AbouCuéllar
Author of A-M essays 📚
Yeah, I just meant in this game. No doubt the quality of football needs to be upped from the second half of last season (which was a level up from the first half of last season, which isn't even worth discussing it was so poor).I struggle not to. We simply are not scoring and look so blunt in attack. We have scored two goals in five matches! Yes, we have won the last two matches, but still that is absolute poverty. Whatever you want to say about Arteta, but we aren't exactly lighting up the league with our attacking football.
No doubt. But this was quite different. Our issue with Arteta has typically been getting into the final third with spaces and interesting situations to create opportunities in. Those situations abounded yesterday. That's why I say, sure, if we see that this now becomes the problem--having interesting situations and spaces but being quite wasteful or poor with the final ball--then I will be the first to say that it is something to do with the manager, because my philosophy is that the manager is the author of a team and has huge effect on its production. But as I said, this hasn't really been the case with Arteta--if anything our players have tended to be rather clinical with the limited amount of opportunities they create and limited amount of spaces they tend to find / create (hence why we have performed to our slightly above our xG).Let's not pretend like this is a new issue. Ever since Arteta has been here we have struggled to score goals and create chances. Now that can be down to two things, the tactics or the players (in reality it's both).
Rather than adress the most obvious issue in the team, he's spent over 100million on defenders and keepers. No excuses for this bloke anymore.
Well, White is a defender but you can argue he does as much to address the systemic issues in the team in terms of construction, being effective in retaining possession and being able to mount attacks and progress the ball into the final third in an effective. Lokonga, Tomiyasu, and Ramsdale certainly have trickle down effects on this too (Lokonga obviously in greater degree). Ødegaard was signed for this, of course, as well. I get this argument from last season (it was mine; absolutely furious we didn't sign a 10 when we had such chance creation issues), but don't really understand it re: our recruitment this summer. Think White's signing in regards to the effect it has on our play is especially underrated / underappreciated. Playing the type of lineup we played yesterday wasn't viable without a player of White's calm and composure on the ball who can supplement Thomas' passing duties in the build-up and playing out from the back including under some level of pressure (something we just couldn't do with a Holding / Gabriel or Holding / Marí back-line; Tomiyasu of course helps there too, though the difference between White and Holding or any other CB we played last season is massive compared to what I've seen the difference between Tomi and Bellerín is in this phase).
Again, we were finding ourselves in very different spaces, breaking into the final third and through lines with our passing yesterday, than we usually see under Arteta, and while part of that is down to the poorish opposition (reminded me a bit of away Wolves game last season tbf, in this respect, though I think Burnley is typically a much more solid and difficult to break down side than Wolves looked last season when we played them), certainly it also has to do with being able to play out from the back comfortably and link defense-midfield-attack in much more interesting ways thanks to White, and the fact his qualities allow for it to be viable a lineup that before really wasn't functional (here I'm talking about the trickle down effect; against Villarreal with this lineup we just couldn't get the ball from Thomas to Ødegaard, we could barely get it to Thomas, through the middle--U-Shape and all that we've talked about--White changes this, and Ødegaard especially was getting on the ball often in the middle of the pitch where he can make the difference and bring the coherence, sense, and quality to our build-up in ways that really no one else does for us).