Up front Arsenal are excellent, the back though needs work. by Konstantin Mitov
Well, I wrote on this site we could thrash Everton 5:0 and I was really close, because of course we managed to concede and I will touch on this matter, because it’s important, but that attack hey?
I thought Mkhitaryan was the star of the show. Three assists for him in 1 game with 5 in his entire time at Man Utd. Make of it what you want, but the guy is all Arsenal – quick feet, sharp mind, slick passing, he was excellent, but of course overshadowed by the elephant in the room.
Aubameyang looked really good. He obviously hasn’t trained up to speed lately with Dortmund suspensions and transfer and so on, but I mean the movement looked incredible and the chip was marvelous, although it was offside.
We are really good going forward and you can see the freedom we had without Alexis who? The team had freedom, we had players in the box, players making runs and up front I’m not worried at all.
Now I cannot ignore the defense. There is obvious need of work there. I was disappointed to see Cech in goal and how much he is forgiven for his mistakes and same goes to Xhaka. We allowed Everton a few chances but they were too poor to take them.
We are playing Spurs next and despite the fact it’s Wembley, we’re not scoring five goals again and we cannot allow the comedy defending we’ve done all season. If we hope to make the top 4 as small as the chances are, we need to go there and be smart.
Our work off the ball when we played them at the Emirates was the best we’ve done this season and unless we repeat this, well struggle, because for as entertaining we were going forward, we were not that interested in doing the defensive job.
And I think the lack of a defensive midfielder and the poor tactics hurt us a lot. Ramsey scored a hat-trick today and it was brilliant, but with Ozil and Mkhitaryan having somewhat of a free role in midfield, you cannot have Ramsey, Xhaka and Iwobi not helping the defense as well.
A lot of people may call me negative again and I respect them, but as I mentioned in my article before the game, it could be the Arsenal at Swansea next week against Spurs and that would be not good enough. So until we resolve the obvious problems Arsenal have thought me to be humble or I’ll just ruin my nerves.
We have the potential to be a real force, but we need to defend better as a team and we must limit the mistakes, but my sneaky feeling is we’ll not fix them until Wenger goes.
This is the first game after January and we cannot draw any major conclusion from it, but next week we’ll definitely learn something. It’s a massive game for us. After that we can better measure whether we’ll be just all out Europa League or slim hopes of top 4 would be lurking around.
But whatever happens, the real Arsenal will be seen next season, after the summer additions in defense come and the work of Raul Sanllehi kicks in and hwo know, perhaps a new manager?
Konstantin