Yep You indeed read it right. Im not saying it is totally depended on him. but watch how we play from the back with him and without him... To remind you, we went 22 games unbeaten with him ( i agree we played bad and had luck on our side, but we still didnt have performances like yesterday), he got injured, and we lost, he came back against chelsea, was MOTM imo, he was the big factor to break chelseas pressure, he got injured, and we lose and play utterly bad. Add his positive effect to the game thats missing to the fact Mustafi now adding his negative effect ( he has no brain, and no body bails us out of pressure so hes starting to think he is prime Fabregas and go for across the field long balls) and there you have our pathetic performances. I truley believe Bellerins injury is making us look that bad. We do need to invest. without bellerin, it looks like we need 6-7 new first teamers. With Bellerin, we'll need 3-4. Bellerin absence effect other players massively and makes them look very bad.
Thing is though mate , Mustafi might be a crap defender but he passes as well as Bellerin . Bellerin doesn't pass out the back in any case he's up the field often times .
Watch the Chelsea game again and see how vital bellerin was to our play from the back. He seemed to finally understand and have the confidence to do his role as emery intends to... And Mustafi has a good pass in him, but The percentage his pass will hit are much lower than, say, Xhaka... and he wastes alot of time on the ball before passing which narrows the midfielders time on the ball. The thing with him is the illusion of a good passer... but he clearly isnt... id rather sokratis/holding/kos to handle the ball. Thing is with this tactic we need our entire back 4 to be very very comfortable with the ball. back 5 actually with the keeper as well... and we dont have anyone comfortable... maybe holding... if a centre back manages to dribble pass his pressure it breaks everything. What we do now is passing the ball back or sideways, and slowly the pressure tightens until we hof it up top.
Totally agree about Bellerin's importance but we also have Monreal and Kos I think there are some serious technical issues in the team from middle to the front .
Shameful & undignified as that loss was, at least we were put to the Sword by a Dragun, Dortmund got laid low by a bloody cockerel!! They'll never live it down
Losing Bellerin has killed us. Absolutely killed us, he's arguably the most important player in Emery's set up. Losing Holding, was also a big blow, not only was he defending quite well, his distribution and calmness on the ball was massive for us.
Absolutely shocking defeat. Haven’t seen anything like this in over 20 years ffs. Imagine losing to a pub team who are in pre season ffs . Sure we had 8 defensive players on the pitch too.
I can't help it, but.... It's happening again, isn't it? Two pretty mediocre and very injured players are absent, we get a few questionable results, and their importance to us goes up several hundred notches. Are we sure this is not the case?
Agreed. Holding has proved **** all. Bellerin is a shadow of the boy who broke through. And now he'll be worse.
Bellerin's importance is magnified by the fact that our other RB options are a midfielder, a 35 year old and somehow in 2019 Carl Jenkinson. In reality Bellerin doesn't add much more offensively than Ainsley does while defensively has been poor in that regard for a while. In terms of our back 4 (or 5 or whatever) we could do with 3 additions, a left-back who can defend and isn't built like a fridge, a right-back and definitely a CB to partner Sokratis for next season.
I mean.. he has. But you gotta be consistently doomy and gloomy or else nobody will take you seriously! Arsenal FC, the only club that needs 25 superstars. Anything less is deadwood/ failed prospects.
I've told you all our goal dependency on the two strikers back during Giroud days and how our midfielders lacked goals to fill in the days when the strikers aren't scoring but no one listened and pound on the FIFA/FM solution "buy new shiny strikers" only to have the same issue all over again and yet the multi million paid football researchers can't even notice this simple stats
That is true and on paper we could say GDeep is being kneejerk. But is he. I mean the level of football was just pants against Bate. I remember it being horrid against Ostersunds but we really looked like garbage on Thursday.
Different situations. We were 3-0 up and played a second string team, obviously complacency crept in. This Bate game was our strongest team in the first leg, against a team in pre season. We’ll smash them at home though.
