Nos89 wrote: ↑Sat Nov 07, 2020 8:52 pm
It seems we are judging the quality of football played by Arteta alongside the type of football played by wenger's least successful period, post 2004 and pre-2014 when we played the best football in Europe yielding no trophies.
There is a plan here and it is very visible. The two own goals scored by molde were created by Arsenal and had the defenders not got in the way would have been scored by Nketiah.
Whilst it is hard watching at times, we are definitely moving in the right direction. I would suggest to all gooners not to fall into the trap of asking for fluent football of Liverpool and City today, be patient it will come.
Arteta has already got two trophies in the cupboard. More than Rodgers has at leicester, ole at manure, flampard at chavski and maureen at spurds. More experienced managers with better players at their disposal. We won them playing a patient counter attack game and it worked very, very well. I'm sure Arteta will get the midfield right, he was, after all, a decent AM in his time at Rangers and Everton. IMO the only midfielder in the current squad who is better than Arteta was in the midfield is Partey.
Willock has shown in the last two europa league games he has the energy and the technique to succeed, he needs to improve his woeful finishing and he will be a classic box to box midfielder. I don't understand the criticism of him on this forum. He looks better than Ramsey was at the same age. Arteta is already a success. He's won more as a manager than Pochettino in England.
At the end of the day, everyone forgives the quality of the football if its winning football. Nobody questioned GG's style (at least not amongst our own fans) when it was winning football, and Maureen has made a career out of it. The issue for me is that it really does have to be winning football if you play ugly because the minute it stops being winning football AND its painful to watch, the pressure on the manager is tenfold. Do we think GG would have been sacked for the 'bung' if we were still in 89/91 mode of winning titles? Nope, it was made easy for the club as were midtable playing awful football. Likewise as soon as Maureen's results dropped at United, Chavski or any of his clubs, the style of football is held up as a stick to beat the manager with
I said from the start that I wanted a manager who didn't play Pepball or Wengerball with average players and Arteta is certainly sticking to that part of the deal. I don't count a one off pre season friendly as a trophy, but he won the FA Cup fair and square with tough games against Sheffield United, Man City and Chelsea as opposed to Wenger's 2014 vintage. He has undoubtedly made us tougher to beat and for that he has my respect and praise. I no longer hide behind the sofa when we play the Mickeys, City or the rest of the big guns.
My criticism is in the home games against the lesser sides where 45 minutes of play seem to go by without so much as an attempt on goal, and it seems like there always needs to be a half time reaction to produce 10-15 minutes of attacking play. That has got us past the likes of Sheffield United and West Ham (just) but it clearly wasn't going to against Leicester and we had a lot of games last year against shite like Villa where we couldn't get the job done. Lets hope that comes soon. I also hate the fact that we're wasting time on numpties like Mustafi, Kolasinac, Xhaka etc in ANY games when he could have done more to include Smith Rowe, Saliba and some kids from the academy
The last thing I want is another change of manager - it is disruptive, and we aren't in Chavski mode where we can write off all the mistakes of the last guy and give the new king 200m to spunk. I don't need Wengerball football either and scoring 5 or 6 against all the pubbers. All i want is to see the finishing of the demolition job by getting rid of the rest of the Wenger assembled c.unts, to consistently play our home games at a quicker tempo with the right attitude and see where it takes us.
If he gets us to the top 4 with this squad, I've already said I think it will be an unbelievable achievement as there are about 7 or 8 teams who i see as having better squads than us.
