Qwiss! wrote:
He was certainly pressing and tracking back more but I think ultimately what he was doing was to the detriment of his natural game. I don't think you can make any sort of argument that Auba improved under Arteta when quite clearly the opposite happened.
Same goes goes for Pepe.
I don’t think that’s the case. He tracked back a lot in his first season or so when he played more on the wing and that didn’t hamper his ability to get goals. On the contrary there was a lot of talk about how moving him central and removing that burden from him would increase his output.
jones wrote:
Only time I remember Auba being praised for his work rate was when his goals dried up at the start of the season.
Auba scored goals for fun under Wenger and Emery even at their worst and was still on fire for the first six months of Arteta's reign. The last 18 months under Arteta his goal scoring rate went down to levels below even his time at Saint Etienne where he was still a winger, with him now at Barcelona being back to his Dortmund and early Arsenal level. To say he improved under Arteta can't even be described as a stretch
I'm not making an argument he’s necessarily better, but there were certainly improvements to his game he didn’t have until he worked with Arteta. I'm not blind to the fact that strikers should score goals, and he struggled.
And that goals dried up doesn’t necessarily mean it was a result of these changes. I recall there was a lot of excuses being made about lack of service and how we were doing him a disservice with our attacking patterns. It’s absolutely logical he can have improved his all round game but still suffered a downturn in productivity. Jones you acknowledged something similar yourself here.
jones wrote:
football is a sport with so many facets that depending on the circumstances even dropping out of the CL could be forgiven as long as you see continuous and sustainable improvements.
There are parallels to be drawn there. Goals dried up but there were improvements in his game. We couldn’t build on them, incorporate them more successfully into the team, or give Aubameyang a better structure from which to build, but that does not mean there were not improvements to his game.
Anyway my point was not necessarily that he improved, whilst there were things he had improved on I’d argue it was perhaps not sustained enough to deem it a sustained improvement to his overall game in fact. But my initial question was more about his form being the worst of his career which would surprise me, but I haven’t ever followed him closely enough to care either way.
Klaus wrote:
RocktheCasbah wrote:
And yet, we have a just turned 22 year old kid who most here don't seem to rate doing it right now.
Eddie's always been criminally underrated by our fans because most people wanted Balogun to make it out of the academy instead for whatever reason, but there's a difference between a good run of form and being first choice. He obviously shouldn't be the starting striker for Arsenal at this stage in his development. The fact that he's this good when he does get consistent playing time surely means that we should have backed him over Laca this season though, rather than persisting with a player who has banged in two league goals from open play in a year just because he supposedly holds up the ball well?
I’d argue that it’s a change that should have been done sooner rather than Nketiah over Lacazette from the outset. Lacazette, poor as he has been recently, did bring a drive the team badly needed and had a decent spell of form for a period. That was allowed to turn into poor performances for too long and Nketiah should have been given a chance sooner. Perhaps in this form Nketiah could have come in, blown things away and steadied the ship in a different manner, but he'd never shown he was capable of that kind of impact or so well rounded in his game.
