Mikel Arteta: All The President’s Men

[Gooner Zig]

Yes, we are very good at them but that doesn't mean we should be relying on them. At the end of the day, you have to fail in your primary objective of the passage of play you're engaged in to produce a goal for the ball to go out for a corner in the first place.

I would much rather an attack finishes with us committing the numbers to score from open play than us messing about passing laterally while being super conservative and hoping that we get a corner out of it because we're good at them. How frequently do teams score multiple set pieces per game? Actually, not very often so even for a team as good at them as we are, you are still talking about razor thin margins that you're leaving yourself if you're putting an emphasis on trying to generate them at the expense of your general play.

There's a very fine line between something being a weapon and a crutch and unfortunately, I think that we are trending in the direction of making it the latter rather than something that we can exploit when the situations present themselves but not try to generate almost inorganically to the point of destroying what should be the foundation of a well rounded attack.

I know we were fairly conservative vs Liverpool at Anfield but we genuinely have been trying to be more direct vs United and vs Leeds. I think the desire is definitely there to change from Arteta, but he kinda relapsed vs Liverpool . It's an addiction to him so it might take some time.

 

[Trilly]

I don't think you can consider our set piece reliance as unsustainable at this point? Surely we have enough sample size to see that we are just absolutely amazing at them.

we had a 2-3 month period last season where the set pieces dried up and our open play chance creation issues were exposed, led to dropped points and cup exits. I remember this clearly being an issue even before Saka and Ode got injured.

We’re good at set-pieces but no top team should be relying on them to be the difference on a weekly basis. Looking at this season we won the United game with a set piece and opened up the Leeds game with another before adding in 1-2 more set piece goals. We’ve scored 6 goals this season and two of them have been from open play. Of those two goals one was a Gyokeres moment of brilliance while the other was Saka’s goal that was created from a counter press.

TL;DR: we’re three games in and we’ve created one clear chance (the Saka one) for our forwards from open play. That isn’t sustainable.

 

[Gooner Zig]

we had a 2-3 month period last season where the set pieces dried up and our open play chance creation issues were exposed, led to dropped points and cup exits. I remember this clearly before Saka and Ode got injured.

We’re good at set-pieces but no top team should be relying on them to be the difference on a weekly basis. Looking at this season we won the United game with a set piece and opened up the Leeds game with another before adding in 1-2 more set piece goals.

We’ve scored 6 goals this season and two of them have been from open play. Of those two goals one was a Gyokeres moment of brilliance while the other was Saka’s goal that was created from a counter press.

To put it another way, we’re three games in and we’ve created one clear chance (the Saka one) for our forwards from open play.

I hear you.

The set pieces should be a supplement to a well oiled attack, not one of the main engines.

 

[Gooner Zig]

Btw...I was listening to Amy Lawrence on a post Liverpool podcast trying to justify the craven approach with the usual "well do you want to get beat 4 or 5 nil like in the past". This is such a disingenuous framing, as if the only outcome is binary: complete haram or shipping 5 goals. I'm not trying to single her out but there are a lot of folks who think this way and it's super annoying.

 

[HattoriHanzo]

we had a 2-3 month period last season where the set pieces dried up and our open play chance creation issues were exposed, led to dropped points and cup exits. I remember this clearly before Saka and Ode got injured.

We’re good at set-pieces but no top team should be relying on them to be the difference on a weekly basis. Looking at this season we won the United game with a set piece and opened up the Leeds game with another before adding in 1-2 more set piece goals. We’ve scored 6 goals this season and two of them have been from open play. Of those two goals one was a Gyokeres moment of brilliance while the other was Saka’s goal that was created from a counter press.

TL;DR: we’re three games in and we’ve created one clear chance (the Saka one) for our forwards from open play. That isn’t sustainable.

Cup exits happened in January and February, Ødegaard was already back from injury.
Ødegaard was injured early September, Saka few days before Christmas.
It couldn't have been before Ødegaard got injured.

Anyway, chance creation was/is our biggest problem, bigger than execution of chances.

 

[Trilly]

Cup exits happened in January and February, Ødegaard was already back from injury.
Ødegaard was injured early September, Saka few days before Christmas.
It couldn't have been before Ødegaard got injured.

Anyway, chance creation was/is our biggest problem, bigger than execution of chances.

I remember us struggling with chance creation before the injuries to them both tbf. As for the rest I’ve clearly muddled my time lines as you’ve pointed out.

But yeah, we tend to have stretches during the season where the set pieces aren’t going in and oppositions who set up with a mid-block start to frustrate us.

 

[Clrnc]

Open play xG - we were 6th in the table. But if you actually look at the numbers there’s hardly anything between us and like 10th, whereas City and particularly Liverpool are miles ahead.

It’s obviously a concern.

View attachment 38826

And just this year open play xG...

 

[Gooner Zig]

We are one of the bottom ranked teams in terms of accessing the center of the pitch or getting into "Zone 14", in the entire division. Our style of play is to go around teams so as to avoid turnovers in the middle of the park. Yes that means we don't typically concede many counters but it also means we have to work incredibly hard to generate big chances. I can't remember who mentioned it a few pages ago, I think it was @Batman, how many easy goals do we score? Hardly any because we don't access the areas of the pitch where we get the opportunity to. This has a knock on effect because I think our players have to work much harder to score our open play goals and it would be mad to think that there isn't a correlation with our style and the number of injuries we've suffered over the past 18 mo

 

[Rasmi]

And just this year open play xG...

Yeah the idea people think it’s possible to win the league creating so little is fantasy. Sadly there’s no return. This is our dna under Arteta

 

[Rex Caudillo]

We are one of the bottom ranked teams in terms of accessing the center of the pitch or getting into "Zone 14", in the entire division. Our style of play is to go around teams so as to avoid turnovers in the middle of the park. Yes that means we don't typically concede many counters but it also means we have to work incredibly hard to generate big chances. I can't remember who mentioned it a few pages ago, I think it was @Batman, how many easy goals do we score? Hardly any because we don't access the areas of the pitch where we get the opportunity to. This has a knock on effect because I think our players have to work much harder to score our open play goals and it would be mad to think that there isn't a correlation with our style and the number of injuries we've suffered over the past 18 mo

I remember when @OnlyOne was still on here talking about our Zone 14 issues…

 

[Riou]

So Mikel has basically cost AM The @Macho Man, ffs.

This is like picking Bruce Rioch over Ian Wright...how can you morons still be Arteta In at this point!

 

[Gooner Zig]

Mikel's backside has been saved by us getting Eze, imagine having to deal with a whole season of Martinelli / Trossard

 

[Tir Na Nog]

Btw...I was listening to Amy Lawrence on a post Liverpool podcast trying to justify the craven approach with the usual "well do you want to get beat 4 or 5 nil like in the past". This is such a disingenuous framing, as if the only outcome is binary: complete haram or shipping 5 goals. I'm not trying to single her out but there are a lot of folks who think this way and it's super annoying.

Tbf I don't even hate a pragmatic approach, but you need a transitional threat and the selection of Nelly and Merino, and leaving Gyokeres isolated basically making Noni the only player Liverpool had to worry about, killed any transitional threat we might have had. Throw in Eze either on the left or in place of Merino central and we'd have been so much more dangerous in that regard even if we were generally pragmatic.

Even Mourinho sides at their most defensive still had at least 3 players ready to spring the counter and destroy the opposition in transition, we don't have anything.

 

[Riou]

It's quite for funny how Wenger played better football than we do now, with an old Arteta as our DM

 

[Tir Na Nog]

It's quite for funny how Wenger played better football than we do now, with an old Arteta as our DM

Bro we played better football with Flamini and Coquelin playing lone 6.

 

[Batman]

Tbf I don't even hate a pragmatic approach, but you need a transitional threat and the selection of Nelly and Merino, and leaving Gyokeres isolated basically making Noni the only player Liverpool had to worry about, killed any transitional threat we might have had. Throw in Eze either on the left or in place of Merino central and we'd have been so much more dangerous in that regard even if we were generally pragmatic.

Even Mourinho sides at their most defensive still had at least 3 players ready to spring the counter and destroy the opposition in transition, we don't have anything.

Yeah in actuality the comparisons people make with Arteta to Mourinho are quite disrespectful to Jose. Yes, that man would park a bus when he needed to but his teams scored goals from open play and would light you up on the counter once you lost the ball. They were defensively solid without being so cautious that they couldn't mount effective and efficient attacks.

Arteta is one of the sharpest defensive minds of this era or any era but he's gone too far. He's got to trust the quality of our defensive unit and the work he has done with them positionally enough to let them absorb whatever pressure we come under from committing bodies into dangerous areas. The team is far too talented particularly in defense to need to be this cautious. Having a spine like we have should make a manager comfortable being aggressive in possession and I really hope he figures that out before it's too late.

 

[Riou]

Bro we played better football with Flamini and Coquelin playing lone 6.

Coq-zorla taking us to the 2015 calendar year championship...

 

[BigPoppaPump]

We have bursts of smashing small teams which clouds the overall pictures sometimes.

Our open play chance creation stats are usually quite bad during our poor form periods. There’s also the stats floating around about our difficulty in scoring more than one goal consistently. Our ratio of open play xG vs total xG is pretty bad, if you consider set piece reliance unsustainable.

Overall the stats paint a picture of a very good team who struggle to score more than one goal consistently. That leads to respectable finishes but dropped points against teams who are able to score at least one goal against us. This problem gets 10x worse if we aren’t able to get a set piece goal.

The sky isn’t falling down, we’re still a very good team but you don’t have to look far or hard for clear evidence of why we haven’t been able to get over the line.

But then you'd have to look at the players available and if the team isn't ravaged by injuries, You guys hate Havertz but I'd bet money on it that the numbers look better when he's playing.

Also set pieces haven't shown to be unsustainable, can't just disregard them if they're part of the way the team plays. I think we'll be better this season with Eze and Gyokeres but that's only if Gyokeres can gel with Arteta's style of play.

I don't even think these stats paint a black and white picture anyway, needs a lot more context and actually compared to why other teams have it higher.

 

[BigPoppaPump]

Yeah in actuality the comparisons people make with Arteta to Mourinho are quite disrespectful to Jose. Yes, that man would park a bus when he needed to but his teams scored goals from open play and would light you up on the counter once you lost the ball. They were defensively solid without being so cautious that they couldn't mount effective and efficient attacks.

Arteta is one of the sharpest defensive minds of this era or any era but he's gone too far. He's got to trust the quality of our defensive unit and the work he has done with them positionally enough to let them absorb whatever pressure we come under from committing bodies into dangerous areas. The team is far too talented particularly in defense to need to be this cautious. Having a spine like we have should make a manager comfortable being aggressive in possession and I really hope he figures that out before it's too late.

Mourinho benefitted mostly from Abramovich's money and having the best teams, he would not survive in this era as seen at Man Utd and Sp**s.

 

[BBF]

@Gooner Zig's run in this thread over the last few pages has been legendary. It has to be said.