Goonersworld

KG3 wrote:Considering injuries against attacking teams I’d go with this

—————-—-Ramsdale———————

——-Holding——-White—-Gabriel——-

Cedric———-Elneny—Xhaka——-—Saka

———Pepe———Martinelli——ESR———

Against defensive sides I’d go with 4-3-1-2, ESR/ODE and Saka alternating, players having creative freedom and none of those predictable plays Arteta

——————Ramsdale——————
Cedric—-White—-Gabriel—Tavares

———————Elneny—————-
—-Odegaard——————-—Saka

————————-ESR——————
———Martinelli——-—Pepe———

Saka can't play left wingback and he can't play also in the midfield.
You can argue about it 100 times ,but he can't play anything ,but the wings if he wants to become world class player.
Having 21 years old Saka to switch positions every game to suit this weak team will just stumble his progress into becoming a world class player.
We clearly can't get the ball forward when we're playing with Odegaard/Xhaka/Lakonga and u expect us to move the ball with saka odegaard and elneny its just impossible.

Zenith wrote:

I am not surprised.
It's our finishing that is the problem.
Even with just average PL finishing we'd have beaten Brighton and Southampton and be in the box seat now for the top 4.

It's actually been an issue all year - but we've had periods where it has been better.
It's not just big chances either - our shooting from range is really appalling.
I'd like to see an improvement there in the coming months.

TedLasso wrote:Finishing is clearly the issue, one that has been there all season. Failing to address it in January was malpractice.

The finishing is far more of an issue across the team at the moment (and you are right has been at times through the season).
If you look at the Soton game, it was actually Saka, ESR and Odegaard who should have won the game for us.
Same against Brighton, the huge chance fell to Gabriel early on that would have put us 1-0 up.

Some of this is just down to experience and the dips in form often seen with younger players.
There is also some significant improvement needed in the midfield in terms of shooting from range.

I don't think we should be using transfer windows to replace young players who have dips in form TBH.
It's just something we have to live with until they become more consistent.

By getting rid of Auba for free you are placing all of the responsibility for goals on Martinelli, Odegaard, Saka and ESR, cos Laca aint gonna get you many.

We do not have a single player in double figures for goals scored so far this season in the league, thats absolutely dreadful !!!

150% on the piss poor decision making of Arteta that put us and the kids in this position.

theHotHead wrote:By getting rid of Auba for free you are placing all of the responsibility for goals on Martinelli, Odegaard, Saka and ESR, cos Laca aint gonna get you many.

We do not have a single player in double figures for goals scored so far this season in the league, thats absolutely dreadful !!!

150% on the piss poor decision making of Arteta that put us and the kids in this position.

Saka ESR and Martinelli have what 24/25 between them. That's good.
They are no doubt going through a dip most likely due to the pressure of the run in.
A CF in Jan would have been great, but not anyone who would be no better than Laca - remember Laca has 10 or 11 goal contributions since December.
Whoever we brought in would have to be as good at linking play, creating goals and also get extra goals. That's quite a job to find one, especially in January. It's clear we wanted to bring one in, but could not find the required level needed.

You have to be really careful with signing players that are supposed to be the difference makers.
Remember Lukaku at the start of the season? £95m and he was supposed to secure Chelsea the league title. Start of the season the 'experts' in the media were handing the title to Chelsea. Lukaku has been a £95m total disaster.
We can't afford to make those kind of mistakes. It would set us back years.

We're far better off waiting if the root player is not available. Give the young players that have shown how good they are the experience. Rely on them and let them fail, but learn.
Next time round they will be better at handling it.

I don't think the club made any mistake. they just couldn't get the striker they wanted in January and consciously decided not to bring in a player who could turn out worse than we had. Did you see some of the names? Isak for £70m????! Jovic??! f**k that.

Nah they wont.. keep failing like this and saka etc will be off to city.

22-0 wrote:Nah they wont.. keep failing like this and saka etc will be off to city.

I don't agree , but if he does, he's not the kind of player we want.
I have more faith in the players than you do, though. Might be wrong, but I see young players with the kind of attitude to step up as opposed to run from their failures.

You said saka and co are world class.. what kind of world class player wants to be at a middle table club their entire life? thats if we keep failing ofc.

22-0 wrote:You said saka and co are world class.. what kind of world class player wants to be at a middle table club their entire life? thats if we keep failing ofc.

We're not mid table.

theHotHead wrote:By getting rid of Auba for free...

We didn't let him go for free. We paid him to leave.

Angelito wrote:

theHotHead wrote:By getting rid of Auba for free...

We didn't let him go for free. We paid him to leave.

Details, mere details...

Telegraph: A run of three consecutive defeats has ripped the momentum out of Arsenal’s season, with the top four now appearing to be increasingly out of reach ahead of their midweek trip to Chelsea.

Injuries have played their part in Arsenal’s loss of form but equally pressing for Mikel Arteta is their inability to score goals. His players have found the net with only two of their last 73 attempts in the Premier League, and their lack of clinical finishing has become the primary concern as they look to stay in the race for a Champions League place.

With Alexandre Lacazette and Eddie Nketiah both due to leave the club upon the expiry of their contracts this summer, Arsenal are preparing for an overhaul of their striking options. Before then, though, Arteta must find a way to reverse this sudden and dramatic slide. Here, Telegraph Sport analyses what has gone wrong for Arsenal’s attack.

Stop Lacazette, stop Arsenal

It was Patrick Vieira, a Frenchman who used to captain Arsenal, who identified the club’s current France captain as the key figure in his former club’s attack. The Crystal Palace manager derailed Arsenal’s push for the top four earlier this month, overseeing a 3-0 win at Selhurst Park, and it was his approach to stopping Lacazette that proved so disastrous for Arteta’s side.

In their impressive run of form following the exile of Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang in December, Lacazette had been crucial to Arsenal’s attack in a creative role. The Frenchman has offered little goal threat of his own, but he routinely brought the best out of the likes of Gabriel Martinelli, Bukayo Saka and Emile Smith Rowe alongside him.

By dropping deep into midfield, Lacazette had spent much of 2022 creating space for his team-mates and pulling opposition defenders out of place. In 12 matches from mid-December to early March, Lacazette provided an impressive seven assists from his “false nine” position within Arsenal’s frontline, including this precise pass for Martinelli:
Vieira ensured his players did not fall into the same trap as so many of Arsenal’s opponents this year. Palace squeezed Lacazette from both sides, with Vieira’s defenders given the freedom to leave their positions and follow Arsenal’s striker into midfield. “We always had one of our back four who jumped out and tried to put pressure, especially on Lacazette,” said Vieira after Palace’s emphatic victory.

A few days later, Graham Potter took a similar approach at the Emirates Stadium, where his Brighton team won 2-1. Lacazette had another ineffective match, in large part because he often found himself sandwiched between a central defender and a central midfielder, usually Yves Bissouma (see image below):

Yves Bissouma - Why Arsenal have stopped scoring goals
Arsenal were therefore unable to play the ball into Lacazette’s feet, which meant their supply line to the other forwards was cut off. Lacazette’s lack of pace prevents him from running in behind the opposition defence, and he does not have the aerial power to attack crosses. Suddenly, with Palace and Brighton stopping him from playing his preferred game, he was offering next to nothing up front.

Lacazette’s own cause has not been helped by his lack of goals. This season he is the player with the biggest under-performance in the Premier League when his actual tally (four goals) is compared to his expected goals (nine goals). In other words, he has scored five fewer goals than would usually be expected, based on his opportunities in the final third.
Lacazette was absent from Saturday’s defeat at Southampton after testing positive for coronavirus. Arteta instead turned to Nketiah, a different type of player, in what was the 22-year-old first league start of the campaign. Arsenal once again failed to find the net, despite taking 23 shots in total.
In the Premier League this season, there have been 11 instances of a team taking 20 or more shots but failing to score. Arsenal account for three of those.

Wayward finishing

Unfortunately for Arsenal, Lacazette is not alone in struggling to convert his chances. As a team, Arteta’s side have produced the biggest under-performance in the Premier League since the turn of the year, scoring just 13 goals from an expected goals total of almost 22.

Tottenham Hotspur, by contrast, have scored 34 goals in that time from an expected goals total of 29.54 – the highest over-performance in the division. Simply put, this is the difference between forwards who take their chances, such as Harry Kane and Son Heung-min, and those who do not.

The obvious question here is whether it would be any different for Arsenal if Aubameyang had not been allowed to leave for Barcelona. Leaving aside the reasons for his departure and the importance of Arteta’s decision to the club’s internal culture, it is worth noting that the former captain was also struggling in front of goal before he left the club: he had not scored in six matches before his exile began in north London, and his performances were poor.

It speaks volumes of Arsenal’s collective lack of composure that three of their players (Martinelli, Thomas Partey and Lacazette) rank in the Premier League’s top 10 for percentage of attempts off target this season, among players to have had at least 40 shots. All three of them have missed the target with more than 40 per cent of their shots.

Over-reliance on youngsters

There can be no questioning the importance of Saka and Smith Rowe to this Arsenal team. With 10 goals each this season, they are the leading scorers for their club and they are both enjoying the most prolific campaigns of their career.

Saka and Smith Rowe play with such maturity that it is easy to forget just how young and inexperienced they are. Saka is 20 years old, while Smith Rowe is still only 21. No other team in the Premier League is as reliant on youth as Arsenal, and it is only natural that these players will have dips across a season.

The worrying reality is that those individual drops in form have all come at once, with the absence of the injured Partey and Kieran Tierney causing Arsenal to lose their stability as a side. Without a solid platform, the youngsters have not been able to lead the way as effectively as they were earlier in the campaign. They still need help and support, despite their obvious talent, and they have not had it in recent weeks.

Lack of depth means no Plan B

Arteta’s game-plan is built on meticulous passing patterns and choreographed moves, with the ball worked from back to front through the midfield. When the system is functioning at its best, each player knows where to be and where to find their team-mates.

The loss of Tierney and Partey has destabilised this system, and Arsenal have looked far less slick as a result. Suddenly their passing game lacks sharpness and their attack has become more predictable. Palace, Brighton and Southampton have all challenged Arsenal to break them down in recent weeks, and Arsenal have not found a way to do so.
At other ‘big six’ teams, there are different game-plans and a variety of options off the bench. Liverpool have five world-class attackers, for example, while Chelsea can alter the dynamic of their attack with the likes of Romelu Lukaku or Timo Werner.

At Arsenal, Arteta simply does not have these options. The Spaniard included four academy players on his bench against Southampton, simply because there were no other available senior players. Their lack of depth has been a significant concern ever since Tierney and Partey were injured, and the absence of more attacking threat has prevented Arteta from mixing up the style of play.

How Arteta must crave, for example, a mobile centre-forward who can attack crosses and disrupt deep-lying defences from the bench. Arsenal have only scored five goals from crosses all season (only four teams have scored fewer in the Premier League), with neither Lacazette nor Nketiah boasting the aerial strength to frighten teams when Arsenal have the ball in wide positions

^ finishing chances.
It all comes down to that.
Tactics, formations? Really not an issue.

Finishing has been poor ifor chunks of the season , very good at other times and really not unexpected for a young squad.
Consistency was always going to be the problem.
But, all these young players are going through a really valuable experience. A high pressure run in. How they respond and learn from it will be key.

Angelito wrote:

theHotHead wrote:By getting rid of Auba for free...

We didn't let him go for free. We paid him to leave.

Egad Angelito ... the nail that ensures that coffin remain shut !!!

We paid to get rid of him. Case closed. If you wanted to know the level of incompetence of Arteta and co ..... look no further

theHotHead wrote:

Angelito wrote:

theHotHead wrote:By getting rid of Auba for free...

We didn't let him go for free. We paid him to leave.

Egad Angelito ... the nail that ensures that coffin remain shut !!!

We paid to get rid of him. Case closed. If you wanted to know the level of incompetence of Arteta and co ..... look no further

He was given his big contract on Arteta's watch too, it was not an Ozil issue which he inherited.