad.

Burnwinter

Hard to be perfectly even-handed, but I agreed at the time. They were replaying the sequence of mistakes Tavares had made across that half hour on the break … getting caught dwelling on it, letting the ball dawdle past him out of bounds. What was really notable was his issue wasn't execution but attention, it was like he was half awake. Meanwhile Arteta was looking straight at him screaming at him from a few yards away, lulz.

So yeah although Soares and Holding were trash, not sure Tavares wasn't worse. Not the biggest question on the day, and it made Arteta look like more of a dickhead.

AAStyle

Sicario wrote:
Lol yep Arteta was just WFH during the 5 big wins ahead of City game.

Just imagine how good we would be if he actually werent here at all

KurtEisner

I mean you can argue he was the worst player on the pitch, and I wouldn't disagree, but I don't think Holding in particular was much better, if at all. Losing posession time and time again, dawdling on the ball, caught out of position a fair few times, weak in the challenges and as our most senior player on the day I do actually expect a bit more from him than Tavares, who's younger than Lokonga and has just as little PL experience.

I agree with Burnwinter that Tavares looked half awake, which was probably what infuriated Arteta moreso than him playing badly in general, but that's still no reason to take him off 10 minutes before half time and humiliate him in front of 20.000+ Forest fans. Just wait out those 10 minutes and bring on Tierney for the second half. What's the worst that can happen, conceding a goal? Would probably have been good for us to get that out of the way in the first half tbh.

I also don't think Arteta's incessant screaming helped. I know that if 21 year old me would have been screamed at by my manager non stop, I'd have played even worse.

Now I know it sounds like I'm making excuses for Tavares, and I'm not trying to. He was horrible. But he wasn't alone in that, yet he was singled out for the world to see, and that just rubs me the wrong way. Arteta comes off as a right fucking prick quite often, and I'll readily admit that that makes me biased against him as soon as results aren't going our way. But I really love this squad, the kids all have a brillant personality, they're super talented and for the first time in ages I really want the players to succeed because of who they are and not just because of the badge they're wearing. And having a disciplinarian asshole scream at them all game only works for me as long as we're playing well.

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