Martinelli has surprised the hell out of me with his improved dribbling and touch. A wonderkid in the purest sense now.

Saka is having too many of these sloppy performances against the best teams. Getting a bit annoyed with him.

He did score against City

It's more than the odd goal against those sides.

His first touch can let him down in key moments when real chances are hard to come by as it is.

And he's unable to really burst past someone from a standing start, so the way he receives a ball really needs to be spot on.

He can go past someone with guile though, which is a much more valuable skill

National team onlookers ought to be tantalized about him joining up later this month. Hopefully gets his first cap as just reward.

Easy to forget that, yeah.

Also the system last night didn't help him... Ødegaard was crowded out and Cedric is Cedric.

I guess Martinelli is more of an Alexis type than Saka is, ie. can wreak havoc on his own where as Saka needs to be able to combine.

A proper striker will do wonders.

Martinelli is great but he needs to score more. Should have scored last night and v City he missed a big sitter.

Only one goal in 2022 so this needs to improve.

To be fair the ref did everything he could to stop him from scoring v City

His chance yesterday wasn't easy at all. Was a good attempt.

Clrnc wrote:

His chance yesterday wasn't easy at all. Was a good attempt.

I was right behind the shot in the North Bank and he should have hit the target.

Smith-Rowe scored from a similar angle v Brentford at home recently.

Sicario wrote:

Martinelli is great but he needs to score more. Should have scored last night and v City he missed a big sitter.

Only one goal in 2022 so this needs to improve.

It's a bad idea to rely on a bunch of 20 year olds to score all your goals. There's not a single proven goalscorer in the squad right now and I hope it's not gonna cost us more points. Martinelli will score a fucking shitload of goals in his career, Saka will start scoring more as well, but at this point we don't have a single player who's calm in front of goal and who you'd back to score most of his chances, because they're all basically kids. Except for Lacazette, who's about as likely to score as Ramsdale.

Edit: Well Pépé is a goalscorer, but he's gonna play maybe 90 minutes in total til the end of the season.

Gurgen wrote:

He really destroyed Arnold yesterday. Shame we didn't have the quality to take advantage of it. A top striker will take us up two levels.

The great thing about it is that he done it on the inside and the outside.* He can go both ways and you can see it gets him a little bit of extra space as defenders don't want to commit. He's fantastic to watch. 

It seems overly critical but his final ball/shot needs improvement. We've said he needs more goals, but those occasions where's dribbling along the goalline and squaring it in the box really should be resulting in better chances. A large part of it is on the movement and instincts of Lacazette, Odegaard and Saka, but Martinelli really needs to work on getting his head up and hitting someone with those passes instead of just feeding it into a dangerous area. He's done that a few times in recent games and not much has come of it. Liverpool done it once last and scored from it. We really need to be more clinical, but as I said that seems harsh given how well his all round game was last night. 

• Am I making it up or does my vague recollection of nonsensical argument about whether the inside/outside changed depending on what foot/side the dribbler was on ring a bell with anyone?

I was immediately reminded of it before I read the asterisk. You're thinking of Savz talking about Martial skinning defenders on the inside

The fact that the answer kinda changes from game to game, with Ode involved too, is amazing for Arsenal as a club.

Bring Back Kerrea Gilbert wrote:

Saka is having too many of these sloppy performances against the best teams. Getting a bit annoyed with him.

He's 20 and has carried the team for a lot of the season. Teams set up to nulify him now too.

Getting annoyed with Saka at this point is quite an incredible feat.

I think we should demand more from him sometimes. If you're good enough you're old enough and all that.

To be fair he's probably overplayed to fuck as well - that's on Arteta.

Let ESR come in for him or Ødegaard on Saturday.