Go wide …

11 months ago 133

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Morning all.

It’s January 2nd and we play our next Premier League game on January 20th. We sit five points behind leaders Liverpool who beat Newcastle in an extraordinary game last night. Having been top at Christmas, the mood was good. A few days later and things have changed. Understandably so, playing that badly is no fun at all.

The current table is a perfect illustration of how quickly the festive period can shake things up, but there’s a long way still to go. The FA Cup clash against the Mugsmashers on Sunday will be an interesting one, and one I think Mikel Arteta will go full strength for, but in terms of the league, he certainly has some things to sort out with this team.

The attack isn’t working as well as it should, which is the fundamental issue for me, because you can offset some defensive issues if you can score goals. To some extent, Liverpool are a great example of that. Nowhere near as solid at the back as they were, but so potent going forward.

We’ve laid bare the output and statistics of our forwards over the last couple of days, and as we discussed on the Arsecast Extra yesterday, it’s why if there were to be a January addition to the forward line, I would be much more inclined to bring in another wide player rather than the out and out striker so many people covet. There are myriad reasons for this, most of which I have gone through before, but ultimately it comes down to that kind of signing being much more realistic. I don’t think we should go anywhere near Ivan Toney for the kind of money Brentford are looking for, and beyond that, the quality of striker people want and the availability in January is more or less incompatible.

To those who don’t believe we need that kind of player, just look at Bukayo Saka and Gabriel Martinelli and tell me they’re not, in some ways, struggling with the burden right now. It’s also worth remembering that this time last year Arsenal were prepared to go big for Mykhaylo Mudryk, a player who, despite the shambolic nature of what’s happened at Chelsea since his arrival, has taken some time to get used to the level of the Premier League. Maybe it would have been easier to come into a more settled environment at Arsenal, but the very fact we were prepared to go as big as we did for a player that raw 12 months ago tells you something about what the manager felt the team needed.

We still need it, in my opinion. Not least because the options we currently have in the squad are not ones Arteta feels he can use. Reiss Nelson is not considered good enough to start in the Premier League, while Emile Smith Rowe must be wondering how he gets minutes when he can’t even get on in a game which was crying out for someone to do something different with the ball. As for Leandro Trossard, I’d be a lot happier seeing him up front if we’re not starting Gabriel Jesus, but when deployed elsewhere (especially left 8), he leaves me – if not cold – lukewarm at best.

Elsewhere, the recent shift to playing Declan Rice so deep hasn’t really worked. Against Fulham he was basically an auxiliary centre-half at times, and on a day when his passing range was off, the distances were too big between him and the players he was trying to connect to. Clearly it’s by design, but I don’t think it helped.

It’s difficult to analyse the Fulham performance well, because despite the fact we’ve had some worries about our efficiency in the final third, I don’t think we’ve seen that kind of performance before. Not this season anyway. We’ve missed chances, yes. We’ve played a different way this season, yes. But I don’t think we’ve ever had such an individual and collective off-day like that. The optimistic part of me hopes that it was so bad it was just one of those days that most teams have. My glass half empty side harbours concerns that we’ve been figured out a little bit, although I feel the pace of our game (or lack thereof) is a major contributor to this.

As I said yesterday though, a mid-season blip is far preferable to an April or May blip. You have time to recover, and it’s now incumbent on the manager to make sure this last week was an outlier in a season when we’ve been difficult to beat. I realise the January priorities for the transfer market may lie elsewhere, and I think the news that Thomas Partey is not going to AFCON suggests his injury is a lot more serious than we know, but to win titles you need a difference maker in the forward line. Liverpool have that, Man City have that, Arsenal don’t.

It’s easier said than done, of course, but I hope the last few weeks have demonstrated clearly that while we have needs at the back and potentially in midfield, there’s more required at the most important end of the pitch.

The Arsecast Extra is below if you haven’t had a chance to listen yet. More here tomorrow.