Porous Arsenal ride the luck train again

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What a rollercoaster of a season we’re having. One minute we’re celebrating the rebirth of The Arsenal, the next we’re slapped back to reality with a latter years Wenger-esque performance at home to a newly promoted team.

Thanks to some second-half substitution wizardry, Arsenal pulled an equaliser out the bag late on. Mikhi fizzed a dangerous cross across the box, it ghosted about ten players and slipped fortuitously in at the back post unchallenged. It was a dirty goal, but hey, I’ll continue to pay my respects to the very fine Lady Luck who continues to shine brightly over the Emery tenure.

The frustration of the afternoon is that you can fully accept that we’re going to have tough games, we’re not always going to be at the races, but ideally, we should be winning that 1-0. Not drawing because of another sloppy unforced error. I wasn’t overly surprised that the error came from Xhaka. Just last week, the footballing sages of the internet were crowing over his newly anointed mainstream acceptance, that after a solid 90 minutes, he was here. The player who, according to some, had always been here, you were just too fucking stupid to see it. Well, it didn’t take long for the high to get mowed down by the buzz kill police, the Swiss allowed a pass to run past him, Wolves capitalised ruthlessly and put themselves a goal up early on 13 minutes. That’s the 4th Premier League game in a row we’ve conceded first in.

It was hard to say they weren’t worthy of the win. Wolves were lively to our press and exploiting us with quick counters all game. They were first to every ball, they looked hungry and they weren’t intimidated. You can’t blame the Thursday game, because only 3 players were involved. We just didn’t have a good attitude. The players had no urgency about their play, and we looked very disjointed.

We’ve been riding our luck all season, and it’s going to be really difficult to escape the fact that there’s still a lot of work to do with that squad. Mustafi is ridden with errors, I’m surprised that a coach who has high standards for accountability persists with him. Xhaka is simply not good enough, it doesn’t matter how hard usual suspects push his elevated xWhatever stats, he’s too slow and he’s still making regular rookie mistakes. Being good at one thing will never counter for being a total donut twice a game. He is the new Wenger and it’s not surprising it’s the same fanboys who love him. I was very hopeful with the Mikhi signing, but even with the goal, he’s simply not offering us £170k worth of value at the moment.

I actually had to come back to the post because Ozil was so annonymous, I forgot he even played. I think it’s becoming more and more apparent that having two deeplying midfielders is never going to make up for having a uninterested number 10 in front of you. We need to find someone who can defend and give up the dream of being the only club in the world rocking a #10 from 10 years ago.

Iwobi is very up and down. It was quite the rebuke to be yanked off at halftime and get replaced by Guendouzi. We desperately lack real width. Auba isn’t a left winger, Iwobi isn’t good for us on the right, when those two play poorly, they stink out the house. I’d love Reiss Nelson to play out the season with Hoffenheim, but the form he’s in, and the lack of real width we have, shouldn’t he be here starting every week in January? Maybe that’s knee-jerk, but it’s not often a talent blows up like that, and we really are desperate. The fans will give him time as well. Perfect solution.

On the positive side of things, Bernd Leno had an exceptional game. He was off his line nice and quick, his distribution is smart and his shot stopping really is a level up from anything we’ve seen at Arsenal for many years. Still needs to work on his command of his box from crosses, but hopefully that’ll come with experience.

Also, we can’t be too harsh. We took something from our worst performance under Emery. My concern, as it has been all season, the luck will run out. The corrections will arrive. It might not be very pretty.

The club don’t want to splash in January, so one would assume this is it for the rest of the season. Top four is still our stretch target, and it appears that is going to be incredibly important because we need some major surgery on the squad, and we’re not going to be able to do that unless we have the stream of money the biggest prize in football gives you.

Right, that’s me done, see you in the comments.

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TonyD

Pierre
“and my hair was a fraction longer than Charlie’s back then.”

Hmmm the original supergirl – now old woman queen of the trolls!

TonyD

Pedro “Alex Cutter, I got into advertising at 27 because I built Le Grove in my spare time while I worked in a cardboard box factory. Save me the privilege bullshit, I never went to ad school.” Kudos Pedro for your success and giving us this blog London Gunner “Big respect for that Pedro! I’m 28 and if all things go well by the end of the year will be making quite a massive career change. Its daunting as fuck but exciting and I would only regret not taking the gamble.” It was once said something like: people are too… Read more »

TonyD

London You’ll find living in Amsterdam a crazy, but great experience. The Dutch are unique and quirky people. Back in the late 80s I lived in a Chislehurst type small Dutch village suburb of Zwolle for a couple of years where I co-owned a music production company because of it’s proximity to Hilversum where the main TV and recored companies were situated. Often went to Amsterdam at weekends to see friends from my music touring days of the late 70s and early 80s. I ended up having an emergency quintuple heart bypass in Zwolle at the age of 35 due… Read more »

Receding Hairline

Gambon hasn’t still let on where Arsenal are going to get the money to spend like City and PSG. I guess you haven’t been reading on how City have broken every FFP rule possible. City are a club bankrolled by a caliphate so don’t understand why you keep harping on about emulating them. I mentioned doing things smarter and you scoffed at it,City and PSG aren’t the only model for success. Many are very wrong if they believe that once Wenger goes the club will somehow become a global super power in 6 months. We are very right to see… Read more »

TonyD

Receding I agree we can’t spend like City etc unless Dagnote or similar wrestles the club away from the Kroenkes. If we wait and see we’re very likely to miss CL next season and the way we’re set up financially that will make drastic changes for next season impossible. We need to make some sensible changes now because the picture is clear enough this season for us to know that Mikhi, Ramsey, Mustafi, Sead, Xhaka and Ozil are not the future nor even realistically worth keeping this season. We can’t change them all January, but we should buy a winger,… Read more »