Although watching Arsenal play is torture at the moment and anybody with any sort of expectations can not possibly be happy with our performance levels, even since we've won in Munich, you can't deny that at the moment it is very effective. We have conceded just 4 goals since the loss at WHL, and we are stacking up the clean sheets, too. But what has struck me is the amount of 1-0 victories we have picked up this season. I actually had a look at the results and we have picked up 6 1-0 victories in the league this season, which is more than any other team and the most amount of 1-0 victories we have had since 04/05 (7). Here is the 1-0 table: Arsenal - 6 United - 4 City - 4 Stoke - 4 Sunderland - 4 Chelsea - 3 Newcastle - 3 Spurs - 3 Everton - 3 Fulham - 3 West Ham - 3 Norwich - 3 Villa - 2 Southampton - 2 Wigan - 2 Liverpool - 2 West Brom -1 Reading - 1 QPR - 1 Swansea - 1 This can be our trophy if we don't finish top 4.
The defence has been rock solid since the spurs disaster, the last 10 games have been pretty impressive, if we could start a season like that we could have been title contenders, our form really has been that good, 8 wins and 2 draws in the last 10 games. If we could just be a bit more potent in attack, I'm actually looking forward with slight optimism to next season provided we keep all our players and add a couple of quality additions.
That defensive calamity against spurs basically handed them the game and I think it was a massive wake up call. Other than Sagna's **** up last week, the defence have been solid. It's a shame about those incidents though as it cost us 4pts and we could already have secured a top 4 spot and be challenging City for 2nd
Just for those of you identifying Ramsey as some part of the problem. http://news.arseblog.com/2013/05/qp...gnews (Arseblog News - the Arsenal news site) 94 - Passes attempted by Ramsey - Led all players 52 - Passes by Ramsey that were forward - Led all players Also from http://thepremierleagueowl.com/qpr-vs-arsenal-individual-player-stats/ – Ramsey and Cazorla each completed their passes with 89% accuracy, the highest in the game. Now I hear you about stats not meaning much when you want to say that a player played well or not. But if you are saying a player "Gives the ball away too much", or "Passes backwards too much", then I'm afraid you need stats to back that up.
The turnaround is quite amazing. After that Spurs defeat, we had a ten day break before our next game, and I can only imagine that we worked on our defence in that time. Also, I think having Arteta and Ramsey infront of the defence has helped us a lot in terms of keeping clean sheets. But, IMO it has also affected us going forward. In the summer, we need to strike the right balance between attack and defence and IF we do that, then I would be really optimistic about our future.
