VERY reminiscent of Rooney's goal against City. At least Pickford tried. Joe Hart didn't even flinch.
The offside bit is just really well-executed tactics; Villa's defense is excellent at catching opponents offside. Prior to today, they'd done it 58 times this season - next highest was 38.
Emery is good at the level where both teams are going to play football. His problems came more when teams just refused to play us.
The squad was bad and the club leadership situation above and around Emery was even worse. He never had a chance. Still, I don’t miss him.
Fwiw, I don't think he's a horrible manager and didn't even when he was with us. But man, there was that period for about 2 months before the club finally cut him loose when we were just dour, awful to watch.
The 18 months prior to selling RvP were watchable. And now the past 18 months under Arteta. There were highlights in between, even a title chase in 2016. But it's been a very long, sometimes painful transition.
The total capitulation at the end of 2018-19 was the most frustrated I've ever been as a fan. A win against any of Everton (8th), Palace (12th), Wolves (7th), Leicester (9th), or Brighton (17th) in the last two months and they qualify for the Champions League. All followed up with the bullshit Azerbaijan final where we got annihilated by Chelsea. That should've been the end of his story at Arsenal. Wild that he held on until the end of November.
Hated that whole window of time. We should have been comfortably top 3, and the final should never have been in a country where a player who was important for us at the time COULD NOT BE ASSURED OF HIS SAFETY IF HE PLAYED.
How? Villa have deployed the offside trap the most successfully this season. Spurs fell into their trap.
The first part I agree with, early in the game Spurs missed 2 or 3 clear cut chances, but the offside stuff is deliberate and they should get credit for that. They have played a high line for a while, they play the offside trap excellently and Son fell for it so often you wonder what was going on between his ears.
Udogie skied a golden chance and Kulu hit the post when he had 3/4 the net to aim at. Villa woulda been down 2-0 in the first 5 minutes. Well-executed trap or not, Villa got lucky that Spurs crapped down their pants when presented with opportunities.
Not going to quote anyone here because I don't want anyone to feel picked on, and because I'm picking on everyone. To those of you rehabilitating Unai Emery: Your opinions are bad and you should feel bad.
Oh, I'm pretty sure I said after the Baku debacle that I didn't think he was right for the job. I just don't think he's horrible.
who is doing that? i just don’t believe there is much managerial impact. Both late phase weng and emery were managers who had no Alpha combined with an top 6 type squad.
Dude. Wenger's final season had an xGD of ~25 Emery's first season had an xGD of ~7 And Emery got substantial investment in his squad when he took over. Wenger was significantly better than you realize. For comparison, Arsenal last season were ~+31 xGD, and this was the first season Arsenal were better than they were in the season that got Wenger fired.
Emery wasn’t the guy for Arsenal but we had a shit squad wenger was more attack minded but I don’t think he wouldn’t done any better the following year we were treading water for years
Right but as we discussed before, the reason Arse were slipping season on season under Weng was the declining quality of the first team which had been very dependent on the output of Alexis, Ozil and Giroud in particular