Hello lovely Arsenal people. As disappointing as it is, the result is not unexpected. We were riding our luck in a lot of the games. We scored an incredibly lucky second goal today as Lacazette used his hand to guide the ball to Auba from the corner.
And even though we turned it around, we failed to take a grip on the pitch and created very little in attack. Our defense eventually failed us as usual and as I kept banging on you can’t always outscore the opponents. Sometimes you need to be able to hold onto the lead and we are yet to learn this lesson the hard way.
Substitutions were wrong on the day too. Iwobi should have been subbed instead of Auba and Lacazette was also extremely poor. I’m not sure why we introduced Lichtsteiner instead of Bellerin, but there is a massive rebuilding job in defense.
Mustafi is a liability, Xhaka isn’t a left back and we don’t have a regular set of CB. I was also unimpressed with Guendouzi who wouldn’t have started had we had a real LB. It’s difficult to point out a player who had a good game, as Xhaka was my only candidate until he put a silly challenge on Zaha who made the most out of little to no contact to earn a penalty.
It’s really sad that we failed to take advantage of the fact City play Spurs. Our real Target is the top 4 and with the ways other teams keep winning against the lesser sides, failing to beat a team like Palace really hurts, but it’s our own fault.
Now we’ll see the real character of this team. Can we bounce back? Can we turn up the heat against Liverpool and finally start a game well? A run of very difficult fixtures is coming up. But first it’s the carabao cup.
Konstantin