Another rude awakening? How long before we know Arsenal are getting worse? by Eddie
Watching the game yesterday there’s only one thing I kept thinking; Arsenal is clueless, with no style of play and no direction. All hail Almighty Emery who’s our saviour with his pressing games. I see folks on here keep saying stuff like “Emery’s pressing is great, and it makes the players work hard” and “Under Emery if you can’t press then you can’t be in the team”!
I got a huge question; Does pessing win you games or scoring goals win you games? Under the so much disliked Arsene Wenger, we were known for playing good football, scoring goals without pressing and our biggest problem being our defence. Every pundit kept on saying how we need to fix our defence and then we can challenge for the league, we were like Liverpool before they got VVD. We played and scored goals with bloody Giroud and Walcott even though they were wasteful. At least we knew our strengths back then and knew what we needed to fix. Right now, We can’t attack efficiently, we are not creative enough neither are we defensive. We look lost on the pitch each time. Hold on to your horses oh, ye Defenders of Emery, let me land, I marvel at how you’ll say stuff like: “Emery’s been here just six months, he’s dealing with injuries” but you can’t seem to see that within 6 months, the attack and creativity that we were known for has totally disappeared and seems gone”.
We used to smack and lick our lips and we’ll say stuff like, imagine our team with Lacazette-Aubameyang-Ozil and Mhiki? Scoring won’t be hard. Now? Hell, we can’t even create enough chances to score and Ozil isn’t even part of that attack, even when Mhiki was out of form. Our manager kept on playing him and kept shutting out a certain Ozil, just because he doesn’t run around the pitch like others, as you would all call it, “Pressing”.
How much more delusional can we get? Previous seasons we were known to score goals and yet be wasteful with chances after creating chances upon chances. Right now, we are wasteful, we struggle to score goals and we hardly create chances. That’s improvement? The easiest games we’ve had and scored easily was against the worst defence in the league, Fulham. Still people think we are better than we were just because we run around the pitch?
Ozil was given a huge contract, the mistake has been done, if we get the chance I say sell him off and get a replacement but until we do that, do we have better options other Ozil? You say stuff like he doesn’t track back, yet I don’t see anybody questioning a certain Aubameyang who doesn’t track back, the only attacker in our team who does that perfectly is Lacazette. I’m tempted to see the kind of beast he’ll be under Klopp, but I can’t. We all see the struggles we had during that 22 games run. We all knew we were riding our luck and now we keep getting the reminder that we haven’t moved a bit away from where we were.
This isn’t about a certain player who earns 350k. This is about Emery using the team according to their strengths. This is about Emery having to use the team properly until he gets his choice of players, this is about Emery getting his selections right, this is about Emery not treating players like Mourinho does. Constantly leaving out a player after a mistake and coming out in the public to say things like ‘he has better players to win games’ sounds like no one else but Mourinho. Defend Emery all you want, we don’t have wingers, he needs to stop forcing us to play from the wings, we need our creative midfielders, and we need to stop this thing of trying to play from the back when we don’t have enough ball-playing defenders.
I don’t know about you guys, but I really don’t care if we don’t press as long as we win AND have defensive stability. I really wish there’s some way we could create a team of Wenger’s attacking football alongside a defence like Diego Simeone’s. We need to fix our defence, all this dropping out certain players because they don’t run or press isn’t working out, fixing the defence was the main goal and solution not asking our attackers to start running around like defensive players.
Scoring goals and having a good defence wins you games and trophies not running around the pitch without scoring.
Eddie Hoyte