Good morning to all.
Slightly anxious times in this house this morning as Lana, the younger of the two German Shepherds, has hip replacement surgery. It’s been scheduled for some time, and I know it’s the right thing for her in the long run, but dog owners will understand her concern and concern. And the guilt of leaving her yesterday at the vet.
Keep your fingers crossed for her, and if anyone has any experience/advice on post-op recovery and how to handle that in regards to a very active dog who basically needs to sit still, I’d be very appreciative. We have a box for her, but beyond that, any advice is welcome. You can send an email to ‘thearseblog at arseblog dot com’.
Thank you!
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I enjoyed this from Gabriel Jesus, speaking after the Man Utd game on Sunday:
“We are not happy, because we played much better [than United]. But that’s football, if you don’t go there and kill, you’re going to be in big trouble, and that’s what happened today.”
It coincides with what Mikel Arteta said about turning that dominance into opportunities. I’m sure you’ve already seen the stats. We had 47 touches in the United box to 17 of them; 16 shots on his 10, but only 3 on target on his 6. So while there is encouragement that we can go in there and play well, we have to be more ruthless in front of goal.
Some of it is obvious: Martin Odegaard’s chance created by Jesus, from which the captain should have scored, instead made a mistake. Somewhat less, but it feels like we’re too eager to create the Goldilocks shooting opportunity, making one more pass, one more move, to create perfection when maybe we need to pull the trigger a little sooner.
It’s a little early to say that this is an ongoing problem, because we had won five in a row before this one, and this team has certainly developed in the last 12-18 months. One of my big concerns as we got closer to this point was the fact that we were pretty shy, but so far this season (in addition to the progress we made last season), we’re much more active. Let’s look at the games so far.
Crystal Palace 0-2 Arsenal
Shots: 10 Target shots: 2
Arsenal 4-2 Leicester
Shots: 19 Shots on goal: 7
Bournemouth-Arsenal 0-3
Shots: 14 Shots on goal: 6
Arsenal-Fulham 2-1
Shots: 22 Shots on goal: 8
Arsenal 2-1 Aston Villa
Shots: 22 Shots on goal: 9
We’ve basically outshot and outscored our opponents in every Premier League game this season except Sunday. We had more shots than United, but they had more on target and obviously scored more goals. In the end that’s what counts, and I’m sure it’s something the coach will be working on. However, when you consider the frustration of the not-too-distant past when we barely seemed to shoot, this feels like a better place to improve.
Jesus continues:
Now is the time to learn from it and improve. We are doing very well this season, but there are still things to improve for everyone.
Although I like the mentality. Kill or be killed. This is the Premier League and you know that if you don’t take the risk, almost every team has enough quality and ability to punish you. When you couple that with some structural errors, which I think were caused by the triple substitution, you end up with what we saw on Sunday. The improvement doesn’t just come on the field, it can also be how in-game management can affect performance as well.
What’s interesting to me about this is how we respond. There’s a Europa League game on Thursday which is a good chance to get your confidence back a bit but you’ll remember last season’s losses tended to come in bunches and in my opinion that’s another one of the key areas to improve this season.
Every team is going to lose, but how well you react and isolate the L’s is what separates a good team from a very good team. Those sequences of three losses in a row, or three losses in four games, are so damaging to ambition this season that the top four seems to be the minimum requirement. I’m sure when his coach and his team took a deep dive last season, that’s something that stood out because when you look at the results it sticks out like a sore thumb.
We need our thumb to be a lot less painful this season.
Well, that’s all for this morning. Have a nice day, more here tomorrow as we start looking towards Europe on Thursday.
