Tir Na Nog
Changes Opinion Every 5 Minutes
Country: Ireland
While a lot of people can focus on individual errors today what I couldn't wrap my mind around was Özil and Xhaka in the first half.
They kept swapping positions so Özil was playing deep while Xhaka would then ponder up the pitch in a half-run. It seemed a very odd tactic to try to break Palace down leaving both Özil and Xhaka in tasks that were not suited to their skill sets.
The other thing was it really seemed like Sanchez-Özil-Xhaka were playing with each other much of the first half and ignoring Welbeck and Walcott completely with Monreal and Bellerin occasional contributors.
It does seem like the divide on the training ground might be affecting the play on the pitch. Either that or I don't know. the tactics this match are hard to understand for me
This tends to happen quite a bit depending on the circumstances of the game, used to happen all the time with Özil and Alexis only really looking for each other and Cazorla. It's clear some of the players just don't trust some of the others in possession.
As for Özil dropping deep, I believe it was because he was being tightly marked by the Palace player (can't think of his name, it's a hard to spell one) who scored the penalty and he just couldn't get on the ball in the number 10 role and went looking for it deeper. Once that player man-marked Özil it seemed like our entire game plan just went out the window and we were almost improvising in terms of how to try and break them down with people just doing whatever they wanted without much thought to the overall structure of the team.