yorch44
Commander of the Pelotudo Brigade
Exactly!!! You resume it perfectly and I agree... the problem is that I think this is intentionally going by Emery’s system... he always gives the instruction from the bench of that, to do those annoying U turns as you say. That’s why I don’t see Emery as a good manager for PL and Arsenal. He is wasting this team. He wants to open teams letting them pressure us, but at the end we lose ball... and PL league teams recover so fast. In La Liga maybe this works but not in England.It’s extremely annoying. We end up with a 4-2-4 shape because the CAM, wide forwards and striker are all squeezed up trying to press high. We are constantly light in midfield.
A team with defenders capable of bringing the ball out and finding forwards/wingers with quality rangey passes can get away with it, but we aren’t that. Well Luiz will help but still, we rely on midfielders and full backs to create from deep.
Xhaka and Guendouzi aren’t sufficiently creative to play quick incisive passes from deep so we end up with loads of pointless U shaped possession in front of the opposition, and often struggle to build any kind of rhythm in our attacking transitions.
The goal today came from a Newcastle mistake. They couldn’t recover their shape after Ainsley’s interception and run and we used our pace on the counter. Simple.
Honestly nobody will care because we won and kept a clean sheet, which is great, but it bothers me that one small, obvious tweak could see this team explode and we aren’t even trying it.