Cedric is stealing a living. Glad he's been taken off. Says a lot that he looked like total shit against the 2nd-placed Austrian team.
Serious concerns about Arteta's ability to coach a buildup, and if he was involved in signing Mari or Cedric, about his judgment of players.
Passing out of the back only works if it draws a defense out and creates gaps throughout the team. When it's used against an underdog playing in a low block, with a lead, it does exactly nothing. If you want to play those safe, meaningless passes, do it further up the field where there's equally little pressure. That way, if a defender loses concentration/makes a mistake, there's at least an opportunity to make something dangerous happen. If a forward half-heartedly pressing David Luiz switches off, it doesn't mean anything. And a goal!
We have the same problem that we did dating back to the Wenger years. Our passing is fairly poor. We can rarely complete a simple, direct pass to a player who has a defender on him.
Maybe that's true, but Wenger dealt with that through really creative off the ball movement that created options. Nobody disputes that Wenger could coach a buildup.
Overall, terrible game. The tactical setup is so conservative that it can only succeed when the players give up on it. The gap between Cedric and Bellerin is a chasm. Leno needs to sort his head out. The insistence on using strikers as wingers is silly. We need more of Saka and Nelson playing as actual wingers. Gabriel and Partey look like terrific signings. Elneny is like a new signing. Onward to Sunday. ******** Jamie Vardy.
Yet another reason Californians are comfortable with diversity, we get the Europa and Champions League games in Spanish without having to subscribe to CBS.
I can get 2 on TV in Chicago, one on UniMas and one on Galavision (standard def only). They usually focus on Spanish teams though - the broadcasts in the early session today were Napoli - AZ and Rijeka - Sociedad, so I would have been shit out of luck if I hadn't caved to CBS.
You guys suck at providing score updates, I was thinking it was a draw at best. (final was 2-1 good guys) Living in Kansas, it would be CBS streaming or nothing, and I already pay for enough streaming services. On paper, this was the toughest match in the group. Dundalk at home is a week from today. Arteta needs to play kids who are hungry and want to force their way into the PL squad.
Just got back and watched the highlights on TUDN, after hoping to find a full-match replay with no spoilers. No such luck. Highlights are of course misleading, but they made it seem like it was a close match and we were a little lucky to come away with 3 pts. Leno did his best to gift them 3 pts, and refuel the debate about whether he was the wrong keeper to keep. I couldn't see/hear much of their crowd... how many thousand did they have in there? Anyway, onward.
El Neny looks... Good, now that he's clearly being coached. His engine is useful and he knows what he is capable of. If it turns out El Neny is the glue that lets us connect our defence and our attack going forward... Well that's just shocking. The easy as you like vertical ball to Bellerin was tasty.
For all the talk about keeping the ‘wrong’ keeper, it’s worth mentioning that we got a good offer for a player we wouldn’t have expected to get a quarter of that six months ago. And as far as we know there weren’t any offers for Leno. What kind of offer for him would have felt like such a windfall? I like Martinez a lot, but both he and Leno have their flaws. Whichever one we ended up with also would be far away from our biggest problem.
The minute Leno screwed anything up, the knives would be out. And a similar outcry would've happened if we sold Leno and kept Martinez.
I think that says more about us as a fan base. Selling Emi was smart business unless we thought Emi was a much better keeper.
Correct. Many fans apparently do think that, but there’s very little evidence it’s true. I think there was a lot of healthy skepticism over Leno when he signed, but he’s been largely good for us. Again, he’s not the problem.
reading this thread, there's a ton of teeth gnashing about leno's fuckerations as if he is almunia. has there been much/many other examples of him being bad/having brain farts?
He's not essentially an eleventh outfield player, but mistakes happen. Our win against Liverpool came from who I think is the best keeper ********ing up the passing.