We had 71% of the possession, you can't do that without putting in a shift. Sunderland worked hard but they were made to work hard. Wenger can work with mid rank players and our position reflects as much. We are 4th, where this team really should be.

We have a lack of quality in vital areas and that just shows. I don't think we conceed on the counter because we have committed men forward, we have always committed players forward through all 15 seasons under Wenger. The difference is teams of the recent past have players that don't have the technique to keep possession under pressure or pass accurately with consistency.

Henry, Pires, Bergkamp, Vieira et al didn't lose the ball cheaply in dangerous areas under physical pressure or in misplacing passes. It is ridiculous.

christ rohit, that was sunderland's plan. they wanted us to have the ball. you don't get it.

if i had a team with a good defence, i'd rather be defending comfortably with 2 banks of four in my own half than faff around playing pointless passes around the halfway line, which poses ZERO threat to the other team. at least when i'm defending, there is loads of space behind their defenders that my forwards can exploit once we win the ball back.

this is the essence of the chess match that is football - you attack too much and you get burned on the break. you attack too little and you get relegated after a season of 0-0 and 1-1 draws.

kamikaze wrote:

christ rohit, that was sunderland's plan. they wanted us to have the ball. you don't get it.

Lol. Exactly bro. It doesn't matter how much possession we've got if we've not got the vision or creativity to do jackshit with it. They know this and just wait and work hard and stay disciplined and hit us on the break. That's how almost every team which beats us does it. Nothing new.

Ofcourse i do Kami but we also worked hard to get it back when they had it.

My point is what Sunderland did today is no different to what teams have done to us for years. Right now though we neither have the quality to score goals in such a situation nor do we have the technique to make us less vulnerable to an opposition solely looking to play on the counter.

kamikaze wrote:

this is the essence of the chess match that is football - you attack too much and you get burned on the break. you attack too little and you get relegated after a season of 0-0 and 1-1 draws.

not to quote myself, but somehow, we've also mastered the art of not attacking, while still getting caught on the break. it is astonishing to behold!

kamikaze wrote:

christ rohit, that was sunderland's plan. they wanted us to have the ball. you don't get it.

if i had a team with a good defence, i'd rather be defending comfortably with 2 banks of four in my own half than faff around playing pointless passes around the halfway line, which poses ZERO threat to the other team. at least when i'm defending, there is loads of space behind their defenders that my forwards can exploit once we win the ball back.

this is the essence of the chess match that is football - you attack too much and you get burned on the break. you attack too little and you get relegated after a season of 0-0 and 1-1 draws.

So true. We beat ourselves because we're so damn inept and clueless with the ball. We're lacking quality.

Rohit wrote:

Ofcourse i do Kami but we also worked hard to get it back when they had it.

no we didnt. everytime they got the ball, their ball carrier didnt have arsenal players within 5-10 yards of him, and had space and time to scan the entire pitch and choose his pass. that is pathetic. good defending is showing the ball carrier to a certain side of the pitch, so that you effectively reduce the pitch to half its size, and your teammates can pack into that area, anticipate the pass and either intercept or press the receiver to cause a turnover.

but our team has no concept of defending as a team whatsoever.

y va marquer wrote:

I'm no O'Neill fan but I actually believe if we'd swap managers around for today's game and we'd have hammered Sunderland.
Guarantee you none of our players would have put in a shift like that for many managers but Wenger.

Easy to do that when you've only been in charge two months, Y and it's all going well. Try after 16 years when it's not.

Which might be a reason in itself for Arsene to contemplate letting someone else have a try.

You can do that when the opposition is trying to build an attack from the back. I am not saying we are very good at it either because we lack ball winners and are far too meek, something i have said earlier too.

Sunderland just kept breaking from midfield which is why our midfielders and full backs scampering back like headless chicken looked so disorganized and scrappy. We turnover possession far too easily after playing some pointless passes and any team doing that will look as clueless as we do.

Rohit wrote:

We had 71% of the possession, you can't do that without putting in a shift. Sunderland worked hard but they were made to work hard. Wenger can work with mid rank players and our position reflects as much. We are 4th, where this team really should be.

We have a lack of quality in vital areas and that just shows. I don't think we conceed on the counter because we have committed men forward, we have always committed players forward through all 15 seasons under Wenger. The difference is teams of the recent past have players that don't have the technique to keep possession under pressure or pass accurately with consistency.

Henry, Pires, Bergkamp, Vieira et al didn't lose the ball cheaply in dangerous areas under physical pressure or in misplacing passes. It is ridiculous.

You're a nice guy Rohit, but you're labouring under some misapprehensions.
Possession of the ball in football is a useless statistic, in fact most statistics are irrelevant it's not a sport like cricket, it's a very flowing fluid game where things like morale movement tempo and space are much more important.
It's more like a medieval battle than a business production report.

It's not how much of the ball you have thats important - It's what you do with it.

Don't dwell on just the first line of the post Biggus. I just pointed that out as a response to Y va's post to suggest that a stat like that cannot be attained without the players having worked hard. No where did i insinuate that it is tantamount to a good performance. I am bemoaning the lack of quality in the same post as well as in the posts later.

Most of our possession is between our CMs and our back 4. These days we NEVER try to play on the break. There were a few great opportunities in Milan, and there were a few really good ones today as well. We ALWAYS slow it down these days. Then we have 20 meaningless passes between our back 4 and our CMs only for us to either

A: miss one of those meaningless passes and the opposition break on us
B: we try a slightly more adventurous pass, mostly Rosicky who really shouldn´t, and the opposition break on us

Rohit wrote:

Don't dwell on just the first line of the post Biggus. I just pointed that out as a response to Y va's post to suggest that a stat like that cannot be attained without the players having worked hard. No where did i insinuate that it is tantamount to a good performance. I am bemoaning the lack of quality in the same post as well as in the posts later.

I'm getting to it
Y va's point is well made, anyone can be successful with players like Henry, Pires, Bergkamp, Vieira et al, fact is Wenger is just a mediocre coach who got lucky having an extraordinarily talented bunch of players together at the same time.
Now he's been found out- The Emperor has no clothes as someone once said.

Who do you think coached Vieira, Pires, Henry? Wenger's gran? You don't get 'lucky' for 10 years (not including the relative success he had with Monaco either)

And all successful teams have a talented bunch of players.

An inanimate carbon rod (which Capi so cruelly disparaged) could have coached these players and still they'd have been successful.
Credit to Wenger for assembling them though that was his doing.
Err except Bergy of course.

Biggus wrote:

An inanimate carbon rod (which Capi so cruelly disparaged) could have coached these players and still they'd have been successful.
Credit to Wenger for assembling them though that was his doing.
Err except Bergy of course.

You keep saying Wenger was 'lucky' to have those players though. While at Monaco he brought through Weah, Thuram, Henry and Djorkaeff, amongst other more established players. Some of them were youth players but all have gone on to have stellar careers. Funny how that luck seems to follow him about his entire career.

Granted, tactically Wenger isn't a revolutionary but management isn't only tactics, you deal with players and their demands, pick up the right players that fit in to a 'team'. In the middle of that, if you can revolutionise diet, training, play a popular brand of football and boost the clubs finances it helps. And while your at it, why not extend the careers of good players that you do have at the club and keep them around through your methods. Isn't that also in the job description? Sure, the self righteous, chest thumping fan response is: 'trophies or gtfo' but I wager that 99% of football clubs in the world don't see that way when hiring a manager.

Wenger was very fortunate to come into a club which boasted the likes of Adams and co. [although the season before he came, the Arsenal defence conceded 55 goals - just saying yo] but the same will be true for any subsequent manager that comes to Arsenal and has the advantage of the infrastructure that was built during the Wenger era, starting with the youth facilities right to the financial health of the club. And that will last a hell of a lot longer than Tony Adams' knees.

I suppose, what I'm really trying to say is, you're off the mark here.

Quick edit: If you're going to re-write history to fit in with how you see Wenger today, you're just as bad those who want to keep Wenger on because of what he achieved seven years ago.

General Mirth wrote:

You keep saying Wenger was 'lucky' to have those players though. While at Monaco he brought through Weah, Thuram, Henry and Djorkaeff, amongst other more established players. Some of them were youth players but all have gone on to have stellar careers. Funny how that luck seems to follow him about his entire career.

Not his entire career, his luck ran out in 06 (as luck will always do) and he was found out.

General Mirth wrote:

Granted, tactically Wenger isn't a revolutionary but management isn't only tactics, you deal with players and their demands, pick up the right players that fit in to a 'team'. In the middle of that, if you can revolutionise diet, training, play a popular brand of football and boost the clubs finances it helps. And while your at it, why not extend the careers of good players that you do have at the club and keep them around through your methods. Isn't that also in the job description? Sure, the self righteous, chest thumping fan response is: 'trophies or gtfo' but I wager that 99% of football clubs in the world don't see that way when hiring a manager.

Yeah GM, but we're not 99% of clubs, we're in that 1% of the elite richest clubs in the world.
We supporters are well within our rights to demand trophies or gtfo.

General Mirth wrote:

Wenger was very fortunate to come into a club which boasted the likes of Adams and co. [although the season before he came, the Arsenal defence conceded 55 goals - just saying yo] but the same will be true for any subsequent manager that comes to Arsenal and has the advantage of the infrastructure that was built during the Wenger era, starting with the youth facilities right to the financial health of the club. And that will last a hell of a lot longer than Tony Adams' knees.

I suppose, what I'm really trying to say is, you're off the mark here.

Quick edit: If you're going to re-write history to fit in with how you see Wenger today, you're just as bad those who want to keep Wenger on because of what he achieved seven years ago.

No one is denying Wengers contribution to making Arsenal a superclub, but of course he had luck and he was in the right place at the right time, and we who love Arsenal had luck that Wenger was the perfect manager for us at the time, but we're all agreed his time is well past.

And just to stay on topic, we're going to lose RvP unless things are changed at the top.

Biggus wrote:

General Mirth wrote:

You keep saying Wenger was 'lucky' to have those players though. While at Monaco he brought through Weah, Thuram, Henry and Djorkaeff, amongst other more established players. Some of them were youth players but all have gone on to have stellar careers. Funny how that luck seems to follow him about his entire career.

Not his entire career, his luck ran out in 06 (as luck will always do) and he was found out.

This literally makes no sense, you don't get 'lucky' for 20 odd years because Wenger reinvented himself during that period, just like any other coach would have done and worked well until 2008.

You don't understand the meaning of the word 'luck' do you? Circumstances are always going for and against you but no more or less than any other manager around at the time, and the success that we got was merited and deliberate in thought and execution.

Given that wenger's spent most of his career being sucessful. By your reason, I could just as easily say Wenger's been 'unlucky' not to have won anything in recent years, and let's face it, that case wouldn't be hard to put forward either. I don't actually believe that though.

I'm not saying this just because it's Wenger either, I've stuck up for Guardiola in the past when it's put forward that was 'lucky' to inherit the group of players he has. Although Pep has more to prove in some ways.

General Mirth wrote:

Yeah GM, but we're not 99% of clubs, we're in that 1% of the elite richest clubs in the world.
We supporters are well within our rights to demand trophies or gtfo.

But clubs that aren't Man City, Real Madrid or Chelsea don't work like that. Hell, even the latter two have developed a snob value for beautiful football and bringing through young players. I reckon City will do the same in a few years.

Trophies are of paramount importance to any Champions league team but not the only target they set themselves, if you don't see that then you're not the 'realist' you claim to be.

And just to stay on topic: van Persie is predominately left footed.

TG, a lot of that makes sense. Especially your last sentence.