Tam I think the attacking positions have been a weakness of Arteta’s since he’s arrived, much obscured by the brilliant Odegaard and having Martinelli and Saka come through the ranks. He’s stumbled upon Havertz as a striker, who were now needing to upgrade on, and the others have ranged from underwhelming to poor. The S v G situation is doing nothing to dispel my belief that Arteta is not as decisive with his attacking instincts as his defensive ones. Contrast it with how quickly and aggressively we pursued some of his defensive buys (that on the face of it we didn’t really but admittedly did work out good acquisitions).
I think this argument is overstated, it's like when people used to complain that Arteta had an aversion to signing CMs. Taking a limited sample size, ignoring some points that don't fit, and extrapolating erroneously.
E.g. we sign Calafiori, a CB to play left back, and we complain that he's always signing CBs. We sign Havertz, a CF to play AM, and we complain that he doesn't sign CFs. White underwhelming at CB and then happening to be an awesome RB is evidence of Arteta's defensive talent ID, but Havertz doing well at CF is just luck.
Odegaard, Havertz and Trossard were all good attacking signings but more importantly, having three shit hot young attacking talents in Saka, Odegaard and Martinelli is an obvious situational difference that is going to have an impact on our prioritisation of targets. That's three attacking positions out of four where you're mostly shopping for backups and alternate options, until you decide that someone isn't realising their potential at least.
We have signed some attacking rubbish like Sterling but it's not like our defensive signings are all amazing; Cedric, Pablo Mari, Lokonga, Runarsson, Ramsdale, Tomiyasu, arguably Zinchenko too, all varying degrees of dodgy.
We pursued a bunch of forwards aggressively - Mudryk, Sesko, Vlahovic, Raphinha spring to mind - and we were decisive enough with the attacking players we did land. Another situational difference between attacking and defensive signings is that forwards tend to cost a lot more, and even with that we still sometimes miss out on defensive players; Huijsen and Garcia this summer alone, Caicedo and Martinez in earlier ones.
I guess to summarise... how many right sided center backs have we signed since Saliba broke through? What has Arteta got against right footed center backs?
