This is similar to what Pep was teaching Sterling - I remember the Pep video also got a lot of attention at the time. I find it odd players of this age have to be told this https://t.co/7x52COJuXu"If you stand closed, you have to take two touches. Give me the ball, I'm open, then you don't get done on the press." pic.twitter.com/urlGx0nzTl— Lewis (@LGAmbrose) December 5, 2019
Aha, missed that. Just watched. That's the same video as on Arsenal.com. When I first watched it, I didn't catch that brief instruction by Freddie about open body. Wasn't clear if he was talking mainly to one player (Martinelli?) or the whole team. So yeah, it's kinda basic, but it also doesn't hurt sometimes to reinforce the basics, right? So if there's a lot of hype about this video, I would tend to say to those folks doing the hyping: chill out a bit, try not to pile on too much, or make mountains out of molehills. Game play and results are the real barometer. Let's see after several matches under Freddie how things went, assuming he gets that many.
Been away a while, but now that there is some wheels a turning I guess I’ll hop back in for a bit. One thing I’ve really noticed under Emery is that our precision game has gone out the window. Very few passes hit the target in stride or on their preferred foot or put them in a position to make the next pass quickly so every attack dies. Maybe this is something Freddy or a new Manager can turn around quickly. But with our defense and no target man to lump the ball to we must possess the ball better or we are going to suffer.
Did our possession game at the end of Wengers run fall apart as badly as it did end of last season and most of this season under Emery?
This is untrue. We didn’t have technically strong players under Wenger but we could formulate an attack.
Right. The philosophy didn’t change much be we lacked the players to execute especially without Santi. AW didn’t really adapt to the squad he had I suppose, but the poor personnel decisions he started have continued. I was okay with letting Iwobi go at a good price, Ramsey would have been hard to keep with his contract, and miki seemed an obvious release considering his wage but those three made up a considerable portion of our attacking stats and they haven’t been replaced. We are feeling it right now.
xG by season: 2014/15: nice! (think Gronk). We were second in the league. 2015/16: 73.53 (led the league) 2016/2017: 63.58 (fourth in the league) 2017/2018: 72.27 (third in the league). Was a colossal drop off after the Alexis sale. 2018/2019: 64.80. In our first season with a top ten striker in ages. 2019: 20.70. Over a full season this extrapolates to 52.44 xG. There's a huge drop off post Wenger. The rubbish we've seen post-Wenger is complete non-sense. In the season we fired Wenger, we did this at home: 5-1 win vs Everton 5-0 win vs Burnley 5-0 win vs Huddersfield 4-1 win vs Crystal Palace 4-1 win vs West Ham 3-0 win vs Stoke 3-0 win vs Watford 3-0 win vs Bournemouth 4-3 win vs Leicester Honestly, I would welcome Wenger back with open arms at this stage. Late Wenger gave us consistently above average play that wasn't quite elite.
It's interesting 15/16 was peak Ozil though he was also ok in 16/17 IIRC he was injured the beginning of that season I wonder how much of this has to do with the failure to replace the Ozil/Alexis/Giroud outputs? Auba scores quite heavily but we are not creating for him and he can't generate the shot volume all on his own
It wasn't nearly as bad as we're seeing now. We had 4-5 game stretches where teams figured out how to counter us followed by Wenger fixing this.
Yeah agreed. I mean like we have been saying, our data nosedived out of top 10 land 6 or 7 games ago after an OKish start Wengers arsenal was at least top 6
Unfortunately unless the new manager comes with significant investment for at least one 1 great CB and 1 Great CM in January. The snowball will likely be too big to stop. Heck it may be already. We have a thin squad with young players that are not ready or defensive players that are subpar and a midfield that cannot compete on either end enough to cover the cracks.
Liverpool needed a central defender so they bought the best one in the Prem. ManU needed to shore up their defense so they bought 2 established starting defenders. Arsenal needed 2 central defenders and they bought a winger and the only last minute, hand-me-down defender available. So long as player purchases are made based just on the player's individual market value as opposed to addressing team needs then it won't matter who's managing. The greatest of chefs can't make a meal if you give them an empty fridge.
The crash in XG pretty much exactly correlates to selling Alexis and the Ozil cliff edge 17/18 was the last time Ozil had any data volume.
I am not trying to dig into why his data went off the cliff. It might be because of tactics, or decline, or simply lack of playing time. But the point is we need someone else to generate the chance volume if he isn't doing it