With Arsenal sitting in a lowly 8th position in the Premier League table and with us playing catch up to Borussia Dortmund in our Champions League group and having been knocked out of the Capital One Cup by Southampton, you might think it strange for me to say that Arsenal have excelled at anything so far this season, but as a tactical stats report on Arsenal.com shows, we certainly have. But there are also areas in which we need to improve to start winning games.
The report shows that the Gunners have by far the best average possession in the Premier League and that only PSG, Barcelona and Bayern Munich have more out of the top five leagues in Europe. On it’s own, of course, possession does not win you a football match, but when you see that we also have the highest number of successful through balls per game as well as the most successful dribbles.
And with Mikel Arteta as the most accurate passer and Laurent Koscielny the best defensive interceptor, you wonder why Arsenal have not done better. To put it simply, we just need to improve a little at both ends of the pitch. A few defensive slips, including penalties against Chelsea and the Saints, have cost us dearly, but an increasingly settled back four and getting our injured central midfielders back should remedy that.
Arsenal have not scored as many goals as our possession and creation have deserved, but Welbeck is improving all the time, Alexis is getting more used to the BPL and with Walcott coming back as well as Podolski and Campbell pushing for a place, you would expect us to start banging a lot more in. Also, we have missed the regular goals that Ramsey was getting last season and the Welshman is close to a comeback. So the small details should be fixed soon.
Then there is the fact that we have had a tough start to the season after a disrupted pre-season and plenty of injury problems. Hopefully that is behind us now and the next few months should be a much happier time for Arsenal fans. What do you guys think?