I saw this in Ramsdale's Players Tribune article, and it jumped out at me as a potential area of his game where he has been as yet unable to push to the level, or rather, adapt to the style, that Arteta is pushing towards.
I remember him (Arteta) explaining to me that he wanted me to play a lot higher, and a lot more aggressive. And so every day in training, I would play higher, and more aggressive.
And he’d say, “No, no, higher.”
Every day, higher.
“Yes, yes. No, Higher.”
I’m thinking: f****** hell, I’m near the halfway line. How much higher?
It was brilliant, actually, because he let me explain my emotions about feeling a bit exposed in playing so aggressive, and he showed me 10, 20 times different examples of teams playing the way he wanted. Sometimes I was thinking, “Shit, boss, we’re watching vintage Barcelona here. Are you sure we can pull this off?”
But in the end, we were able to come to a middle ground where I wasn’t overthinking out there, and the results spoke for themselves.
And:
We don’t always see eye-to-eye on everything. We have some very florid conversations about football sometimes...
I think Raya and Ramsdale are similar in terms of their distribution - both world class with their short and long passing. The area I do think Raya has an edge, though, is in his calmness and confidence. This shows in his pass selection under pressure - Ramsdale sometimes gets a little too hoofy when pressured for my liking, it's the English coming out in him! - and I think that same nonchalance from Raya means he will be up for playing extremely high and aggressive. He's got that crazy fearlessness that borders on being a bit foolish. Ederson has it too.
Maybe it'll mean Ramsdale has to match that and adapt his game to get closer to Arteta's preferred style in order to keep his place? The knock-on effect of a keeper playing extremely high up in a team who wants to dominate the ball in the way we do is not to be sniffed at.
