I had to kill a couple of hours during travel yesterday, so I watched the Villarreal game.
From reading through the thread here, I thought we'd be worse than we actually were.
I think we started quite well, the first 10-15 minutes were excellent I thought. Good intensity, trying to get forward and at their defence. As the game wore on, it gradually became more flat and some players clearly taking it as a pre-season kick-about had a negative effects on others. We then turned the screw again in the second half, but then the pre-planned substitutions killed the momentum.
I thought Nwaneri and Norgaard were excellent. Gyökeres looked to get involved, but isn't quite on the same wavelength as the others yet. Understandably. I think he looked sharp physically and made some good runs(which were mostly ignored), so I'm optimistic that it won't take him long before he starts finding opportunities to score.
I really hope the long throws and long kicks were just something that they were told to try out and not something that becomes a reoccurring thing in our play. Because they were all god-awful.
As Villarreal settled and punished our lackadaisical defending, our play slowly regressed to moving the ball around the horse-shoe of death and getting in mindless crosses to no-one and trying to win corners.
It really doesn't help our fluidity or creativity that we always take 2min breaks before delivering any free-kick or throw-in. I understand that it's a tactical thing by Arteta to help sustain the intense pressing style that he wants us to play, but it really makes watching the games such an eyesore.
Taking time during the free-kicks weren't such an issue when we were looking like scoring from every opportunity in the first half of last season, but like the rest of our football, the last 7 months or so our set-pieces have been pretty unimaginative and poor in quality.
Hopefully against United the switch is flicked and with a more serious approach to the game, the little things that were off against Villarreal will work out and we will see a better performance quality wise. The fear still remains that when all is not clicking perfectly, we will fall back to the original program of the drones- pass it around the defence and try to win corners.
Let's see whether against Athletic we will see our best XI together on the pitch.
