To Tet or not to Tet? There's justice on both sides of the argument.
If the cards had been very slightly different we'd have been league champions last season. And refereeing and injuries have fucked up this season.
Tet stays for now but he's on thin ice with me. The truth is that we are now in May and injuries and refs are starting to look like excuses. Yeah our lucks been bad but we never really looked on it this season for any prolonged period even before the injury issues got bad.
Burnwinter The critique of recruitment is valid, but it also gets exaggerated when people pencil in £200m of strikers without taking out an equivalent value.
Every summer people are crying out for strikers and up until this year with Isak no one has ever really asked for a £100m striker never mind £200m. We wasted £50m on Jesus, £65m on Havertz. They are our current striker options and the 2 highest paid players at the club. We should have done better than those 2. We seem to have constant upgrades at the back. Moves like White to Timber, Ramsdale to Raya, the constant influx of left backs, etc Yet at CF we are far more flawed with no sign of an upgrade.
Burnwinter My concern: Arteta is too dogmatic on the basics and it is holding us back now.
He is but a lot of coaches are. The way to fix it is to compensate by having better attacking talent. Even Mourinho knew he needed the likes of Hazard, Robben, Drogba, Costa, etc in his teams.
There was no reason he should be so careful with his subs in Paris. Pulling Skelly off for Calafiori at half-time and getting Nwaneri on for Øde would've shifted things and maybe given us a chance.
If the argument is that no-one on the bench can play the 8? Then that's a big flaw in Arteta's game model and coaching.
Fully agree here, he has huge problems with in game management. People like to blame his squad but again this is his squad. Having players like Zinchenko that you brought to the club, you paid big money for and handed big wages to and then saying there is no depth is one of the issues. Move these players on and reinvest in the squad, even if its just reinvesting in depth.
Burnwinter What we've been doing has brought us this far but the foundations have been laid for ages: we need the rest of the structure.
Think it was @Dom who was saying roughly "empirical change by Christmas or get rid". That's about right. We need to be in pole position in the league at that time. Letting another season slip away like this one would be bullshit.
We absolutely have to hit next season running and go all the way. There has clearly been a huge loss of focus in the league and I'm starting to feel like Artetas man management magic could be showing cracks. If we don't look like potential champions early next season I think we may have even worse issues. You can't keep that level of buy in going indefinitely without achieving anything. The first step is summer recruitment that gets the players and us fans really excited for next season. Most of us went into last season thinking we hadn't done enough, I can't imagine the players don't have the same reaction to poor windows. It feels to me like this is the pivotal moment for Arteta and this team, its get it right now or you end up being the Spanish Pochettino.
Josh recently shocked everyone when sacked Denver Nuggets coach Michael Malone for finishing 4th in the Western Conference right before the play offs. They won a title under him just 2 years ago. I do wonder will he be as ruthless with Arteta.
