Claudius
Clrnc
Couldn’t disagree more. We don’t have quality in depth. We have a strong, but not elite, first team. We may have more numbers than the Wenger era but as Big Willie points out it’s not a straightforward comparison due to number of facets of the game that have changed since then.
Have a look at some of the players who were playing off the bench in 2003/04. We only really had a core squad of about 16/17, but those not generally considered first teamers were the likes of Parlour, Edu, Wilford, Reyes and Kanu. That’s a marked difference in terms of trust, experience and/or quality to Nketiah, Vieira, Nelson, and Smith-Rowe.
Technically we’re not all that. We’ve done really well against City and Liverpool in the league, but in Europe our shortcomings are clear to see and the physically edge/domination we can exert in the Premier League just doesn’t work as well. Think it may have been Goon that referenced elsewhere our inability to be able to smother games with possession the way City do. We just don’t have enough technicians in the first team to be able to do that. We look blunt in Europe because Odegaard aside, we don’t have players of a high enough quality who can operate in tight spaces with any degree of effectiveness. Too easy for teams to sit back and neutralise us.
We are scoring for fun, we have been good to watch. I don’t think that’s necessarily a sign that this team and squad is as advanced as we think it is. Our physicality had a huge bearing on our (relative) success so far this season, but our over-reliance on that to the detriment of technical development in the team means we’ll likely struggle as teams see how to stop us and figure it out themselves.
We’ve had the warnings.
