I loved our team selection last year (consistent and obvious) until Arteta became hesitant to rotate. Hopefully, today was more of an experiment than Arteta overthinking tactical changes and heading towards weekly changes.
To me, the advantage from tactical changes (week to week) are generally marginal and riskier than the optimized performance from consistent partnerships/line ups.
Partey at DM and White at RB just makes too much sense for me. Both have fantastic partnerships with those around them and are critical to our ability to control games.
Rice needs to play, I get that but I’m not yet sold it should be at the expense of Partey (as our DM). I would rather he start as an 8.
Also think this would have been a perfectly fine game to give Kiwior a go of Gabriel wasn’t available.
