Expectations - 2023/2024 Season: Page 20 - The Arsenal discussion community: One More in the Tolly

Expectations - 2023/2024 Season

flobaba

awooga83 it is so overly dependent on winning your one v one duels. If you can't do that then the likelihood of creating a high quality chance is slim. And with our finishing...

Even if we somehow get things to click again, I do not like the way we play. It is way too prescribed, rigid, and predictable.

Claudius

Clrnc

we aren’t in transition. We reinforced from last season. This is a money season.
that said we have significantly higher load this year given that we are playing champions league and did really well in group stage. Mikel barely cared about Europa league. So we have to factor that into what we are seeing with the team…
-… which comes into Mikel’s one squad building mistake. He has not sufficiently augmented the forwards. Nketiah and Nelson are not very useful to us, hence they don’t play. We would be better off with one Saka level replacement, plus an academy kid in their place. So we could freshen up with Saka and Martinelli. You can see they are shot. They’ve ploughed through the last month, and we would’ve benefited from rotating them.
that impact was seen today. Team was tired. We didn’t press. We got stretched. And then Fulham just had time to get the ball and play it over our absent fullbacks over and over again.

RocktheCasbah

Big Willie thanks, I will.

RocktheCasbah

Clrnc manifestly not true, we played some fantastic football 21-22 - as evidenced by the Man City game two years ago. We were just let down by the way we started and ended the season..

Clrnc

RocktheCasbah as evidenced by the Man City game two years ago

Remember the City game vividly because that's the rare time we played well and everyone cheekily credited it to Stuivenberg, we quickly went back to type after the match though and people were calling for Stuivenberg to come back 😆 That's how rare good free flowing football were that season.

If you look back at last 2nd half of the year there were alot of grinds and single goal wins at the end too and we completely shat the bed against Nottm and Brighton. Only when we lost the title we started to play slightly better again

RocktheCasbah

I also don't accept we only played good football for half a season last year. Yes, the collapse was painful, but it came in April - a month out. We still had some excellent performances in there.

Claudius

So Arteta doesn’t get the best out of his squad when he doesn’t have a full team. But he’s not unique.

Both Pep and Klopp have been able to get to ₁₀₀ points when they are able to get full seasons from their very best players. What happens when these players are injured. Wee saw Liverpool drop like a rock last season with VVD and others injured or out of form.

City are even more interesting. With a healthy team with Rodri, Gundogan, KDB, Haaland etc, they wheeled out 18 straight league wins and got the treble last season. This season with KDB out for all the games they have looked limp, they’ve lost every game Rodri has missed, and have struggled in most of the games without Haaland. And they’re on an 80 point pace, not their typical 90-100 because of this, despite having a deep squad with players like Grealish, Foden, Doku, Nunes, Kovacic etc who can fill in.

All this tells me is that depth isn’t as important as your peak quality. What really matters to a team is having superlative players available as often as possible, and being able to coalesce around them. And not even Pep can transcend this.

Claudius

Clrnc the free flowing football is easy to link to the games where teams attacked us. Eg City, Brighton, United, Sevilla, PSV etc.

RocktheCasbah

Clrnc If you look back at last 2nd half of the year there were alot of grinds and single goal wins at the end too

Premier League wins Jan - May 2023:

Spurs 2-0
Manchester United 3-2
Aston Villa 4-2
Leicester City 1-0
Everton 4-0
Bournemouth 3-2
Fulham 3-0
Crystal Palace 4-1
Leeds 4-1
Chelsea 3-1
Newcastle 2-0
Wolves 5-0

Obviously, there aren't as many wins in that list as I would have liked, but if you want to tell yourself we didn't play good football in these games, there's nothing more I can say (I was at 3 of our final 4 home games, thankfully missing Brighton and we we were flying). By my count, we scored 38 goals in 12 games..

There are only 3 single goal wins in there though.

Clrnc

Claudius Again, that's not true. We played deep block defensive compact football against City this season when they attacked us and won, while last season we pinned them back for long period of games and yet lost (thanks to the ref).

We absolutely controlled the game against PSV and United. United didn't attack us much, only through counters. Brighton pinned us back last season and we couldn't get out, deservedly lost.

Rohit

Free flowing football is easy to spot when there is intent and adventure. Adventure brings with itself risks. We have the the center backs and a midfielder to mitigate the risks, may be not the full backs. Arteta is trying to find the balance this season and he hasn't been very successful.

awooga83

I'm not sure he has been working in the balance Arteta has always been a defensive manager that's what he focuses on above all else. It impacts how we play because everything is about making the decision that tries to minimise our defensive risk. He's a very Mourinho manager but if you can't win the big titles nobody wants to play that way it's boring and uninspiring.

I've seen nothing over the majority of his tenure that says differently about him. The 50 point half season was an anomaly and relied on some of our forwards hitting their top potential all at the same time and executing everything perfectly. But that is never going to be a sustainable way to play football.

Claudius

awooga83 that said, every season his xG difference has improved. And that’s one measure of a team overall improving.

RocktheCasbah

awooga83 The 50 point half season was an anomaly and relied on some of our forwards hitting their top potential all at the same time and executing everything perfectly. But that is never going to be a sustainable way to play football.

And I think he recognised that, hence why we've got this more controlling style of football this season. It seems that we've gone too far back the other way right now. To me, it sort of feels like when Arsenal went on a crazy berserker run at the end of the 91-92 season, walloping teams left right and centre.. but we'd already blown our title defence due to our definitive frailties. In the summer, George sold Rocky Rocastle, Anders Limpar got marginalised - and we became very dull indeed.

I think there are parallels with that situation and now, but I go back to what Arteta said after the game yesterday. I don't believe he wanted us to play like we did yesterday any more than we did - and he obviously hasn't got the balance quite right himself - the players just seem a little shot, a little off in their execution and even a 1,2% drop off in performance, at this level, can be fatal.

We shouldn't forget that we're only 9 days on from a top performance at Liverpool, Jurgen Klopp was purring about us. I know people don't want to hear it right now, but we haven't just suddenly become shit.

awooga83

Claudius I'm never fully convinced on how much value Xg might have. If you create good chances they only really help you if your attackers or goal scorers are able to convert at the expected return rate. If those players aren't clinical or good finishers then you can be looking like you are creating all the right chances but you won't actually score the goals which is ultimately what matters.

The Brighton game would be one of the best examples people said how great a performance it was which I agree with the exception of the goals and finishing. That should have been a 4-5 nil result. But it wasn't and that result was in the balance going into the last 10. If that's how it goes when your game is near it's top level you will have problems in the vast majority of other games types where your not at that level.

Qwiss

awooga83 we also need to be looking at non-penalty xG, we've had a decent few this season but most of last season we were denied so many and they really push xG up considerably. Open play xG is another thing to look at, we are overly focussed on set pieces. People say we're like a Mourinho team but really we're like a Big Sam team.

Claudius

Agree. We are also being hit hard by a combination of injuries - Partey, Timber and Tomi. It’s doing a number of things. First, Odegaard is playing very deep this season, so it’s killing a lot of our connective tissue up top. And then we can’t spell our fullbacks, including White who has played unfit most of the season.

Clrnc

Why are people claiming White is unfit? He has no injury issues and was rested plenty when Tomi was fit. He was not very good even at the start of the season too

flobaba

Clrnc https://www.nowarsenal.com/latest-news/arsenal-star-playing-through-injury-over-the-last-three-weeks/

Just by watching him, you can see he doesn't seem as explosive or confident as he was last season.

RowJimmy

RowJimmy Joyful football.
Not looking good here at the moment. Yesterday was particularly turgid.
85 plus points (ie more than last season).
Still possible, will need to play better in 2nd half than in first.
If we go into the next-to-last match day with a chance to win the league I will be happy.
This is still my key measure, and I would now say that if we hit 85 points we will be playing that penultimate game with a chance to win the league. The way things are bunched that could be true of 4 teams.

Claudius

Qwiss good points. Our set piece coaching in both directions is great. We need to get Odegaard up, and connect the front 5 again as was the case last year. Each game our player networks look like an Nketiah effect regardless of if he plays - and Odegaard’s positioning is a large part of this.

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