Another poor performance escapes with a point by Konstantin Mitov
Hello lovely Arsenal people. Arsenal entertained Wolves and repeated a lot of trends that have been going for us all season so far. First of all, we started slow. Honestly the only game where we were up to the tempo from the get go was Liverpool.
Wolves had more chances and shots on target. Games like Palace, Everton and Watford had similar character and could’ve gone either way, but then we created chances and today we were really lacking ideas forward.
We’ve been over relying on impact subs to get results. We find it difficult to break a team from the start which is very well reflected in the fact we’re the only team not to have the lead at half time.
And again it was a sub that saved us with a bit of fortune as a cross failed to find a player, but found the net instead. We missed Welbeck’s energy from the bench and in January I think we will need a wide player.
After our equalizer it was again the visitors who had the chances but Leno was excellent and saved a point which is still better than none. That said the break that comes is good for us to reflect on things and rebuild confidence for the tough games coming.
We may have not lost in 16, but 4 draws on the last 5 is not the kind of form that will get us a top 4 place. There are simply too many big fish for a small pond of champions league places and we need to improve.
Honestly there have been very few league games where we’ve been really dominant and while I enjoy this more than the Wenger days where Ozil would’ve played the entire game no matter what and we would’ve dropped heads when they score, this is yet another reminder of that work that needs to be done for us to challenge for the top places.
Some of the players will need to change too. For a 300k player Ozil really should be dominating teams like Wolves. Iwobi was a super sub against Liverpool and very poor when he started today. Ramsey will be leaving the club and can’t be trusted to do his absolute best but you can see why we are letting him go.
If we give him 200k/w we are killing the remainder of our wage bill which we can use to add a good player on the wing. And we already have a 300k/w problem at number 10, making Ramsey unnecessary in the squad.
And in terms of CM, Xhaka again made a mistake leading to a goal after playing a blinder against Liverpool. We have too many players who are unreliable. It’s true Auba missed a sitter to equalise sooner and give us a chance to win, but during our 11 game winning run, we were scoring 25 percent of our chances which is ridiculously high and can’t be sustained forever.
We’ve only won against two teams who were in the top half of the table when we played them and this is also something we need to improve. The road to the top is a long one. Even Pep failed at his first attempt. Hopefully we’ll finally take a deeper look into those matters and prepare for 3 huge league games coming up after the break. We simply must start winning again.
Konstantin