Happy Sunday to you all. We’re right in the thick of the Interlull, and yesterday I watched Ireland play Georgia for a bit. I did not realise that Georgia were actually Brazil. At least I think that’s what happened, because they were doing this crazy thing with the football. What they did was, and this might be hard to get your head around, was pass it to one another repeatedly. Over and over again. They kept possession, they moved around the pitch creating space for another pass, and at one point they opened up the packed Irish defence beautifully and scored an equaliser (I missed the Irish goal). This was in stark contrast to the Irish players who must have been told that being in the vicinity of the ball for any longer than 2 seconds would give them a bell’s palsy and make their mickeys fall off. So, every time they got it they would look worried for a couple of seconds then hoof the ball as far up the field as they could, at which point the Georgians would do that mean trick of passing it around and looking like competent professional footballers. I found myself actually getting a bit angry that Ireland were so incapable of the basics before I realised that I already have enough football things to get worried and unhappy about, so I turned it off. Then a bit later I turned it back on again (glutton for punishment) to watch James McClean miss a great chance to win it either side of him clumping into the opposition with one of his trademark ‘hard but fair but probably not that fair because he knows what he’s doing’ challenges. Then I went out and drank quite a lot of beer. And here we are. So, what’s going on? Well, Mesut Ozil has marked the fourth anniversary of his signing for the club by taking a pop at former players over criticism aimed at him and the team. He says:

Too expensive, too greedy, bad body language, and lacking fight – this is what people have said about me. Some of these comments are made by those who do not know me, some are made by former players – both successful and unsuccessful during their time here at the club. Although criticism is something that all football players have to deal with, I nevertheless expected legends to behave like legends – my advice to these former Gunners is stop talking and start supporting.

I think criticism of Ozil this season has been a bit over the top, especially when it’s so clear how fundamental the issues of this team are and how deep they lie. To single him out when he’s far from the root cause of our problems has been strange to me, but then he’s an easy target. A slighty fey foreign player whose style lends itself to criticism because he’s not as rough and tumble as people would like. At this point anyone with expectations of Ozil being a hustler, a tackler, and getting stuck in is always going to be disappointed. That’s not to say he couldn’t do a bit more but then he’s far from alone in that when you look at how this team has played this season. For me the main issue is our willful refusal to bring in the kind of player who can offset some of Ozil’s weaknesses, and who could enable him to become more effective (this is a central midfield player by the way, the one we should have signed this summer but couldn’t be arsed). Basically, I think criticism of individuals at this point is more or less redundant. It’s systemic, it’s how we’re coached, how the team is set up, and how the team is selected that are the main issues. That said, I don’t think it’s incumbent on former players whose job it is to analyse the team to ignore the problems just because they once played for us. Have a soft spot, by all means, everyone can understand that, but they have to address the issues that are so patently obvious to everyone. They are paid to be pundits, not cheerleaders. I don’t always/often agree with what they say, and sometimes how they say it, but it’s their job to do it. I’m not sure what exactly Ozil hoped to achieve with this message, but I suspect it might well be counter-productive as he’s well and truly turned the spotlight on himself. I guess the best answer to any criticism is to deliver on the pitch, create those chances, hope that one of our feckless eejits up front can put them away, and people will have a lot less to say about him. He also had some nice to things to say about his time at the club too, but said his future remains unclear as he heads into the final year of his contract. Again there are wider issues, but when you’re in this situation people will question your commitment at every opportunity, so let’s hope Ozil can back up what’s he’s said on social media when we see him back out there on the pitch, in what’s almost certainly his last season at the club. It’s a miserable day here, so I’m going to spend it cooking and eating. Have a nice Sunday.   The post Georgia play mean tricks on Ireland, Ozil takes a pop at critics appeared first on Arseblog ... an Arsenal blog.

The Stoke result continues to loom large, with Arsene Wenger urging some calm after just the second game of the season. He says:

Let’s not go overboard. We lost one game. I can understand that but overall I believe there were a lot of positives in the game as well because we created many chances. We had great domination and unfortunately we dropped three points.

It’s true. It is only one game. We did have a lot of chances. We enjoyed ‘great domination’ and on another day, if we get that penalty in the first half for the foul on Hector Bellerin, and Alexandre Lacazette isn’t given offside then things could be very different. Except we didn’t, and they’re not, and one game has illustrated the gossamer nature of the material that was used to paper over the cracks for some people. We’re 180 minutes into the new campaign and we’re already firefighting, dealing with Wenger Out hashtags, and I suppose it’s only a matter of time before we have more concerted efforts to highlight people’s unhappiness with the manager. If we were working off a blank slate it’d be considered ridiculous for such an outpouring of anger after just the second game of the season, but this is far from a blank slate. This is more of the same which was more of the previous same which was more of the same that came before that. The club must have known that it would take very little to pick away at the scabs and open up fresh wounds. The Stoke game showed that, and I don’t know what anyone can do about it now. This is the Arsenal world that we live in, like it or not. A new manager, a different manager, would likely get a bit more patience after just 180 minutes of football, but watching the same man in charge as we lose so needlessly and carelessly to Stoke is going to push some people’s buttons. It was worrying, let’s not beat around the bush. The individual mistakes were costly but we were supposed to learn from the ones of last weekend against Leicester; and while Arsene Wenger’s team selections have left us scratching our heads in the past, there’s usually some fundamental logic to them. The team he selected at Stoke, and the changes he made, were not easy to understand at all. I say this with the caveat that he knows his players better than anyone else, he sees them training of course, and is aware of underlying fitness issues that we’re not privy to. Yet I can’t fathom the reasons for leaving Per Mertesacker on the bench. Stoke away is basically the perfect game for him, and the way that game played out was evidence of it. They had little to trouble us, the team would have been better balanced with Monreal and Kolasinac shifting over and one of Bellerin or Oxlade-Chamberlain on the right hand side. Would Mertesacker’s presence have improved us from an attacking point of view? Probably not, but I think experience and leadership at the back might well have helped prevent the kind of carelessness that led to the goal. Then the substitutions, and Arsene Wenger explained his thinking with regards the introduction of Theo Walcott, saying:

I wanted to put Walcott on because he can cross for Giroud.

Quite why he thought this, I have no idea. Theo Walcott had two assists last season. One was at Burnley, when he nodded the ball across for Koscielny to the bundle it in with his hand; the other at Watford when Alexis Sanchez just about got the ball over the line after a cross from the right hand side. The last time Walcott assisted a Giroud goal was March 2016 in the FA Cup against Hull (4-0). You have to go back to September 2013 to find Walcott’s last assist for Giroud in the Premier League, this was in a North London derby again Sp*rs at the Emirates. All that aside, we already had Oxlade-Chamberlain slinging in crosses from that side, and the sum total of Walcott’s contribution was three short passes in the 15 minutes or so that he was on the pitch. If you really wanted good balls into Giroud, you leave Xhaka on who provided two assists against Leicester because he’s involved in the game (even if it wasn’t his best performance and I can understand why the manager might have been frustrated by elements of it). It felt like a substitution that was more about taking a player off than it was about introducing someone who could make an impact. And while Xhaka has got to smarten up when it comes to his passing, because his mistakes are being punished severely, he’s far more likely to create something than a player like Walcott whose main quality is his pace and ability to get behind a defence that is pushing up, not one that has parked the bus. As with team selection it felt like muddled thinking, and there’s no doubt in my mind it stifled the momentum we had in the final stages of the game. Even the explanation over the wing-backs sounds strange, when asked about Bellerin being deployed on the left:

He can play there, I play him or Chamberlain there, and Chamberlain on the right looks good as well. Both of them are more right-sided players, I agree, and depending on the game I choose sometimes right and sometimes left.

Of course it is only the second game of the season, and there’s plenty of time to recover, but worries about the way we’re set up and the way we play are understandable too. With a trip to Anfield next weekend there’s a lot to work on between now and then. Based on what we’ve seen from both sides thus far, it seems likely this is a game that will be decided on firepower rather than defensive strength, but unless we find some balance at the back and some composure in midfield it’s going to be tougher than it should be. Right, James and I will be here this morning with an Arsecast Extra, so if you have any topics for discussion or questions you’d like answered, send to @gunnerblog and @arseblog on Twitter with the hashtag #arsecastextra. We’ll have that for you around lunchtime. Until then.   The post ‘One game’ opens up old wounds as Wenger’s decisions are hard to understand appeared first on Arseblog ... an Arsenal blog.

Match report – Player ratings – By the numbers – Video

It’s unusual to open a blog with a song, but this morning this one is going around in my head and it seems particularly apt. Nothing’s changed I still love you, oh, I still love you Only slightly, only slightly less than I used to, my love To be fair, there was at least some variation in that we continued our fun experiment of playing a back three almost devoid of central defenders. With Per Mertesacker, Shkodran Mustafi, Rob Holding and Calum Chambers to choose from, Arsene Wenger plumped for Mustafi, Monreal and Kolasinac, flanked by Bellerin on the left and Oxlade-Chamberlain on the right. Now, I like Monreal, and I think he works very well in a back three, but not as the anchor man in that system. We bought Kolasinac to add power and physicality to our left but instead played a right back, who should have been on the right, in that position, with Mertesacker on the bench and Holding, off the back of one dodgy game, left out of the squad altogether. You wonder what that will do to his confidence. Amazingly, having picked what was essentially a mismatched, hotchpotch, ramshackle back three, Arsene Wenger then bemoaned their lack of cohesion post-game, saying:

You need to improve the connections with the players but I was not convinced by our central defence today.

Crazy idea, but how about playing some actual central defenders in central defence and see if that makes things any better? As it was, the defence wasn’t entirely culpable for what turned out to be the winner, but its shortcomings were most definitely exposed, and the story of the game felt oh so familiar. Arsenal spurning chances to score, yet concede a thoroughly avoidable, feeble goal then spend the rest of the game huffing and puffing and failing to blow the house down. The goal itself came when Granit Xhaka, whose radar seemed off all day, made a mess of a short pass in midfield allowing Stoke to break. Monreal’s hesitation was critical when the ball was slipped through to Jese and the former Real Madrid man made no mistake with a close range finish. Like last week against Leicester the problems were primarily of our own making, but this time there was to be no dramatic rescue. In that Leicester game the manager’s substitutions worked brilliantly with Ramsey and then Giroud scoring the goals we needed, but yesterday they basically made things worse. I understand introducing Giroud, but I’m not sure Kolasinac was the man to take off. I would have preferred to see him move to left back as we settled into a back four, with Bellerin shifted back over to the right where he belongs leaving Oxlade-Chamberlain to make way. Whatever about the efficacy of that move, it’s hard to understand exactly what the thinking behind the Iwobi and Walcott changes were about, beyond shoehorning as many attacking players onto the pitch as possible. When you’re chasing a game like this, against a team like Stoke who are sitting as deep as they did and packing their area, the qualities Walcott in particular possesses are basically useless and he barely had a kick when he came on. And while I think Xhaka had a poor day by his standards, when you bring on Giroud you need players who can provide him the kind of service he needs, and taking the Swiss international off robbed us of one of the key proponents of that. The Frenchman had one chance, late on from a Monreal cross, and that was it. In some ways it was illustrative of our day in general. The initial team selection was wrong, you just can’t play that many players out of position and hope to be cohesive as a team, and the substitutions – rather than changing the dynamic of the game – made us worse at a time when we were playing well enough to believe a goal wasn’t out of the question. Indeed, we scored one, Lacazette’s effort was ruled out for offside – wrongly in my opinion – yet the manager’s response to that was to take off the man who had blasted the ball into the top corner, showcasing his finishing skills while others around him fluffed their lines when chances did present themselves. His decisions from start to finish were baffling, and ultimately costly. I think it’s fair to point out that as well as the disallowed effort we should have had a penalty in the first half. I thought the two handballs were purely accidental, and would have been unhappy if we’d been penalised for those, but the one where Bellerin is clearly taken out by the defender is a shocking oversight by Andre Marriner, and in close games such decisions can be pivotal. That would certainly have changed the trajectory of the game, but at the same time it doesn’t excuse our own shortcomings. Afterwards, Arsene Wenger bemoaned the offside decision, calling it ‘100% onside’, but said the result was of our making:

In football, when you don’t win, you can only look at yourself. Other teams might take points here that we have dropped today. Today I would say that we can look at ourselves and we are 100 per cent guilty on the goal we conceded.

The line about other team stands-out because he’s absolutely right. Stoke were pretty poor all round, far from the relentless threat they have been to us in the past, but they took their big chance and we failed to make the most of our domination of the ball. We had 77.3% possession, yet still managed to lose. This is a team that badly needs some balance, because without it we’re going to struggle. It’s impossible to play football the way you want to with so many players in unfamiliar positions, and it wouldn’t surprise me very much if Arsene Wenger ditched the three at the back in the not too distant future. I mean, he could make it better by playing centre-halves there, and with Koscielny back next week we’ve got more chance of doing that, but I’m not sure he’s ever been truly convinced by it. One of the other things that struck me yesterday was how deep Mesut Ozil was playing, dropping back to try and make things happen, and at times he and Xhaka were almost under each other’s feet. They’re both capable of picking a pass, but when they’re that close together they seemed to cancel each other out at times. I maintain this team is in need of a central midfield player who can help glue all our distinct parts together, because right now that area of the pitch as still not functioning the way it should. So, our first tricky away game of the season and we come unstuck. If we need to get back on that horse straight away then a trip to Anfield next weekend should do nicely, but unless we sort out this team from a positional point of view, it’s hard to see how we’re going to avoid the same kind of result. More on this tomorrow in the Arsecast Extra, in the meantime have a good Sunday. The post Stoke 1-0 Arsenal: Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before appeared first on Arseblog ... an Arsenal blog.