'Is' is doing a lot of heavy lifting so far this season... Great player, but he's contributed very little as a player and absolutely nothing as a captain. I'm not saying he's past it - for fear of a DH attack - but there's something not right.
Arsenal were missing 2 key players and looked average. We didn’t even bother them today. We’ll be on the end of a hiding at the Emirates if they are at full strength.
8 wins in 22. 13th in the league and already 8 points off the top. I know others like him but Ange has to sort this form out asap or he will be gone.
Don’t care about all the negativity, we’re a really good team. Only one team came to play football. Only a matter of time before we start getting our rewards. Good to know time wasting from minute 1, clogging the area with 11 men will only get them 2nd place at best again.
To stick up for Son, I think anyone would struggle playing alongside the likes of Brennan Johnson and Werner. The midfielders don’t help either as they are slow on the ball. He also doesn’t get the space he used to because Udogie plays so far forward.
The defending is a massive issue but going forwards is equally as worrying. While we dominate the ball and create chances, they aren’t great chances that you think that we definitely should have scored from. The only one I can think of is probably solanke v Leicester where he shot straight at the keeper from about 10 yards out. I can’t think of any real chance today at all. They certainly had the better chances IMO.
I see we've quickly moved into the lets all hold hands and tell yourselves everything's going well and it's ok to have a relapse phase.
I hope you are right! but I thought we were completely toothless today and never really looked like scoring. They had a game plan and it worked perfectly for them. I’m not going to look for excuses of why we weren’t good enough.
He has been manager for 42 games. That is about 5 times too few to make a judgement on his competence. Cherry picking the last 22 is ridiculous
The stats that I would gather would probably be effectively the same as for the Toon game. And therefore show what the score was at FT + I saw with my own eyes.
I know I sound very negative and if we hadn’t conceded that set piece goal a 0-0 draw would have been a reasonable result. But these soft goals are killing us at the moment and any team that plays us will known it’s a massive weakness and will exploit it. And if we don’t score when we are on top we will always be massively under pressure.
I have to agree. Partey and Jorginho both had poor games, in my view, and were giving the ball away/turning over possession carelessly. Partey in particular did it a few times in our own third. Yet none of your players took advantage of his hesitancy on the ball. Especially Johnson, who was profligate in front of goal. And, whilst you did dominate possession, bar the first 10 minutes of the match, I don't recall too many clear cut chances where Raya had to make big saves. It was very toothless. Yes, we were very well organised and defended superbly, but I also think your players could have done more to really test our backline to their limits. It simply didn't happen. Son started the game on fire, he had White on toast, but he faded as the game went on. Solanke, apart from that one shot I think he had, was pretty well-marshalled by Gabriel and Saliba. Kulusevski showed a lot of endeavour, but lacked a clinical edge. And Maddison...someone earlier described him as a 'fair-weather player' and I think that's accurate. That's two consecutive NLDs in a row where he hasn't turned up at all. And he's meant to be your primary creator in midfield. Our attack was very frustrating as well, don't get me wrong, but we knew your weaknesses from set-plays and exploited it. We also had more shots on target despite significantly less ball territory. My personal view was, whilst we are a well-oiled machine, we were missing some extremely influential players from our team and so it was a big opportunity for you guys to lay down a marker; to right the wrongs of the last game. Unfortunately for you guys, it didn't happen. I like Ange as a manager, but he has lots of work to do to sort this out.
as I said earlier, this is the biggest concern for me. We all knew we were gonna get a style of football that would frighten the life out of us defensively, but it seemed that the forwards would make up for this. But the fact that now every attacking player in our squad looks incapable, that actually poses a whole new problem. Can’t score and can’t defend? Only 1 outcome from that.
