re: Arsenal 18/19 Season Thread

quote:

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Maybe he will work better with Emery. Otherwise I'm not optimistic.

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Yeah, I was optimistic about Monchi coming to Roma. However, it's two consecutive summers that he's made a lot of moves that were widely criticized at the time and turned out even worse, or more naive, than they seemed.

This summer he managed to stockpile 4-5 guys that only seem to thrive in the most advance midfield slot while completely ignoring any mid that could do the defensive, positioning, pressing and possession box to box work Strootman provided.

That came after last summer where he spent €70m on 2 players that could only backup Dzeko when we desperately needed a direct Salah replacement.

All the while, his more desperately needed CB (and GK) acquisitions have been busts.

He has brought in a lot of really talented young players but it's not the most "balanced" team of them either.

He's fallen quite short of in his own stated goal that the move to Roma and our budget would allow the incorporation of youth while not falling off the pace too much competitively. We'd been doing that a lot better before he arrived.

It would have been better to just bring in even more young players, finish 8th this year and not have all the Pastore, Nzonzi, Marcano, Olsen etc salaries on the books.

I would have hoped that he'd stay to clean up the mess but if the reports are true than he's ready to bail since Di Francesco was fired, it doesn't exactly endear me to him any more.