Pepe and Laca not in the squad for Barca. Full Arsenal squad to face Barcelona: Leno, Martinez, Maitland-Niles, Chambers, Sokratis, Mustafi, Monreal, Kolasinac, Thompson, Ceballos, Guendouzi, Torreira, Xhaka, Willock, Mkhitaryan, Nelson, Ozil, Martinelli, Saka, Aubameyang, Nketiah
If people don’t want me abusing Xhaka all season, then he better not try dumbass nutmegs near his box again. Like if he had the speed to pull it off anyways
Probably the most demand for a stream they ever did. How much demand is there for watching a new signing play keepy uppy?
All match AMN has been poor in defense and he caps it off with a Mustafi-esc backpass that beats Leno. Maybe Barca will buy AMN off us to play striker for them.
why do we play so many small passes at the back? Our D sucks so get it out the area as soon as possible!
He's young, he'll learn from it. Our goal is to not be reliant on AMN at right back this campaign. Hopefully Hector will be back by October.
Could we get through one game without our defenders spudding it up? I have absolutely no faith in our season as it stands because I can't see us not conceding a goal a game minimum. Its going to be at the point where we will have to score 5 goals to be a good chance to win.
Well that wasn't exactly inspiring for the upcoming season. Pretty lame effort against an un interested Barca team.
Half that mistake belongs to Leno. There was no necessity to come out. In fact by coming out he puts himself under pressure.
The worst is the goals aren't coming from someone individually snapping our CBs or some intricate passing move that renders them like practice cones. They are simply falling asleep too often, losing sight of their striker. Their awareness or concentration needs to be improved drastically.
I am not sure if Emery can't teach that to these players, or if the players we have are simply incapable of learning. Either way, it looks like we are headed for 3rd consecutive season of conceding 50+ goals in the league.
We didn't do this under Wenger. As bad as Mustafi has been, he wasn't this bad under Wenger. Emery just can't coach.
It may simply be that Emery's style of play doesn't suit Mustafi. Mustafi is not very good at playing out of the back, he makes to many bad passes. In addition, in a pressing team his focus to often is anticipating that the midfielder pressing the ball may be beaten, requiring him to cover for the midfielder, which means he loses track of runs off the ball. I'm not sure that makes Emery a bad coach, but a good coach does adjust his tactics to take advantage of the strengths of his players and minimize their weaknesses. I don't think this happened last season.
Interesting take. Along those same lines, Emery certainly didn't do anything to tailor his style to any of Ozil's strengths last season. A gamble that paid off in some ways for the team overall, but also put our (arguably) most talented player into a similar funk that Mustafi appears to be in. NOTE: by no means am I saying Mustafi is as good as Ozil. But his crap performances are clearly affecting his effectiveness and making the situation worse. Emery's solution to Ozil last season was to bench him. Unfortunately, we aren't deep enough at CB to do the same with Mustafi. Time to remedy that ASAP!
He can hardly press and mostly won’t. In addition, I saw him trying to stand in front of Griezmann when he was near our box, cutting the passing lane. The problem was, when Barca actually felt like passing to Griez, they did so easily, with Xhaka nearby. He’s basically doing zero-nada-zilch on the defensive side.