Thanks for the advice.
But most of us want to watch attacking and exciting football, not mind numbing walking football, passing sideways and backwards for 90 minutes + injury time. Believe it or not, Pep used to get his teams to play exciting and fluid football, whilst retaining the ball and also wining the ball back that won us numerous trophies. Now it’s all about keeping the ball, passing it around aimlessly throughout the match, hoping against hope of breaking down a packed 10 men defence camped in and around the 18 yard box , and doing next to nothing with free kicks and corners.
Fair enough. I'm as bored out of my skull with it as you are.
But here's the rub. What exactly do you do when you're, say, Rod or Bernie, advancing into forward midfield with the ball at your feet, and you're looking into, almost literally, a
forest of players in front of you, most in the box, or otherwise camped about five to ten yards in front of it? What do you do except pass it to the side, probably out to the wings, in the hope that your wingers will get round the outside?
If you try to put the ball forward, there is
at best a fifty-fifty chance it will go to the foot of the wrong one of those players making up that thicket of legs. Even if it does go to your man, he's got his back to goal, he cannot turn unless he's lightning quick, because he's got four opposition defenders straight away right up his backside. You can't play a through ball for him to run on to, because… same reason, there is simply no space behind him to run into.
We're not talking about
spaces that are available here. We're talking about
crevices. And that is the case for 80 to 85% of the game. And nearly every team now plays that way against us. Now we did have a player, one David Silva, who was capable of finding those crevices. A generational midfielder. Astonishingly, we then found another, one Kevin de Bruyne, who was pretty good at it too. Another generational player. We had no right to have two in one generation, and we sure as hell haven't got anyone with that level of accuracy and vision in midfield any more (it's not Rodri, it was never quite his role). So what do you do? You keep possession, rather than playing a forward ball and then them breaking fast, outrunning your high back line, and scoring against you with their first chance — and we have seen that over and over — and presume that their concentration will lapse at some point and the crevice will open somewhat wider. It's often worked, even this season. Even last. In Haaland's first season he was running into space behind the defensive line and murdering teams, scoring hat tricks breezily, because he can outrun most defenders once he gets going. He also had a Belgian midfielder who was eerily, perfectly attuned to those runs. All that's changed. Teams and their coaches wised up to that.
Answer: play against Manchester City as though you're playing at the Etihad, regardless of whether you're home or away. Be
happy with a point (!) and celebrate it like maniacs as though you'd won a cup. Even their fans buy into it, apparently, because they saw us slaughter them so many times since 2017-18, they got sick of it, and they don't want to see it again.
You can put angled high balls into the box, but we're an attack that prefers it on the ground, we don't generally have an aerially dominant attack — even Erling is not the bully you'd expect him to be in the air — and so there's a very, very good chance of their big centre halves heading it away. Again and again and again. Then, depending on how the ball falls — the break. The chance. The goal.
Arsenal's solution? Forget about open play, generally. Score if you can from that (they did it last night). Otherwise, score from set pieces, harrass the opposition into own goals if you can. Penalties also are useful.
Yes, it bores the fuck out of me, but that's the way it is. That's the way the league has decided to play against us, and it's been the case for several seasons. I don't have a solution to it, not sure if Pep has. But he's the expert, and he gets paid the big bucks.
For those wishing Pep gone — the next guy may well not have the solution, either. Be careful what you all wish for.
