re: Arsenal 2016/2017 Season Long Thread: 13 time FA Cup Champs

Xhaka is still suspended domestically right?

The EFL cup counts domestically. So, he was out for Boro, Reading, and Sunderland.

I am. I know the guys real well who run the twitter and facebook pages.

No matter what, having this depth is a good problem.

I really don't like Ramsey on the left. We have to have width somewhere. It depends on who is on the opposite wing.

While our attacking play works really well right now, there will come a time when we will be completely stagnant, and we have no positional structure to revert to. It's one of the things that pisses me off about Wenger. Ramsey has the freedom to move centrally, but it limits his movement in different ways. We've looked better having actual wingers play wide, and the auxiliary no.10 bullshite that Wenger uses unbalances the team more often than not. It works if Walcott is in supreme form, but if he is out, we have a stagnant front three who usually ask for the ball to feet.

For me Ramsey is just a 1a option in central midfield. I mean, at the moment we only have four fit CMs. He's not that far away from making the position his own either. At his best he's by far our best CM, but we haven't seen that play for 3 years.

He drifts but his heatmap is fairly limited. He's also more a winger than Ramsey. Iwobi can beat his man 1v1, and drive to the byline if necessary. He's like a competent, not retarded version of Gervinho. Ramsey uses body position and smart running to get goalside. In tight spaces I trust Iwobi to do the right thing. In tight spaces I trust Ramsey to do something fancy as hell that won't work.

Ox really does nothing for me, sure he had that spree of goals recently but he does pretty much nothing the majority of the time. Ramsey just isn't quite there, don't know if it's fitness due to him recently coming back, or just a lack of fitting in with the squad.

We're superior technically but they're more physical and athletic than us at almost every position. They've built a strong team that is extremely hard to beat. Now they won't win titles bc that "hard to beatness" comes at the expense of offense. Tottenham tied Pool, tied us, tied everton, beat man City. They're going to have a 1-0, 1-1, 0-1 game against Chelsea and Man city in all likelihood. But they'll also draw games against mediocre/bad teams.

This isn't a death knell. Nor would getting a point at OT next week. Draw the big games, win a few, which we did with Chelsea, and then beat the small teams. That'll keep us in title contention

I thought we were better for some phases of the game, but Spurs are such a good team positionally. I envy their spacing, but we could have worked them. Ox was really poor when he came on. Ozil didn't have a great game. We maybe should have started with Giroud. Iwobi should be dropped. I thought the decision to take off Coq was poor as well. He's been probably our best midfielder.