Third straight league victory with no striker again… by Konstantin Mitov
Hello fellow fine Gooners around the globe! So Arsenal maintained our 100% away record away at Hull City winning the game by 4 goals to 1. This is our third straight win, a feast we haven’t head since Christmas!
The starting line up was questionable once more, with Xhaka again on the bench and no striker. People will slate me again for saying this, but Arsene for me is riding his luck big time. Why the no striker? I mean Sanchez did score, but a lot of the time we didn’t have that hitman in the box.
Look, we played Hull after all and our pace was too good for them, but there were some old fragilities showing. We missed a penalty. The second missed out of 4 this season. Last year we got 2 penalties the entire season. Why did Alexis take the penalty instead of Santi?
Speaking of Cazorla he escaped the red card and should’ve been subbed straight away. He was one foul away from seeing red and he still played 15 more minutes. No need to mention we have Xhaka who looks a beast, costs a fortune, scored a stunner and is somehow warming the bench for… Coquelen.
I mean, you could often see Coquelen up front of Sanchez and our back 4 was seriously exposed, just like in the PSG game. And again I think Monreal was struggling with even the little work he had to do. As I said before, we lack backup for the full backs and the pairing of Cazorla and Coquelin, two players lacking pace and physical presence as a DM duo will not get us far, but it will get us past Hull City.
On the positive side, Iwobi looked good. Much better than the Ox has looked so far this season and that backheel was so lovely. Theo’s pace made impact for all of our goals, but I hope that he can repeat that next week against Chelsea, because Hull weren’t exactly very good at defending this game.
Speaking of the blues they got beaten by Liverpool at the bridge after a draw with Swansea and adding that to the fact Costa saved them so many points, when he should’ve been sent off in two of their games it seems like not all is good with Conte, despite the fact it’s better than last season.
We couldn’t beat them last year when they were terrible and I look forward to seeing how Arsene will approach it this time, hopefully we’ll have a striker on the field at least. The problem for me is, that even against Hull, who were reduced to 10 men and we had 2 goal lead, that Arsenal moment came out of nowhere and Cech could’ve been sent off.
We survived the scare and quickly restored our lead, but we allow easy chances even when there’s nothing troubling us. Seeing the way City destroy teams, I still feel we are miles off them, but we got good results in recent weeks and hopefully we’ll build on them starting with Chelsea next week.
Konstantin