re: Arsenal 2014/15 Season Long Thread

I never said any of those things and I have no idea what you're talking about.

We're now really fast up top, and really slow at the back. When teams are running at us and Per and Flamini/Arteta are two of the three protecting our goal, it's a terrifying prospect.

This city match is going to be massive. Arteta should be back which is nice. Really hope we revert back to the 4231 for it.

Tigerfan we did really poorly against the top sides last year. I don't see anything that will change that but I hope I'm wrong. I would feel much better if we could stay healthy... Or if we had any defensive speed, which we don't.

reading Welbeck rolled his ankle during England training... will be held out of Norway match, but is expected to be okay...

Let's be completely honest. The CDM we actually need is so rare that only a handful exist, and they already play for the best teams in the world. Carvalho looks like a good prospect, but so did Alex Song at 21. While I would have liked Carvalho, I don't know if he was worth the asking price. At the same time our problems at DM were actually problems with our whole defensive shape. What we want is to continue playing the way we are and have a DM that can cover those spaces. Again, we might as well be talking about a video game player. If we were just a little less naive in our positioning at certain points of the game, we would be fine. We certainly don't need to buy anyone. One solution could be the fullbacks being more thoughtful on where they are positioned and when they go forward. Another is to go to the double pivot.

If we actually isolate the problem, the games where we were destroyed were all away from home where we tried to play as if we were at home. And then we had luck go against us in those games as well (Koscielny injury at Man City, early goals at Liverpool etc) then would wouldn't have been beaten so badly.

Buying a the rare DM who can allow you to play recklessly isn't necessarily a good thing. You are still playing recklessly. Since we have this Mertesacker-Arteta/Flamini pivot that limits how high up the field we can press, it is obviously better to concede possession up to the halfway line, press hard with the front players at that point, and then break at speed. Trying to play any other way is simply suicide, even if we had De Rossi/Martinez/Busquets/Makelele. We reformed the way we played when Mertesacker came into the side, and we will have to continue to play that way in certain games if we are being realistic about our chances. I mean no one seems to remember that playing a deep line and pressing with the front players was how we won games at Old Trafford with the Invincibles. There isn't a shame in it.

What frustrates me most is that we blame Arteta and Flamini for things that aren't their fault. Arteta has been an absolutely spectacular player for us as soon as we signed him. He has been the most underrated DLP in the world since 2011. Flamini is a better passer than most give him credit for, though he isn't as good a passer as Arteta or any of our other midfielders, which he makes up for by being positionally aware and a workhorse defensively. He is the only midfielder player we have that seems to relish defending.

If your system requires a once in a lifetime sort of player (and this might be hyperbole, but I want to accent how rare a DM of the caliber that we need actually is) then maybe it should be time to rethink the system the 10% of the time it will be tested.

All I need to do is watch our side without Arteta to see how good he is. I'm not as worried about DM as defensive cover. I'm very worried there. Last year, our 4th CB was Sagna, really, who was much better fourth CB than Monreal, IMO.

We were also incredibly healthy on our back line last year.

Defensive depth last year:

RB: Sagna, Jenks
CB: Per, Kosc, Verm, Sagna
LB: Gibbs, Monreal, Verm

Defensive depth this year:

RB: Debuchy, Chambers, Bellerin
CB: Per, Kosc, Chambers, Monreal
LB: Gibbs, Monreal

Basically, we have less LB depth without Verm, less quality CB depth, and going to have to rely on Bellerin probably.

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I don't follow Arsenal that closely but that's probably where many Arsenal fans are slightly concerned. When you're invested in so much amazing attacking talents like Ozil, Cazorla, etc who aren't going to effectively drop back and help defensively when facing another elite side it's not easy to just change tactics completely.

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And this is the problem. Wenger doesn't really set the team up to who we are playing. We live and die by how he wants to play. Playing a high line with per and your fullbacks up by the corners is something he refuses to change. Which leaves us with arteta and flamini trying to make up ground on the counter and we get burnt. If Leicester was a good squad they would have punished us.

And this isn't the fault of the players. its wengers stubbornness. We don't need patrick vieria, we need a better defensive shape that we showed early on last season but just reverted back to the suicidal high line. I think Arteta and flamini are solid defensive players and I never bought into arteta not being able to defend when he seems to break up play and make more tackles than any one on Arsenal since he's been here.