The Arsenal vs. Liverpool, Premier League Matchday 30, 3 April 2021

Xhaka is a perfect example. He looks great sometimes because the opposition is letting him play his game. Put him under consistent pressure and he falls apart. So his inconsistency is about quality.

 

I agree, when I used to play tennis I played a shot worthy of Wimbledon once a year. It felt good.

 

The team is not very good, but we should be doing better than we are.

 

We have some good players who are totally underperforming. Wrong set up, wrong combination of starters? Something's not right.

 

A lot of the fan base just default to blaming Kroenke because he is an easy target, but a lot of that is unwarranted.

If you go back to when him and Usmanov were jostling for control of the club, everyone said how they would hate to have Usmanov and his blood money. Everyone was really proud of the fact that we were a self-sufficient club, and hated the idea of an owner who would meddle the way Abramovich was doing a the time.

So Kroenke essentially honored the wishes of the fans and didn't meddle. He trusted that Arsene and the team around him knew more about how to run the club than he did, and left them to their own devices. The problem was that Wenger, his coaches, the back office staff Dick Law, and the board were relics of a time gone by. They hadn't evolved to keep up with everyone else, and Gazidis, who was not the sharpest guy himself, didn't have the power to do anything but sign off on Wenger's wishes.

So we basically had years of institutional decay that no one could really do anything about because no one could go against Wenger until that final season.

Then Gazidis put in place a structure that was supposed to guide the club in its transition to a more modern structure, and build up some institutional know-how, and he ditched it almost immediately after. And that is where Kroenke does deserve some blame, because he should have stepped in and appointed a CEO who could be trusted to run the club and control those below him in the org structure.

We are still paying for Wenger's bad decisions. That is not to say there haven't been mistakes made since - Edu and Arteta have made plenty of them, but the trajectory we are on was set by Wenger, and no one who has come since has really been able to break us out of that.

As far as owners go, Kroenke is not that bad. He has helped finance transfers when John Henry wouldn't put in a dime to help out his recently crowned champions. He restructured our stadium debt, so we owe the money to him rather than bondholders - so in a summer like the one coming up, with extenuating financial circumstances, we will have more to spend than we would otherwise.

Sure he has not been a sugar daddy, but wasn't that what everyone railed against?

 

I got around to listening, I thought they were both right and both wrong. Elliot's been on the Arteta bandwagon recently so his jumping off it after Liverpool was an overreaction. But Paul's insistence that a coach has to lose the dressing room to be fired is nonsense.

I actually think, sort of paradoxically, that there has been an overreaction to the Liverpool loss but that Arteta probably should be fired.

Liverpool was one match, they are still a good team, Arteta was dealing with a lot of injuries. The loss isn't shocking and isn't deserving of an overreaction.

But while many (like Elliot) had been seeing green shoots in Arsenal's play, I look at the totality of the league position, the slim hopes of European football next year, and it's hard to justify why we should have any hope in Arteta. I think his squad building move have been almost universally bad. I don't think he is good tactically. He has control of the locker room, but only because he's banished anyone who would question him. I'd like to have something to have hope for other than he's young and learning and should improve as a manager. That's not good enough for me.

 

And the club have basically reverted back to that model, but instead of an experienced world class manager in Wenger, they've given all the power to a 30-something with no track record.

(unless you think Edu has an independent voice from Arteta, something that I have yet to see)

 

Vinay, Edu, Arteta is not a management team that should fill anyone with confidence, and it is the primary reason I feel we will be an 8-12th place team for the foreseeable future.

 

This morning, I almost wrote this verbatim, but I stopped halfway through and realized that it wasn't worth rehashing. I agree 100%. There is a lot of revisionist history going on...Stan deserves some of the blame, but there is plenty to go around, and he was exactly what the shareholders wanted. He didn't do a leveraged buyout like other owners. He didn't want to take dividends like Usmanov did. He bought into the “self-sustaining model” as opposed to being a billionaire’s plaything, and he left the club management to run the club. Now, people are acting differently.

I usually do not take up for Stan because he is a problem as well, but again, there is plenty of blame to go around.

 

Back to Xhaka: Given time and space he can be brilliant with his passing, but it doesn’t seem like he makes quick decisions. When comparing him to Partey, you can see the difference. When pressed from behind, before he receives the ball, Partey knows when he can turn and beat the pressing player, so he does it with his first touch, Xhaka invariable passes the ball backwards, or at best sideways in the same situation. You can argue he knows his limitations as a player, but it is a limitation, Xhaka has mistakes in him if pressed. The other skill requiring quick decisions that Partey has and Xhaka rarely demonstrates is one touch passing. The reason Saka and Smith-Rowe were such a revelation in the Chelsea game was their ability to combine with one touch passes in tight spaces. If you want to slice open a defense the more one touch passers you have in your team the better. Think Wilshere’s goal against Norwich, or for that matter any of the great team goals Arsenal have scored.

The other limitation in Xhaka’s game is his defense. He has become the de facto 6 and he is not good enough defensively for that role. He doesn’t have the speed or quickness to effectively shield the defense and his slide tackling often reminds me of Paul Scholes, perhaps the worst slide tackler in the history of the Premier League.

I don’t believe Xhaka is a player you can build a title winning or even a top four midfield around and starting with Wenger that appears to be exactly what’s happened.

 

I think it was Clive that said Auba on the left only worked in the 3-4-3 since the wingbacks were responsible for defending. In a 4-2-3-1, the left wing has to track back more, and that's a poor use of Auba's talents.

The list of squad building mistakes in the Arteta/Edu regime is long:
- Didn't have enough spots to register Ozil and Sokratis
- Failed to loan out Saliba and didn't register him
- Should have loaned Nketiah and Nelson in January
- Should have sold AMN last summer instead of keeping him and not playing him
- Gave Auba a big contract and then play him out of position
- Didn't have a capable backup GK for the first half of the season
- Don't have a capable backup LB for the second half of the season
- Signed Willian

Most of these can't be blamed on a lack of transfer funds and some are poor uses of the money they did have.

 

The money they did spend on transfers (not free agents) was spent on two quality players in Gabriel and Partey and a solid backup in Mari. They may have overspent on Partey, but they got a relative bargain in Mari. So there may be some hope.

 

You're setting the bar really, really low. Mari is a 27 yo backup left side center-back to another guy they spent 24m on.

From a squad building perspective, I want my backup CB to have any or all of the following:
- Homegrown
- Potential to improve and be a starter
- Future resale value
- Positionally versatile (able to play RCB or LB or DM)
- Low wages

Mari provides none of those. He's no different than Cedric, really, just a couple years younger but had a small transfer fee. According to Spotrac, he's on higher wages than Cedric at 85k/week.

Gabriel - good player, good signing. Partey - good player, bad/dumb signing.

 

About Kroenke, I'm on the same page as Jitty. He's ultimately responsible for what happens. And since the money was ok he didn't concern himself with the sub-par management that was slowly eroding the foundations of the club. Once the CL money went away he freaked out a bit and spent some money, but didn't bother to spend the time or effort or money to truly rebuild what had broken.

Stan is a finance sheet owner. He only cares that the money is coming in. He's effectively asset stripped the performance side of the club. The value now is all in the stadium and the legacy of the name.

 

United makes less sense to me because they'll still spend money. Imo, their "rot" is similar to ours, in that one guy was responsible for too much, and without that guy things went haywire.