Arsenal - Aston Villa, Today, In about 3 and a half hours.
est Can't someone give me a brief summary what went wrong?
Defended two balls into the box poorly. That was it, really. Frustrating that we didn't even blow the win in any sort of interesting way.
tielemans run and finish was great, as was the delivery. but that was a winnable ball for merino. it highlighted an issue I've noticed with him struggling to track back. he's often lagging behind the ball on defensive transitions. it kind of makes him a general drag on our game because he doesn't exactly ligh the world on fire up front either.
DiabyKungFu Cheers DKF! Ah, sucks. Fucking Emery again.
Coombs to be honest, I wonder if the whole "ahead of schedule" thing was used to temper the expectations of the fans for when we suddenly became competitive again. Bit of good old fashioned sandbagging.
Oh my god that was painful, in complete control and switched off twice and they score from half chances. Last 10 mins was so painful, fuck man it felt like the goal would come but just didn't. The disallowed goal, Merino hitting the post and then Trossard at the end (think he was offside).
The footballing gods have deserted us!
est I see we went 2-0 up and then fucked it all up? Can't someone give me a brief summary what went wrong?
Essentially, as seen for several seasons now it's impossible to win without Saliba even with £700m or whatever is spent on players.
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invisibleman18 nothing to do with Saliba missing. We’ve dropped plenty of points with him this season - it’s 80% Partey at RB and 20% anything else
Why not play Kiwior at CB? We did for large portions of the home stretch- I know he’s not perfect but it’s surely is a better option than what we saw today
Mirth essentially that still means it's not possible to win without him because being without him means having to do those multiple positions shifts. £700m spent but no trusted backup CB option that doesn't involve weakening the team at RB and in midfield.
The latter part of this game was reminiscent of our end of season collapse 2 seasons ago. It’s not easy to just slot players in and out. Saliba is a massive part of how we control the game in both directions.
Claudius that’s why we need Araujo or someone similar
This season has been incredibly painful. Even after their comeback I really felt we'd do enough to squeeze out the win but we get a tricky call to disallow a goal then we're working the post and fluffing our lines.
Feels as if we're simultaneously unbalanced, cursed with bad luck, and suffering the arbitrary punishments of the referees and the pundits weekly.
It does. I feel like we’re actually playing really good football. Mad negative variance. Though if we were to continue playing at this level for the next few seasons I’m pretty sure we’ll win the league. Adding genuinely good attackers will improve us further
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We really need to eliminate this ‘bad luck’ notion from our vocabularies if we really want to win things.
Bad luck is a cope mechanism at best and a kop out at worst.
Cliche aside, you make your own damn luck.
If I was Arteta I would make the whole team watch #lastdance. Especially Martin Odegaard.
Sicario2 - Tier 1 luck evens out over time. No one talks about our good luck, which we needed plenty of to beat Spurs last week.
Liverpool haven't been much better than us but they are winning games when things don't go their way. We are not. Sometimes we don't even win when things do go our way.
Qwiss No one talks about our good luck, which we needed plenty of to beat Spurs last week.
We'd have won the league last season if City faced up to a penalty on anything like a reasonable timeline or if they'd had any kind of decision or incident go against them.
Looking at City and Liverpool now I think it's fair to call the overall trajectory bad fortune for us, or perhaps a well rigged kayfabe drama in which we've been cast as the heel.