I was surprised we continued to swing in crosses at a very solid Inter backline on Wednesday night.
Off the back of the one nil loss to Inter on Wednesday night, there has understandably been mixed feelings about our performance. Some have viewed the loss as an improvement on our recent games performance-wise and some have disagreed.
You can make arguments in favour of both perspectives but what was certain is that we lost. Though we did massively improve from the showing against Newcastle we still largely were guilty of being all too predictable in attack.
That has been our Achilles heel in recent times and has arguably been the sole culprit to blame for our poor form currently. Against Inter Milan we saw Arsenal replicating the type of football that was painstakingly a theme of our rot during the Covid pandemic a few years ago.
Arsenal swung in a whopping total of 46 crosses against Inter on the night, which is quite astonishing given we failed to profit from at least one. The crossing theme was reminiscent of a game against Tottenham Hotspur in December 2020 where we attempted almost an identical number of crosses, we had a total of 44 crosses that day in a match where we were haplessly devoid of ideas. On both occasions we got beat with cleansheets unsurprisingly, given how we kept trying to push through a cul-de-sac.
It was very surprising that we kept putting in crosses in against Inter given how good their backline is. They played with a back six at times, they ate up those crosses for fun but we persisted anyway in what would’ve been a frustrating watch for the gooners.
Perhaps it was rather forced given how we lacked a central figurehead in those pockets to really hurt the Inter backline, it was clearly obvious that it was the case given how better we were centrally when Nwnaneri came on.
Looking forward we can only take the positives from that loss heading into the Chelsea game, we’ll have Ødegaard back, and after that fairly improved showing against Inter we’ll hopefully translate it to a return to winning ways at the Stamford Bridge.
Thoughts, gooners?
BENJAMIN KENNETH.
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It wasn’t possible to play through them and that’s why there so many crosses, though of course we could not score that way either. It wasn’t the lack of height in our attack, more like many quite poor crosses that failed to reach their target. As to “returning to winning ways at Stamford Bridge”, our biggest hope is that Palmer’s injury rules him out and Chelsea have an off day after their big performance last night, albeit against a team of no hopers.
Not all the crosses will be accurate of course but I think Arsenal still lacks a “killer striker” in the box to put, hopefully, at least one of those away.
I’m puzzled at the absence of such a player (or at least the apparent lack of any real attempt to get one in the last transfer window). If you look back to Wenger’s time, for example, he always ensured that there was such a player in his (many) teams, yet Arteta has only Havertz to rely upon and he isn’t (or hasn’t been to date, anyway) a prolific striker in that sense. Clearly Jesus has been a waste of a team place as far as goals are concerned not only for last season, but this one so far.
Watching Osimhen the other night against Spurs made me wish we had tried a bit harder to get him in the summer just to give us another option and he might have got on the end of all those crosses.
Well, that’s a point. There were several mentioned in the media back in the summer and probably others that didn’t get much coverage as well. If a club is really interested in bringing someone in it usually leaks out somehow. As I can recall anyway, there were no firm, consistent, reports linking Arsenal to a particular striker.
Almost all Arsenal’s efforts across ten weeks of the window seemed to go in bringing in Calafiore and Merino. It doesn’t appear to me that they could cope with more than two player purchases, even if they wanted to.
It was like fishing in the kitchen sink, even with the best bait in the world you are not going to succeed.
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try try again, but what ever you do, don’t be creative or try some individual skill to break them down. That’s my guess at Arteta’s half time tactical inspirational rally.
I think I might have discovered the game Arsenal were playing against Inter Milan the other night.
We put in 46 crosses, with 0 goals at the end of them.
I think Arsenal were playing naughts and crosses🤣