Freddie had the choice at Norwich and he left him on the bench in favor of Guendouzi. Then last match he started LT instead. That was a nadir home defeat so when he had the choice again, he bravely stuck with Lucas. I hope he continues to favor him. Maybe Xhaka's apparent concussion will force Freddie'ss hand, and Lucas+Matteo can cement a good partnership?
Well that was fun. Torreira was fantastic. I thought AMN looked better than Bellerin has of late. He looked so smooth and got out of pressure nicely. With Bellerin's lack of pace now he seemed to have no way around anyone, amn seems much better at that. Nice to finally get a win.
Luiz was installed by Joorabchian. Edu is probably just fearful for his life if Luiz doesn’t get appearance bonuses.
Apparently AMN doesn't want to play RB. Unfortunately, he's already very good there and should keep playing there indefinitely.
I don’t want to see Ricardo Montalban as Khan suffer that indignity, though. It’s a real conundrum...some Monkey’s Paw shit.
Geez. Harsh. Even high level athletes usually take close to a year to fully recover from ACL surgery. And he won't get match sharpness back just playing with the U23s.
He doesn't because he isn't a RB..He was brought up and trained as a Midfielder. He has said that on several occasions. I am a midfielder by trade, either central or on the wing, it's all the same to me. I'm not a defender, so I do get a lot of stick about my defending being poor, but it's something I'm learning and have been learning for a couple of years now. "It's not going to come overnight. If I was a defender as a kid, and my defending was poor, I would understand where the criticism is coming from, but I'm trying my best for the team and for the manager. "It's not where I would choose to put myself in the team, as I'm an attacking player by trade. That's all I can try to bring to the team. I'm still learning the defensive side, so when players are running at me, and they're throwing skills at me, I'm still learning how to deal with that." https://www.google.com/amp/s/syndic...defensive-game-prefers-midfield-role.amp.html He played poorly as RB early in the season but was very poor hence his him being benched. Then he played as a MF I believe earlier in a cup game and played awful and never saw the field again. I am glad though he got a return because he played well down the wings and his passing was superb. Bellerin is shot imo.
Just watched the match on DVR. Amazing what happens when you have dynamic, active players who run an attack a defense! I advocated a shake-up-the-status-quo lineup after Brighton, and while Freddie didn't go that far, I thought Martinelli and Pepe were great in the second half. Now replace Xhaka with someone who won't stand around - whether that is Guendouzi or Willock or try AMN in the midfield - and this team could really take off. FWIW, I'd like to replace Ozil with someone more dynamic as well, but I'm not sure the option is in the squad right now. Maybe Ceballos can do something when he is healthy, maybe ESR or Nelson can develop into that guy some day.
I’ve been saying start Martinelli and bench #34. Glad for the win , glad we came to life, glad for the forwards taking those chances. But the first 55-60 minutes is probably as Bad as I’ve seen Arsenal play . It was like Barcelona form a decade ago except we has the ball and could barely get it out of our Half. We didn’t even reach their box for the large part of the 1st half . I have no idea who we didn’t plan for the press —the spacing was horrendous . Xhaka was terrible -absolutely terrible . Any decent side would have Punished us . Glad we won but the victory doesn’t solve our horrendous MF problems
True, our absolutely stunning strike efficiency (3 shots on target, 3 goals) papers over the fact that we were still out shot, but this time just by a little bit... not the huge disparity we've been seeing of late. One match does not right the ship, but it sure was great to see us not give up, play vertically and with urgency, turn things around in 2T and basically run them off the pitch. For weeks/months now, I've been feeling we still had that in us, and today it finally came out! As did the big smiles from the players and coaches at FT. One step at a time.
Trouble is we can maybe expect a handful of points from our next 5 games. We just wasted the easy schedule getting outshot by bad teams.
Almost lol. I think its interesting that AMN lack of defensive instinct actually massively helped out the team. He went forward because that is what he knows how to to do.
I know, that's why I added the "as of late" and lack of pace "now". I think AMN played well enough that Bellerin doesn't have to play every game and Chambers can play cb and not rb.
True, true. But last night gave us perhaps just a tiny glimmer of hope. But I'm trying personally to be "careful" not to adopt an overly hopeful position. Could be bad for my health. However, one definitely takes note of other recent data points like United taking all 3 points at City, like Everton handily beating Chelsea, etc. IOW, result predictions don't always go as planned. Some simple things can help you go a long way. Like good coaching tactics & preparations. Or playing with sheer will, desire & urgency. Right from KO!
Well if we play against City with the relegation battle mentality and new found belief perhaps we can upset them. After all they are in a spiral of their own and we have some very fast forward players.
I thought yesterday's match was encouraging! We were completely trash in the first half but kept our Brighton second half rebound going for a whole half. I think kudos are in order to Freddie who did some of the necessary changes. I don't get the Luiz love tbh, I think he's been a prime factor in the disorganization of our backline, and having some stability at the back is crucial, so swapping him out looked good. And swapping Laca out, as I had thought, allowed us to have a little more control over the midfield, because we had genuine pace on the wings that could pin back the opposition wide players. The xg numbers seem to show this was our best defensive performance in a while, and I'd mostly agree with that via eye test. We still look pretty squishy but there was an improvement. Not giving up over 20 shots to a relegation team is a start. Once we got play through the lines West Ham couldn't defend us at all. They look really, really, bad. So that's the caveat I suppose: this may be the worst opposition performance we've faced all year. One problem with Pepe has been that he's been incredibly ineffective against defenses set in their low block, and we can see from his various Ligue 1 highlight reels that many of his attacking contributions would come off the counter. So having him find the Robben spot on that corner of the penalty box and go to work was particularly encouraging. Sadly I think I have to eat some crow on one facet: after the Brighton match I thought that we should keep Xhaka in as the one good passer in our side. He was god-awful today even before the concussion. If you play Ozil centrally I don't see any reason to keep Xhaka in the XI (and I actually thought Ozil was pretty good). Once Guendouzi came in West Ham effectively never had possession of the ball again. So it seems evident that we played close to our best XI except for Guendouzi in place of Xhaka. I'm not expecting much over the next month because our fixtures are rough, but this performance has convinced me that we could probably stave off a relegation fight with Freddie at the helm, and therefore the need for a new manager is probably not super urgent, especially if it means buying the new manager out of gardening leave like Poch or potentially Ancelotti. Seems to me that the best course of action might be to play it out with Freddie, see how it goes, and spring for one of the German starlet managers in the summer.
We finally had an xG advantage: xG map for West Ham - Arsenal pic.twitter.com/qSqWkwVsLY— Caley Graphics (@Caley_graphics) December 10, 2019