I'm not disappointed in Saka not playing LB. I wanted him there over Xhaka. Tierney at LB is the absolute best of all worlds.
Yup, that was a little tongue-in-cheek on my part. With Tierney in, Saka's placement is a no-brainer. Meanwhile, I'm not sure how solid Hector's looking tonight. Early going though.
WTF, was that a crazy backpass by Partey to Leno which he had to save? (Since this is streaming, I can't back it up like I can do on my DVR)
So arteta starts unfit thierny and sticks w Mari. Heck might as well gone w no legs xaxa again. It only the biggest game of the year.
27' Chukweze is down with something serious. No contact made. Hope he's not in jeopardy, but his night is done and that's a break for us!
Pepe's been very active, energetic and all over the place. But he made a hash of defending deep in our final third. Luckily Leno was there with safe hands when the acute angle shot came in.
I was watching this on one screen while in a zoom meeting on the other screen and was very confused with Xhaka looking a lot like Tierney for some reason.
43' Saka with what seems like his first serious involvement... and he shanks his cross/shot high & wide. Not a quality half of football.
HT 0-0. This has not looked promising. Cue the critically pivotal HT talk by Mikel? 54% possession, 4 shots, 1 on target. Ugh.
Both teams playing conservative...not too lose. However, arteta must know he is losing right. Arteta has struggled to find a starting 11 all year. This is not an academy youth team. I missed warm up Mr. North bank. Missed XA injury.
Even if we were to win this and go through. What are the chances that we could stop the virile force that is Edinson Cavani?
Our quality of play improved so much when we anchored ESR into the #10 role because it forced us to vary our build-up and move some of it towards the center of the park. Now we have Odegaard and ESR both out there, and they're both tempted to drift wide to find space, so now we're back to the cross-and-pray attack from our horrible run of form earlier this season. We connected 1 of 13 crosses in the first half. That's 1) too many cross attempts and 2) a horrible conversion rate.