Retro Gunner wrote: ↑Sun Aug 27, 2023 12:14 pmThere’s no need for the personal abuse fellas. Both Mantis and Clummo always make good points on here and whether the views contradict each other and whether I agree with them, is not the point. The forum is about an adult expression and exchange of opinions.
Regarding the spat above, I’d add that no one would give a damn about the system if it’s effective and gets results and hopefully the football is good to watch. What a lot of us can’t figure out is why he’s fucking about with a system that was effective last season and only needed the addition of two or three quality upgrades to the playing squad. If you start changing the formula and don’t get results, then you’re gonna get criticised. Arteta is making some very strange decisions and if he sticks with it and it continues to come up short, then he’ll get flak.
It’s only three games and we’ve picked up 7 points, so on the face of it, no disaster. However, we’ve played three teams likely to be bottom half, two of them at home and could very conceivably be sitting on 4 or 5 points. Replicate the performances in the next six games, which include Utd, the scum, City and Chelsea and we could be looking at a very different picture.
Bottom line is that we performed well last year and have spent 200m this summer. Come the end of September it will be perfectly fair to judge the manager.
Like you Retro, I had high hopes that we were going to build on last season, with decent signings in Timber and Rice to make as more solid and increase squad depth.
I have said before on here that for me, football is a lot about partnerships
Your 2 centre backs, knowing each others positions and reading of the game
I thought Saliba and Gabriel had formed a good partnership - both however capable of individual errors at times, but on the whole complement each others game.
Selling Gabriel potentially to Saudi leaves us where exactly ? We would need to bring a new CB in, for no doubt big money, as they would need to be high calibre….and then you have to build the partnership all over again.
LB / RB and their corresponding winger
White and Saka work very well together with White often over lapping to cross or use as a decoy for Saka to be able to cut inside
Playing Partey there, through necessity maybe ( but he also played a couple of matches end of last season there ) seems to have destabilised the whole defence.
Did Arteta think we would dominate the game to extent that it didn’t really matter ?
Left hand side, Zinchenko doesn’t really work well with Martinelli so far, and Havertz just seems to be a round peg in a square hole. Ideally he would be brought in as a sub to integrate slowly, so far it’s not working with him there.
We may well have lots of possession, but doing very little in terms of dynamic attacking is harping back to days of illusionary dominance and ‘deserved to win’ - football matches are determined by goals, not possession.
My pre season optimism has certainly taken a Rodders style bashing
Has it changed too much, too quickly, for the players to get it working coherently yet, or is it doomed to fail.
,how very dare you 
