Last season when Arsenal were going through a very difficult patch, Arsene Wenger suddenly shifted to three at the back to bring extra defensive solidity to the team. This tactic worked and suddenly the Gunners went back on a long winning run. Now we have the opposite problem, with our top class forwards all struggling to put the ball in the net and Wenger has now shifted back to his four defender formation in our last two games. So Wenger was asked if he thought we should continue with this set-up, and he replied: “It’s possible, yes,”
“Especially, I think we were mobile at the back, built the game up well and it gives us one more player to go forward.
“When you don’t score as much as you want, sometimes you look at every single thing and that is why I went for it.
“It was a bit nervy at the end, because we had not taken our chances. We couldn’t finish the game off. But what is most important today is the three points.
“I knew before the game that this is a tricky one because we play three games in six days and that we have not rotated a lot. So I thought it could be a tricky one, but as well the three points tonight are a relief for the team and overall we deserved it.”
That is all very well, but were those two clean sheets more due to the fact that we were playing very weak teams that mostly just wanted to defend against us? And to be honest the change of formation didn’t help our attacking capabilities either as we only scored once in the 180 minutes!
I’m not convinced personally, and I think that Wenger will switch back to three at the back next week when Mustafi returns. We simply have to stopLiverpool scoring and the extra defender will be needed.
What do you think?
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