Claudius But against City in a final with our first chance to win a trophy in 6 years, and missing Odegaard/Eze, i think you are forced into taking Raya
I think this is 100% true with the benefit of hindsight. I'm ambivalent about the balance of the decision before the match. But during the match there was a window of opportunity to intervene based on an "unstructured signal" that passed by. Put simply, at the start of the second half Kepa "looked really dodgy" but Arteta didn't respond.
This gives a way to formulate a general concern I have about Arteta's management: he's too dogmatic to respond intuitively and promptly to events prior to their full interpretation.
This concern also goes to our history of varyingly well-formulated complaints about "specificity", icing out non-conformant players, apparent failure to rotate, and throwing his resources at perfecting tactics versus tactical flexibility ... even our misgivings about our injury patterns.
You could add to these the vague malaise of it still feeling like we might not win the league despite our points advantage. Fact is we've also seen that kind of problem come about before for Arteta's Arsenal.
Kepa's errors alone give a pretty reasonable theory of why we lost to City. A separate and lagging critical observation has been that it seemed we couldn't play out for long periods because we couldn't adapt to not being pressed: an almost Sun Tzu-ish theory that's very interesting.
Did City beat us because Guardiola was creative enough to simply depart from the league-wide tactical outlook of high pressing that has determined a point of inflexibility in Arteta-ism?
That theory is just another that goes back to this way of looking at where Arteta may have a problem: he seems to be an axiomatic rather than a creative thinker. You could say he tends to bypass the "vibes" of unstructured signals, and to rely on facts as expressed by the current terms of his perception. Sometimes until it's too late for us to win.
That said, if we take up this perspective we also need to pay attention to the benefits of Arteta's highly structured approach, which have been enormous, and which also closely address what we saw was wrong with Wenger's approach to the sport by the end of his Arsenal tenure. I wish @Anzac were here so he could argue we need to rely more on "player intelligence".
The league match against City is going to be extra interesting due to what's happened in this one. A good chunk of the stakes of my interest will be adapted from those of this "master versus apprentice" subplot: can Mikel actually "get one over" on Pep without having his trousers yanked down again?
