Seems about right.

Arteta must go full strength for the West Brom game. We’re not in Europe so have fewer games, we can’t disregard the cups. Plus we need to kick start our season and get some confidence back in the team

Like you fellas on here, I've been watching football most of my life but I really know nothing about it. I'm a fan of above average intelligence and I've never been near a professional team and I have no clue what goes on or how to be a manager or what it takes to motivate players. But...!!

We were playing the champions of Europe today. Arguably the best team out there. And sure, we had some personnel issues that meant a back of 4 of Cédric, KT, Mari and Bob. Therefore, surely, SURELY (given thats a ropey old back 4 and thats the Champions Of Europe over there!!) you've gotta prop up the midfield a bit with more bodies than just 1-game rookie Lokonga and Granit? I know Elneny gets pelters but in games against top sides I think that's the time to play him. Not against Burnley or Norwich where we're gonna have the ball and need some guile. But when we're up against the best of the best we need energy and bodies to protect that dodgy back 4 and that's actually what Elneny does pretty well. What we dont need is 4 young guys playing up front. How utterly preposterous. What on earth is Arteta thinking? That we're gonna play Chelsea off the park with our overloaded youthful front line?

Now i know nothing right? But with the guys we had available I would've had Pépé up front on his own, Emile Smith Rowe and Saka behind him, Elneny running around after everyone, and AMN at right back coz that's your position mate, you're a unit, get your head around it and nail a place in the team coz its right there for yer. When we get the ball we get it to Pépé or Saka as quickly as possible coz they're our wild cards, and otherwise we keep it tight. That's how Arteta won an FA Cup against City and Chelsea. That's how Spurs have picked up 6 points so far this season.

No offense to Mari and Cédric who are bang average players, but Raul Sanllehi has so much to answer for. He took one look at Stan and thought "Im gonna fill my boots here coz that pillock has no clue about football". Give Wenger some credit, he would never have let a charlatan like that near our transfer business when he was around.

We were wide open down our left side, primarily because Saka wasnt tracking Reece James. Time after time Reece James was in acres of space high up the pitch totally unmarked and able to put dangerous crosses into our box.

Why weren't our defenders screaming at Saka to track his runner. That was football at its most basic and the sort of thing you would not wish to see in a Sunday morning pub team game.

Let’s keep the options at least semi-realistic for what you think we need positionally. Do you know what difference signing Aarons from Norwich, Bissouma from Brighton, and Calvert-Lewin from Everton would make? Next to nothing in my view. I’m no longer sure it’s about player quality. We could sign anyone and Arteta would make them look mediocre. I think it’s more about his style of play.

Hi Bernard,

You are probably right. Our gameplan consists of playing the ball out wide to Tierney and letting him swing crosses into the box to one player against four defenders. Is it any wonder we can't score goals.

Watching the last two games of pre-season, and the first two of the league campaign I find myself wondering how we've improved compared to the way we played at the start of last season. We don't look more solid. We don't play with more energy. Our pressing isn't better. We're not better at creating chances. It's fair enough to give the manager time to put his stamp on the team, but I'm not sure we've really progressed much at all, at least not as much as we should have in 12 months.

Felt like a lot of the fan talk before the game was about matching up Chelsea with a back 3. Perhaps that was the plan until White got covid but I’m not sure it was ever in Arteta’s thinking.

Keep your cv up to date because if you present this plan at the job interview for the Arsenal job later in the year you will be in with a shout. No experience necessary for the position.

But Tierney came inside continually but not to mark anyone. He was just as culpulable.

Atmosphere was noisy outside the ground then you get inside and are buzzing look at the team sheet and see 3 championship quality defenders in our side. In no time at all they have scored and the excitement has evaporated. Just no chance with that 11.

I swapped my season ticket and sat in block 121 as there were a few of us together. 2 older geezers behind me spent the first 40 minutes observing the occasions Xhaka had neglected to find Martinelli when there was a pass on then said they had enough and couldn’t take it no more and left 5 minutes before half time and didn’t return for the 2nd half.

Other Guys behind me spent the entire game lambasting the ludicrous performance by Mari who was doing a Gus Caesar impression for 90 minutes. Tierney at fault of the 2nd as he was over compensating for Mari getting turned every which way but loose. Simply not good enough.

Just absolute apathy frustration and boredom among the crowd.

If anyone is mad enough to attend the city game I would seriously recommend practicing hunter s Thompson’s daily routine that day

https://youtu.be/cQCFdcEXknc

On that note.........................https://www.theguardian.com/football/bl ... to-chelsea

Arteta said in his press conference he would have played a 3 had white not been missing.

The club need to try and encourage their players to be a bit more reclusive on the covid stuff. 5 players missing in 2 weeks. Obviously you can’t force people to stay home and they have to live their lives but we can’t go into every match each week with a couple of players missing.

Then he should have stuck with the 3 at the back and put Tierney in there and had Saka as a wing back
MOTD have just done a very very simple piece on us continually failing to stop the ball being passed straight through the middle of the pitch to Lukaku’s feet. Pretty embarrassing

https://www.reddit.com/r/ArsenalFC/comm ... ame=iossmf

This had the fans around me going absolutely mental.

Saka didn't look fit to me. He didn't track James all game and didn't add much to the attack. Tierney probably didn't help with either aspect though, he was absolutely terrible.

I read before the game that Arteta said there will be more transfers. Based on today a right back should be the priority. Cédric offered nothing on either side of the ball.

If I was to give Arteta the benefit of the doubt he was missing a lot of players today. A lineup of Leno, new RB, White, Gabriel, Tierney, Partey, Lokonga, Pépé, Emile Smith Rowe/Ødegaard, Saka, Aubameyang. Looks a lot better than what started today.

Once that starting line up steps onto the pitch any excuses Arteta had are gone. It'll all be down to his tactics then.

Mari played poorly. But I suppose he had the job of marking Lukaku, so it was always going to be a difficult game for him. What was Holding’s excuse?

If there’s one good thing about having Covid, White found it by missing the earlier game. Because I genuinely doubt anything would have been different had he played.

To the old timers, what period seemed worse?
1971 to 1989 or since 2004 to now?

Why get upset over the Chelsea game. We'd have needed our best pairing playing very well to have a chance. We didn't have a full strength side. 2-0 is a fair result considering the both sides in their present form.

Brentford is the game that should upset us more. We will likely lose to City. As far as the WBA match, they are catching us at the right time. I wouldn't be surprised if they knocked us out.

A few 'ifs'. If we bring in a good signing or two. We keep main players healthy. End of September I'll revisit and then decide if we are getting better, worse or no change.

Right now, its a struggle to watch a game and tough to take the bad results. Arteta has to be nervous. Anyone would be.

That's a fair call. The Jan 2021 run of form to the end of the year was 3rd best in the league even with the previous personnel (albeit a bit stale). So I agree that once there is a full squad line up who have had a month or 2 to get into the system then there are zero excuses for lack of progress.

The longer this current form continues, the more likely it is that Arteta will have to try something new because his job will very quickly be on the line. But, I'm worried that he's been telling everyone for so long "it's my way or the highway" that he may be too stubborn to make the changes required. He certainly comes across like that in some of the media interviews.

I find myself consistently torn on Arsenal. On the one hand you look at the mitigating circumstances and missing 6 of your best players against the European champions is never going to end well, but on the other hand I still expect us to make it a bit harder for them and to have some sort of effect on the game in attack.

City up next, spurs had lots of success sitting in and counter attacking them with pace and dribbling. What will we do?

Terrible preseason, Covid, lack of any semblance of a strategy (should have done what Pompeii said), and a failure to adjust to what was happening on the pitch. All this against one of the best attacks in Europe. We were lucky to get out of it with a 2 goal defeat.

We finished the game with a defence of Cédric, holding, Mari, Tavares. That is nowhere close to a top 6 defence. But then look at the second choice back 4 of a lot of teams and it doesn’t look good on paper.

A lot of people will say we’ve spent £130m and the squad is no better than last year. Part of that is because we had 3 loan players who we’ve had to spend £71m to just get in permanent players to bring us back to a neutral position from last season. Then we had to replace Luiz who left on a free. So in the immediate I’m not sure the quality of the squad has drastically improved from last year, despite the money spent, but for the longer term the squad is clearly healthier.

I don't think Arteta does himself any favors by coming up with these excuses about missing players. I mean, who are these six of our best players you're referring to? Aubameyang is one, Partey the other. Gabriel has more potential than Holding and Mari but is certainly not a level above them at this point in time from what we've seen. in fact, you could make the argument that Holding had the better season last year, or at least performed more consistently. Ben White playing his second game for the club is hardly a settled world beater.

Who else? Ødegaard could've played if we had wrapped the transfer up sooner. Hardly a case of bad luck. A fit Lacazette, so we can shove Aubameyang out on the wing and not touch the ball for 90 mins?

Mind you, I've only mentioned six players here, not the nine that Arteta was talking about. I guess he had a really sound strategy in place for how Bellerin and Nketiah were going to win us the game.

What's so depressing about all this is that it feels like we're at that stage where we're just waiting for things to get bad enough so that Arteta gets sacked and we can start fresh (again). The fact that he's happy facing Chelsea at home and looking like a team from the lower half of the table is telling. I don't think he has any idea of how to improve our form.

On the bright side, the signings we've made are still very good. Talented players at a perfect age, who are not signed for a specific system (since we really don't have one). Any manager that follows Arteta will be able to continue building around them.

Your kidding yourself if you think having Partey, white,Lacazette and Ødegaard in the side and Nketiah and Willian on the bench wouldn’t have helped us.

If Gabriel was fit Mari wouldn’t have played not holding who you are referring to. Maris performance was atrocious.

Partey and Lacazette definitely would've helped us, we might even have been able to create a scoring opportunity with them on the pitch. White and Gabriel, I doubt it. Ødegaard, maybe. But then again, Chelsea started without their best midfielder and best defender so it seems you can replace good players and still manage to play with structure and energy.

It's all just excuses. Nobody expected us to win. I didn't expect us to win. But I do expect us to put up a fight, and we did that for about 10 mins yesterday.

Yeah your kidding yourself. Keep trying to convince yourself.

I don’t think it’s fair to compare Chelsea being able to have top class replacements in virtually every position. I think fair criticism is we should have made it harder for Chelsea despite the absences. Concede territory and possession, force Chelsea wide and have them cross it in to a packed defence - which is possibly the strength of Mari and Holding defending. Then have a plan to hit on the counter attack in the space left by their wing backs being wingers. Or go for the full high press, high energy and really go after Jorginho to stop him dictating tempo. We didn’t do either so it was just waiting for the inevitable

I'm not comparing the squads though, becasue I don't expect us to be as good as Chelsea. The players we had on the pitch yesterday are all more talented than anyone Brentford or Burnley will have in their team this season, but apparently we can't expect them to play with any kind of purpose. Just sick of Arteta making those excuses. He wants to sell half the players he's missing, and now he's talking as if we can't put in a semi decent performance without them.

Did anyone watch MOTD2 on the BBC last night, or was it MOTD on Saturday night, or both? Thinking about it I reckon it was on both because last night I’d heard it before somewhere.

Anyway, to cut a long story short they showed an interview with Guardiola after the highlights of City hammering Norwich. To be pedantic I suppose Norwich have ‘City’ in their name but everyone will know the game I’m talking of. Manchester City beating Norfolk’s finest.

Pep said (to show how trendy I am by calling him by his first name, which almost seems fashionable in the media these days), words to the effect that he doesn’t like his players running around too much. He prefers the ball going to where they are, so implying they shouldn’t have to move much to receive it. I’m sure it wasn’t meant by Guardiola as a literal statement as City’s players do run around. But more as a reflection of his own footballing philosophy regarding how he likes his teams to play.

What immediately crossed my mind was whether Arteta, who we all probably suspect got the Arsenal job because he had been Guardiola’s number two at City, favours the same philosophy after working under him for so long? Might that explain why we so often lack energy in our style of play. I won’t be too controversial and ask whether, in line with that, it explains why he prefers Xhaka to Guendouzi? Whoops, please ignore that last question.

What I’m getting at more is the possibility that Arteta may not consider running around as such a critical factor in Arsenal’s build up play as others would? After all, from what Guardiola said in his post-Norwich interview, might that be part of the footballing philology of not only his mate, but crucially his mentor? I accept I’m possibly reading too much into what Guardiola said. However, the idea did cross my mind.

Jesus wept. I’ve read it all now.

You might learn something then.

Chelsea have agreed a £25m fee for Zouma to west ham. Chelsea also sold Guehi for £22m and Tomori for £25m. £72m in sales on CB they don't want or need, 2 of which came through the academy.

I seriously doubt it

https://youtu.be/UIUdyBG_DT0

Well they say reading expands the mind. Myself, I don’t think it’s impossible that Arteta may have had his own views on how the game should be played shaped by his mate and mentor Guardiola after working under him for so long.

Id agree. I suspect his views on how to play the game were quite similar even before he worked with Pep. He's a central midfielder without bags of pace but a very good passing range, quite typical of Spanish players of his generation. Then he played under Wenger who was also fascinated with this tika taka style football at the time. Pep takes the basis of tika taka and imprints a very complex style over the top - when it works it is virtually unplayable, but to get it to work you need some of the world's finest footballers. When it doesn't work you can look far to easy to defend against and, as we often found, too easy to rough up and score from set pieces.

My views on how to play winning football in this league align much more with Klopp than Pep. High tempo, pace, power, high press and the use of the flexible modern day forward who is not traditional winger or a traditional striker but is devastating. I see so little of any of these qualities in our entire squad.

Now wouldn’t that be fun to watch. Get’s my vote.

It’s been a long while since we were fun to watch.

WBA game. I hope Arteta has watched the 30 minute highlight show of WBA v Sheffield Utd. I watched it and the standin keeper for SU had a mare. But WBA use a long throw very effectively and like to use their height. Not sure whether WBA will play the same team, indeed it is unlikely but we need a strong performance in this match. Tactically we need a strong performance from Arteta and I hope he reverts to 3 at the back for City.