If you just watched the highlights of Arsenal’s entertaining game against Fulham you would think that the Gunners had a very easy game, but if you listen to what the Fulham coach Slaviša Jokanović said after the game you would really find that it wasn’t quite so one-sided. “My sensations are mixed a little bit,” Jokanović told the official Fulham site, “Because I thought we played the first 45 minutes well. We created the chances, the team was running well and we didn’t give them many opportunities to score goals.
“But in the second-half they scored really easy goals and I missed the team being more solid, I missed more speed, I missed more thought.
“At the end we opened all the doors and they finished the action easily after not so many complicated situations for us. The second goal arrived from some throw in, they kicked the ball and finished the action, we weren’t strong or fast enough to stop the shot, and the first goal too, we needed to be more solid and better in this kind of situation.”
Fulham were definitely in the game in the first half, but the thing that caught my eye in his after match conference was this one. Jokanović said: “After they scored the second goal I tried to find some way to find the equaliser, I don’t believe in too many statistics but we finished the game with 21 shots and the opposite team with nine.
“At this level you can be a little bit confused but at the end they showed the quality, they showed the base, they showed their strengths too and this is what I missed, especially today.”
And indeed Fulham did have 21 shots, which is a very worrying statistic indeed, but luckily for us only 4 of them were on target and 9 of them were blocked by the defence. It would appear that our back four were very busy until the second half which is when we started dominating the game.
If 21 shots conceded is the worrying statistic, then the good stats are that, although Arsenal only had 9 attempts we had 7 of them on target, and we scored with 5 of them! But despite the fact that we keep giving our opponents myriad chances in every game, we are still winning! Having just checked our last 10 games we have scored 29 goals, and an average of 3 per game is nothing to be sniffed at!
I personally will put up with the defensive frailties if we always score more than our opponents….
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