It's about balancing criticism. However, after the last couple of results I've had to temper my natural responses to matches with reviewing the stats, incidents, etc. Some of the things I thought were pretty distorted.
There are some counterintuitive things about the way we play. We're incredibly front-heavy in the attacking phase compared to a traditional football side, what with our tendency to have White add himself to our front five, and to be using Partey and Zinchenko as our de facto midfield in that phase.
I think you could argue the conditions have flattered Ødegaard and Xhaka a bit during the past couple of matches. Our most resounding issues have been in midfield, where we've been at sea for one half out of two, with no Saliba, and against the lesser West Ham also no Zinchenko to calm us. That has created a situation where Øde and Xhaka are relatively absent—they're not making many visible mistakes, because they're not even that involved.
But … why is that? The detailed instructions of those "8" roles seem to be making it hard for us to re-balance the field when it tilts against us, so it's really a tactical problem. There's a scrap of denial about how vulnerable we are with these injuries.
We need to be able to shape-shift more for game management reasons, to be able to switch to a more traditional 4-3-3 without surrendering our press resistance, as opposed to the 2/3-2-6/5 we're often shaping up as when we dominate, and we need to be able to do this with even more vongidebce when we're missing a couple of men who are good on the ball.
Arteta's got a nice opportunity to find solutions against Southampton, so let's see some progress.
