jones I don't disagree we are at times playing risk averse football but not when we have all our players available, Arteta is not Wenger who went out to play free flowing football and it is something we need to accept. But this is not us basically parking the bus, we play with the highest defensive line in the league, we have the most possession and teams week in week out deploy a deep low block or mid block to ensure we can't get through. I think teams on average have the deepest defensive line against us as well. These stats don't point to us being an overly defensive side, we hardly play on the counter. Firstly don't get much chance but also our counter attacking play simply isn't quick or direct enough.
The reason we got 70 something points was not down to our style of football but an unprecedented injury crisis. I have no doubt we would have either won the league or pushed Liverpool right to the end had we not suffered that injury crisis. It should be added that injury crisis probably came about from a bit of bad luck but also lack of options and rotation and we have gone a long way in addressing that this window.
I will defend Arteta, but you've known me long enough I was the same with Wenger. I'm the type of guy who goes down with the ship 😆
jones Points total is no indicator for attractive football anyway, Mourinho and Fungus won plenty of titles playing ugly footy.
Compare our football in 02/03 + 04/05 to the football in 03/04. The year we won the title was probably the worse out of those three years in terms of entertainment and free flowing football, maybe that tells us something....
