Tir Na Nog
Changes Opinion Every 5 Minutes
Country: Ireland
They probably thought that the Özil-Miki-Auba-Laca attack would thrive for a few years, and with Bellerin + Xhaka established in the team you only need a few players to complete the first XI with 3 windows to do it in.
The thing is, I remember the Liverpool game we drew 1-1 at the Emirates.
We had Lacazette-Auba-Özil-Mkhi as our attack, Torreira-Xhaka as our midfield. Bellerin and Kolasinac as our attacking full-backs. Leno in goals. It seemed to be working pretty well in that game, like our attack look potent, Xhaka-Torreira were holding their own against a 3 man Liverpool midfield, Bellerin and Kolasinac were contributing offensively as well. Back then most would have assumed that would've been the basis of our team for the next few years and that we'd only have to add maybe a couple of players in midfield/attack along with some quality CB's. For ac combination of reasons that all went array. Emery seemed to prefer 3-4-3 or eventually 3-4-1-2 to the 4-2-3-1 we played in that game, dropped Özil, Mkhitaryan was hugely out of form, Torreira was dreadful second half of the season, Bellerin got injured, we had to adapt to make ourselves better defensively and as a result our attack hugely suffered.
It was always a huge gamble to be relying on an attack consisting of players mostly in their late 20's or entering their 30's especially as we were exiting the Wenger era entering a transitional phase under a new manager where our focus was purely getting back in the CL. It was kinda of a now or never approach, either the attack hits the ground running and fires us into CL and we can then focus on building with younger players or we end up having the issues we did have and we're left with what we have now.