He has to be very careful with the way he handles press conferences. There's bullish/confident and then there's arrogance and delusion. He's started talking like Mourinho but doesn't have the CV to do so.
On a serious note i heard your line up on radio 5 as i was on the way home with the Mutt after her walk and i assumed i had misheard it as i thought that you were going in with just 1 CM and that was one who had recently been dropped . I was amazed when i got home and saw the "line up" and immediately thought you were doomed . The only good thing for you yesterday is that Arsenal seem a bit off last years form
I saw that interview this morning. I don’t mind him being spiky like he with her. He has to back it up with results though
I said earlier I think he’s very arrogant and a bit delusional. No disrespect to the Scottish, Australian and Japanese leagues but the English Premier League is a different game compared to them so what he’s done there beforehand has no relevance. Ange acts like it means he’s got nothing to prove though.
There’s a lot you can say about yesterday’s game. Some of it stands in isolation, weirdly it didn’t feel like a home game against Arsenal for example, outside of one or two flashpoints. But more broadly in terms of how we’re playing so far this season I think what stands out is the lack of quality out wide. The dynamic on our left side feels out of sorts still and on the right, Johnson is not showing the form we need. He does a good job sometimes of committing his man and driving into the box but the end product isn’t there consistently enough. We gambled on youth in the summer window, largely, and the likes of Odobert, and Gray and Bergvall (as our midfield dynamic still feels off) need to start getting chances now as we move into having cup and EL games as we badly need some of them to show the kind of form that could earn them a PL starting spot if we’re going to see any major improvement going forwards. Aside from the Achilles heel of defending set pieces, and general concentration at the back, the ponderous nature of our wing play is what’s causing us the most attacking issues IMO.
TBH the ponderous play starts in the centre and spreads out wide Our system works best when we play direct, but all too often various combinations of Bissouma, Bentancur and Maddison slow down the ball progression. Now this isn't 100% as there are games where retaining the ball is necessary, and yesterday was one of them, but the transition from retaining the ball to moving the ball faster than the opponents have time to react has been anything but tight so far this season, and because our system needs the switch to be flipped in an instant it's how we keep seeing one player break but the player with the ball is still focused on keeping possession
Based on the BBC's Olympics coverage this summer, apparently taking part is nothing - you either get those medals or **** off
And your point is? I know we concede a lot of set piece goals but that's because we concede too many set pieces not because we are bad at defending them.
I will try to explain. The last time I looked which was late last season we had conceded nearly twice as many corners and dangerous free kicks as Arsenal. From those we had conceded just under twice as many goals. So the problem is that we give away too many corners and free kicks. Our ability to defend them is about as good as Arsenal but if we have twice as many to defend then we will concede twice as many goals.
So you would work on conceding less rather than work on defending them? For me it’s easier to work on defending them than conceding them as that’s more within the controllable.
But we are already up with the best at defending them....and close to the worst at numbers conceded. Surely that means there is much more scope for improvement on the latter. By the way...this is not an easy calculation to do. The data on corners conceded is gettable but free kicks near the goal are a lot harder to get data on.
A few more stats (sorry) to illustrate the bluntness in attack. This is from the opening 3 games but based on what we saw yesterday I doubt there’s much to change. We had the most possession and touches in the opposition box, and second most shots taken, and passes in the opposition 3rd, in the league. But for xG we were 8th, for xG per shot we were 12th, and only 25% of the instances we enter the opposition box lead to us taking a shot, which puts us 18th on that metric. In other words we dominate possession and get the ball into the final 3rd a lot, so it’s not just passing around the back line and midfield. The eye test combined with these stats tells us that we’re not creating good enough chances - often they’ll be from outside the box, or in and around the box with lots of bodies between the ball and the goal. This comes back to what was mentioned upthread - we need to move the ball more quickly, both when the players are passing and carrying the ball. We need, particularly the wide players, to be more direct and commit defenders so they can either beat their man and be in a dangerous area, or release another player into space. And we need to pull the trigger more quickly when we have the chance - the Solanke chance yesterday was a good example, where his poor first touch meant he couldn’t take a quicker shot and capitalise on an Arsenal mistake and good pressing from us. I’m not happy with the results at the moment but we’re building something here and it’s going to be all about players improving in the final 3rd and the club making better moves in the transfer market for difference makers in key positions who are good enough to improve the starting XI quality, not prospects like Gray, or squad building loans like Werner. You need to make those signings too, particularly the former, but the next two windows need to be focused on adding quality in the key positions.
We conceded 6.2 corners per game last season. Arsenal less than 3. Aston Villa who were the worst team above us, 4.2. If we had conceded even 5 corners per game we would have likely conceded 3 fewer goals which would have given us about 3 more points and left us above Villa.
I suspect this is down to game model - as we play a very high line we have a lot of recovery tackles and interceptions that likely lead to more corners being conceded, and free kicks being given against us in our defensive 3rd in dangerous positions if a challenge goes wrong. I do think we have issues at the back where particularly Romero and Porro can switch off and lose their men, and that’s a coaching and player issue, but it sounds like you’re suggesting the best way to solve is to keep getting better at controlling the games and minimising how often the opposition can break into our half on a quick transition?
It's less that we're not creating good chances, more that we're allowing perfect to be the enemy of good so try to create the sort of chance that even XCOM would say has a 100% chance of success The issue is that by design that approach reduces the amount of chances we could create in order to create a low risk/high percentage chance that would go in if we set it up - but because that's our approach we create bottlenecks in possession because we're focusing on making that one chance and ignoring the possibility of somebody just belting it into the net from 20+ yards if they had the time and space to have a crack, other than Bissouma's thunderbastard that came about due to a poorly-cleared corner
