PL: Arsenal vs Crystal Palace | Thursday 14th January | KO:20:00 | Sky Sports

[shoot for the top]

Palace defended very well and were well organised. We didn’t have the confidence to lose markers and run at them like we did against West Brom.
That one goal makes all the difference in games like these.

More like we attacked poorly, they conceded 29 goals this season. Only West Brom conceded more.

 

[Jack_the_boy]

More like we attacked poorly, they conceded 29 goals this season. Only West Brom conceded more.

Form matters little. You can make the argument that we put 4 past West Brom, whom Liverpool and man city couldn’t break down. Or 3 past Fulham who Sp**s struggled with yesterday.
We may have attacked poorly but the eye test during the game saw great organisation and defensive effort from Palace.

 

[Mohamed7]

In a weird way, I am glad we have not won this match (and also not lost it). I felt like the recent wins were getting into our heads and perhaps taking easy on improving the team in this transfer window. We have clear weaknesses in some key positions since the beginning of the season. The little resurgent by Smith-Rowe, Saka, and Tierney should not blind us that we must improve both our offensive and defensive (fullback) options.

Unfortunately, Pepe and Willian are extremely below bar and cannot be trusted against any decent opposition. Their final third movements and deliveries are very poor. Even as back ups to rest our youth for few matches, they are failing miserably and we are forced to overplay the kids. Today, both Saka and Smith-Rowe lacked something and it has to go down to overplaying specially Saka who only missed one match (against City, EFL Cup) since the start of December. That's a lot of matches over the festive. Below bar, by his standards, performance was expected when you look at the minutes he has played. The same can be said about Smith-Rowe considering he came back from somewhat long term injury and was never eased into the first team like Saka. It is already mid January and we are nowhere closer to signing our highest priority player - A creative and goalscoring Advanced/Attacking midfielder. There is no way we can finish top 10 without this signing.

Furthermore, I thought it was bizarre transfer for Kolasinac because he was the only back up for Tierney, who just like Saka, played a lot of matches since December. There are a lot of people having a go at Arteta for playing him in the FA Cup match instead of this one. I do not agree with that thinking at all. This season the league is pretty much a write-off. There's no way we can make to the top four with the poor performances by the aforementioned senior players and expecting the kids to take us all the way is extremely unrealistic. We should have let go Kola in the summer not now. Now, we must find a good back up, aging player preferred, to rotate with the Scottish.

On another note, I am not convinced with Ceballos. In almost every match, he seems to be either average or below it. We need a number 8 that can progress the ball well and share some of the burden with the number 10. I am not sure we can find somewhat quality midfielder in the winter or if we have the finances to get this plus the above targets mentioned given how difficult January window is.

Unless we address our weaknesses through the market, I believe we will have this inconsistency.

---------------------- Laca/Eddie ---------------

Auba/Gab----SmithRowe/NeedSigning ----- Saka/Pepe

-------- Xhaka/NeedSigning ------ Partley/Elneny -----

Tierney/NeedSigning -- Mari/Gabriel -- Holding/Luiz -- Bell/Cedric

----------------------- Leno/NeedSigning ---------------------

The highest priorities signings must be number 10 midfielder and a good back up goalie. For the left back, at least AMN can do decent job although he was piss poor tonight.

Eddie is not a premier league quality in my opinion. There's no one area he excels: slow, weak physique, poor dribbling, average off the ball movement, average link-up, very poor hold-up play. I do not know/understand why Balogun is not being given more chances. From the little I saw in EL and under 23 matches, he looked very good. He's fast, good strength, and can dribble.

 

[EmeryCouldnt]

In a weird way, I am glad we have not won this match (and also not lost it). I felt like the recent wins were getting into our heads and perhaps taking easy on improving the team in this transfer window. We have clear weaknesses in some key positions since the beginning of the season. The little resurgent by Smith-Rowe, Saka, and Tierney should not blind us that we must improve both our offensive and defensive (fullback) options.

Unfortunately, Pepe and Willian are extremely below bar and cannot be trusted against any decent opposition. Their final third movements and deliveries are very poor. Even as back ups to rest our youth for few matches, they are failing miserably and we are forced to overplay the kids. Today, both Saka and Smith-Rowe lacked something and it has to go down to overplaying specially Saka who only missed one match (against City, EFL Cup) since the start of December. That's a lot of matches over the festive. Below bar, by his standards, performance was expected when you look at the minutes he has played. The same can be said about Smith-Rowe considering he came back from somewhat long term injury and was never eased into the first team like Saka. It is already mid January and we are nowhere closer to signing our highest priority player - A creative and goalscoring Advanced/Attacking midfielder. There is no way we can finish top 10 without this signing.

Furthermore, I thought it was bizarre transfer for Kolasinac because he was the only back up for Tierney, who just like Saka, played a lot of matches since December. There are a lot of people having a go at Arteta for playing him in the FA Cup match instead of this one. I do not agree with that thinking at all. This season the league is pretty much a write-off. There's no way we can make to the top four with the poor performances by the aforementioned senior players and expecting the kids to take us all the way is extremely unrealistic. We should have let go Kola in the summer not now. Now, we must find a good back up, aging player preferred, to rotate with the Scottish.

On another note, I am not convinced with Ceballos. In almost every match, he seems to be either average or below it. We need a number 8 that can progress the ball well and share some of the burden with the number 10. I am not sure we can find somewhat quality midfielder in the winter or if we have the finances to get this plus the above targets mentioned given how difficult January window is.

Unless we address our weaknesses through the market, I believe we will have this inconsistency.

---------------------- Laca/Eddie ---------------

Auba/Gab----SmithRowe/NeedSigning ----- Saka/Pepe

-------- Xhaka/NeedSigning ------ Partley/Elneny -----

Tierney/NeedSigning -- Mari/Gabriel -- Holding/Luiz -- Bell/Cedric

----------------------- Leno/NeedSigning ---------------------

The highest priorities signings must be number 10 midfielder and a good back up goalie. For the left back, at least AMN can do decent job although he was piss poor tonight.

Eddie is not a premier league quality in my opinion. There's no one area he excels: slow, weak physique, poor dribbling, average off the ball movement, average link-up, very poor hold-up play. I do not know/understand why Balogun is not being given more chances. From the little I saw in EL and under 23 matches, he looked very good. He's fast, good strength, and can dribble.

It's such a silly argument that people think we will only buy players when we are losing. We obviously are not where we need to be, a few wins doesn't change that. You guys must think the understanding of football by the management of our club is so shallow. People have been saying this for atleast the 8 years I've watched this forum, implying they thought Wenger was that dumb as well.

 

[shoot for the top]

Form matters little. You can make the argument that we put 4 past West Brom, whom Liverpool and man city couldn’t break down. Or 3 past Fulham who Sp**s struggled with yesterday.
We may have attacked poorly but the eye test during the game saw great organisation and defensive effort from Palace.

We had 11 shots, with an xg of 0.3 vs Crystal Palace 12 shots and xg of 0.7. You need to get your eye checked. We attacked poorly, plain, and simple. Crystal Palace actually scored 2 more goals than us this season while conceding the second-most in the league. Are you telling me we shouldn't be expected to dominate them? The summative stats show more than just "form". We don't know how to attack and it's been like that most of the season.

 

[Jack_the_boy]

We had 11 shots, with an xg of 0.3 vs Crystal Palace 12 shots and xg of 0.7. You need to get your eye checked. We attacked poorly, plain, and simple. Crystal Palace actually scored 2 more goals than us this season while conceding the second-most in the league. Are you telling me we shouldn't be expected to dominate them? The summative stats show more than just "form". We don't know how to attack and it's been like that most of the season.

Again, didn’t say we did well going forward or anything, just acknowledging that Palace were very organised defensively and nullified us too. They particularly did a number on Smith Rowe and because of their presence around him he was unable to find pockets of space to be useful like he has in recent games.

 

[Rimaal]

Woke up, checked the result, was right to go to bed after the 1st half.

Why would Arteta play Tierney in an FA cup match and rest him in the league? Just wondering.

 

[MikeVinna]

Woke up, checked the result, was right to go to bed after the 1st half.

Why would Arteta play Tierney in an FA cup match and rest him in the league? Just wondering.

Same here actually.

Should have gone to bed after 3 mins. We started off with some abysmal passing losing the ball for no reason.

 

[dashsnow17]

Not sure I blame anyone in particular for that result. For sure we missed Tierney and it was stupid to play him in the cup, but apart from that I thought the back 4 were decent and the two midfielders were pretty good, gotta say Xhaka had a very good game defensively. We just didn't have the quality in the final 3rd.

When you consider that we probably played our best combination of 4 attackers, it suggests that we're just lacking quality in attack. It's a personnel issue.

Big clubs need to buy big star attackers every now and then. I think this team just needs some freshening up, it needs a new big star attacker to rejuvenate it. 18 months ago we bought Pepe, but that's failed. Before that it's 3 years since we bought Auba, the last big attacker to have an impact on the team.

Two of our seniors forwards simply aren't contributing, Willian and Pepe, two of them are academy kids aged 19 and 20, and the two others are around 30, have been at the club for 3 years and look to be running low on juice.

It makes me think that buying a creative midfielder this january isn't so important, actually what we need is to wait until the summer and make a big purchase, a prime age star player for one of the front 4 positions who can inject a bit of life into the club again.

 

[Sniper Mik]

Woke up, checked the result, was right to go to bed after the 1st half.

Why would Arteta play Tierney in an FA cup match and rest him in the league? Just wondering.

Sshhh we're not supposed to ask questions.

 

[TornadoTed]

I didn't think we were that bad last night. Palace were organised and defended really well, every time we got a player into a dangerous position 3-4 Palace players just seemed to appear from nowhere to crowd them out.

Of course we could be better, we need more spark in the final third but IMO this wasn't anywhere near as bad as Villa, Burnley, Wolves etc.

 

[Why]

I missed most of the game and only turned it on the last 30mins. Reading some of the above feels weird Xhaka was getting such good reviews? Was he that good in the first half?

The 30mins I saw he gave the ball away 3 times with shocking passes and let them counter, for 2 of those he got back and got the tackle in. But he wouldnt need to tackle if he actually passed to the intended person.

Odd.

 

[Oxeki]

Ceballos played well. A few times a threaded some sublime balls to our fouwards especially Auba, only for him to feck it up.

A decision needs to be made regarding Auba. It's no longer funny.

 

[Red London]

I feel like teams park the bus against us more than any other side at our level. We are a mid table side now but get treated like kings because they know our skill set only suits counter attacks. We need to address this in the window and get people scared to sit so bsck.

 

[Rimaal]

 

[Yousif Arsenal]

I feel like teams park the bus against us more than any other side at our level. We are a mid table side now but get treated like kings because they know our skill set only suits counter attacks. We need to address this in the window and get people scared to sit so bsck.

Because if they open up we'll likely put 3 past against them with ease this is happenings since wenger days to stop us at home is frustrate us of course lack of creativity and quality width is hurting us but seem it's the only problem we facing this season so it's fixable

 

[Yousif Arsenal]

@Riou

 

[tap-in]

Yesterday I said in another thread that AMN & Willock will never be starters so we may as well sell in the summer. Last night AMN supported my statement. He's not good enough at LB and he's not good enough in the middle. I know we need squad players but we need quality squad players!

 

[Yousif Arsenal]

Yesterday I said in another thread that AMN & Willock will never be starters so we may as well sell in the summer. Last night AMN supported my statement. He's not good enough at LB and he's not good enough in the middle. I know we need squad players but we need quality squad players!

AMN is good squad player to have but yesterday he did play in position he never used to at RB he do always preform its bit unfair to blame him even tho he was poor yesterday but that what happen when you rarely play

 

[Yousif Arsenal]

Forget to mention yesterday Nektiah was yet again not useful would have rather we kept on laca both players got little service but Nektiah really still not type of backup you depend on.