Mr Arsenal Blog's tactics weekly. 

02/12/12 - reviewing the Swansea game.

Well, what a horrible performance and result for us yesterday against Swansea City at The Emirates, and you could argue to make things worse, as I am writing this, we have drawn the same team away from home in the FA cup to be played in January. The performance yesterday was very poor indeed, and is to be honest the coming together of the things that have been wrong for much of this season, and things that I have been discussing on here for weeks now.

As I have been saying on here, our passing has been lacking penetration and direction in recent weeks and months. And this was absolutely the case yesterday against Swansea. We all know the way that Arsenal play, we like to keep the ball and we like to attack, that is fine. However, what has been a problem recently especially in games such as Norwich, Villa and United away, is the way in which we use the ball. Against Swansea yesterday the team's passing was once again limp and un-imaginative, and therefore naturally we had absolutely no penetration across the field. Against Aston Villa for example we had 650 passes, did we score? NO. That is so poor, we have to use the ball much much better! It is so frustrating to have to KEEP talking about the same things on here, but there really is not much else to talk about.

This has been a real issue this season, however we have usually had the majority of the ball because we are good at holding on to it. However yesterday we just kept giving it away, and this led to something which we hardly ever see which is the opposition team actually having more of the ball than us at The Emirates, and I believe that just shows you how poor we were at passing the ball, and also shows how poor our movement was. And this was the other main issue with our performance yesterday. As I said we were unimaginative and limp, and this was emphasised with the lack of movement in our team. If you want to play the way that we want to, keeping the ball, playing possession football, moving opposition teams around (like we always have in the past), you have to give your team-mates options to pass to, by moving intelligently, getting into channels of space and putting your man under pressure. This was NON existent yesterday.

If you are going to play like Stoke and just hoof the ball up the field then this is not an issue, you will get a certain amount of success by winning the ball in the air, and get men beyond the ball. However this is not the way we play and quite frankly, hopefully, we will never play like that. However to play like we do and be successful, you have to have intelligent movement, otherwise you will just keep loosing the ball because the opposition will get men around the ball and win it back, as happened yesterday. It was very frustrating to watch it back that is for sure.

This is something which is very un-usual for an Arsenal team to be limp in attack and have no movement. We have been so used to watching our team spreading opposition men all over the place with quick, intelligent passing, and effective movement too. It is also somewhat telling that we have conceded only 16 goals in the premier league compared to United's 21. But what's the difference? Well they have effective movement, they use the ball well, and they score goals. This has never been a problem really for Arsenal before. But this season it is, and why is this? Well because our passing is slow, un-imaginative and not precise enough. It is therefore quite frankly SO easy to stop, and with all due respect to Swansea who played well, they should not be able to have such an easy win, we should be putting teams like that to the sword, especially at home. But we are not because our passing and our movement is not at all effective. Defensively we are actually doing okay on the whole, but going forward I don't know what's happened. People are having a go at people like Arteta for not passing forward, but let me make something absolutely clear, movement and effective passing go absolutely hand-in hand. Without effective movement you will never have effective forward passing because there is absolutely no one to pass to, that is what we saw yesterday. We have to start making more of an effort on the ball to get into space, drag defenders out of position like we used to, and therefore goals will come. Until we do that however there will be more frustrating blank performances. I hope this is not the case.

Quite frankly I don't want to talk about this anymore, it is too frustrating. So to put some good news on the table, we are only five points behind 3rd place Chelsea, who by the way are in crisis, and we have a relatively good fixture list for the next few weeks. Therefore if we start to improve, which to be honest shouldn't be too taxing after yesterday, we will pick up points. However as yesterday showed we cannot afford to take ANYONE for granted. We are in a position that we are not used to being in (10th place), however as I said it is very congested in the table, and we are not far behind, but having said that there are teams that are NOT far behind us now, so we cannot afford to keep playing like this. In the week we have a VERY tough game away in Athens, and in a way I don't want us to play a strong team because the players did seem to have nothing in the tank, at least I hope that's the case, because the lack of movement e.t.c did look like a tired team, and I hope it is that rather than a lack of desire and effort. However the game in Athens is an important one, because we have to finish top in our group, so whatever team Le Boss puts out, we have to win. I wouldn't expect a full team to play however and I really hope that people like Eisfield are given a game instead of Cazorla who was effectively invisible yesterday and does seem to be knackred, he has played every game this season so we have to start giving players with great talent such as Eisfield a chance to prove what he can add to the team, and rotate this players in. Because we have a very busy Christmas period as always, and players WILL have to be rotated, so I expect the team in Athens to reflect this.

Anyway lets hope we get two good wins this week in Athens and in another tough game against WBA at home. Luckily they seem to have dropped a bit, but as I said we can no longer afford to take teams for granted, and have to come out absolutely firing and show that we can still score goals to go with what IS an improved defence.

UP THE ARSENAL

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