THE FINAL COUNTDOWN--Arrested Transfer Development Thread

We fattened up on goals against bad teams, and particularly early in the season. Look at us against top teams, we were 0-1-5 (1 point) against the three teams above us. We only conceeded 8 goals in those games if memory serves. The problem is we couldn't hardly create a chance against those teams, let alone score them.

Just think, we were that bad against the top teams and still finished with more points than we had the previous season (with RVP) - if we had been able to create anything, and win just ONE of those games we would have finished third, with six points more than the season before.

Defense is NOT our need, it is at the offensive end where we lack any creativity to open up opponents other than Santi (and to a lesser extent Rosicky).

 

We have needs on both ends. But we had (and still have) greater needs in attack: another striker to spell Giroud, someone who can play on the right to back up Theo (Gnabry perhaps?), and a midfielder to eventually replace Arteta.

Needs in defense aren't nearly as urgent: a fourth CB, and another right back in the long term to eventually replace Sagna or backup Jenkinson. It's possible that the club could promote Bellerin to backup Jenkinson.

 

The fact that Gnabry and our 16 year old from Mary-Land were promoted to the first team at such a young age means that that they can play. I am hopeful for them.

 

Are any of the youth strikers actually promising? I feel like "buying" Sonogo means Arsene doesn't have much faith in our forwards.

 

Sonogo was free--AW's favorite price, no reason to take your analysis any further than that.

 

What a dick. I hate him!

 

I see you're not one for a daydream so I guess that's that then... Haha Seriously though Im not familiar with Volland, looks like he's got 3 goals in 4 Bundesliga games this term, not a bad start for a kid his age. Good call.

 

Volland is very quick and left footed. Looks to have an eye for goal and is a decent dribbler too. I think he can poay wide too

 

we finished 3rd in goals scored... not enough

 

It should be 4 goals in 4 matches because he scored a legitimate goal but the ref didnt see that the ball crossed the line so didnt count it. Volland was one of the few positives in Germany U21's disappointing Euro U21. In his first professional season at the age of 18, he scored 6 goals and made 4 assists in the 2nd division. In his 2nd pro season at the age of 19, he scored 13 goals and made 11 assists again in the 2nd division. Then last season in his first Bundesliga season at the age of 20, he scored 6 goals and made 12 assists. Now this season at the age of 21, he has 3 (should be 4 ) goals and 2 assists in 4 matches.
Today, he scored 2 goals away vs Ireland U21. He plays as a winger for his club but for Germany U21 he plays as a striker. He can play on either wing, as a number 10 and as a striker. It is not just his goals that make him a good player. It is his great dribbling, link-up play, off-the-ball movement and vision(shown by his big number of assists)
This is his real breakthrough season and there will be a lot of clubs who will try to buy him next summer.

 

Well you sold me, shall we have Gazidis' personal Brinks truck headed toward Hoffenheim in time for Jan. 1?

 

Bar Spurs (to be fair both home and their place) we didn't play badly. We played poorly against the other top 5.

I still don't get the argument. So we had amongst the highest GF tally, but we lack goalscoring capability? Didn't we have three or four players who scored more than 10 PL goals (Theo, Giroud, Podolski, Santi)?

Or is this just illusory thinking, since we had Robin who scored a shit load in 11/12 and it looks like we "lack gcalscorers" because there is no one player who picks up the slack?

 

Exactly. I don't get then how we lack goal scoring ability.

 

We didn't play badly in either of the Chelsea games - dominated both only to be undone by MOTM displays by Cech, two moments of terrible defending at home, and two moments of awful refereeing at the Bridge.

We plays pretty well at the Etihad though. The games against Man United were pretty awful though.

 

27 matches we scored zero or 1 goal.

 

So because of bad luck, we can't score goals, even though our GF in 12/13 was the 3rd highest of out 20 teams?

Is it me, or is this argument based on shaky logic?

 

Plenty of people have answered this question.

Phishy above your post has one answer. Somebody else posted earlier that we scored half of our league goals in 7 matches. 7! That means we scored the other half in the other 31.

 

Anyone who watched could see we weren't creating as many chances as we had in years past.

 

Not really the argument I was responding to - I was responding to the comment that we played poorly against the other top teams. While the results are obviously bad, we're talking about a very small sample: six matches, and a certain amount of luck can creep in.

Back to the topic at hand: we obviously weren't good enough at scoring goals last year. As phishy said, we scored zero or one in 27 matches. Also, we drew 10 games. Those are far more telling stats than being third in the league in scoring. We simply didn't create enough changes last season, and weren't clinical enough in putting away the chances we did create.

The problem is consistently creating the chances to get that first goal, and then getting the second. We weren't very good at that. We were great at getting from two to four or five - the counter was superb (though that teams are willing to get that far forward against us is a little scary). But the potency of the attack has to be measured by getting the first two goals, when the game is fairly even. And last year's squad wasn't good enough in that area.

 

Not if you look at variance in goals per game. There were many games (27 it seems) in which we struggled to score goals. Even this year, better finishing would have meant another 2 goals against Villa and maybe another one against Spurs.