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Arsenal need a repeatable game blueprint

Suburban Gooners Logo Suburban Gooners Logo I watched the mentalness that was The Scum against the Scousers last night in a Durban airport and although I wanted to see Liverpool drop points, it’s hard not to have a wry smile about how terrible Tottenham are at the back. Yes, I know they have injuries, but playing your back line on the halfway line against a transitional team like Liverpool is suicidal.

can we take any crumbs of positivity from that result? I’m not sure. Liverpool looked good going forward, but they were given all of the help in the world from a Scum side who looked leakier than a Man United roof. Liverpool conceded three goals, so perhaps that shows their fallibility as a side defensively, but that felt more like luck than judgement on Tottenham’s behalf. The Scum offered little to nothing else and I wondered out loud on my social channels whether they will be as bad as that when they come to the Emirates in about three weeks time.

of course they won’t be. It’s a North London Derby and they will probably have all of their first choice defenders back, which again is another nod in the direction of things constantly falling Liverpool’s way this season.

Arteta said in both pre and post match pressers that we need to forget about the, though (as you can see that’s tough for me!) and he is right; Arsenal need to get to a position in which we are able to be in the conversation; right now with the, six clear and a game in hand, that doesn’t really feel realistic. I think for me the reason for that is that I’ve not felt like we’ve hit that kind of ‘run’ yet. Hey, if we beat Ipswich on 27th December, then if we go to a decent Brentford side on New Year’s Day (although they’ve hit a bit of a patchy moment in form having lost at home this weekend just gone) and pick up three points, before managing to take all three at a traditionally tough place for us in the shape of Brighton (again, they have been patchy too in recent games), then I might start to feel like we’re getting there.

its all about momentum, isn’t it? Every time we seem to be getting up a head of steam in the Premier League this season, it feels like something happens to us. Before the frustrating 1-1 against Fulham, we had players returning, we’d turned over a few teams and were looking good. Then suddenly with those two draws it just felt like we were stuttering going forward. The game on Saturday will have been good to register those goals and build confidence, but it feels to me like quite an isolated game in terms of how it plays out. Sometimes you get weird matches like that; every position you find yourself in results in an amazing chance and then a goal. Then other times it is the completely opposite end of the spectrum, like that Everton game the weekend before last.

It feels to me like we need to be putting together results which need to be replicable in style and the way the game points out and if I’m Arteta this morning, I bet that’s what I’m thinking, because you’re not going to have games like Palace or Everton the week before. Those games are ‘margins’ games in which it goes for you and sometimes doesn’t. What we need are a string of games in which it just feels like an Arsenal team in the middle of the season, churning out carbon copy games. A bit like the Brighton home game last season; I remember saying it in the aftermath of that game, that I thought it was the Arteta ‘archetypal’ football match. We absolutely dominated the ball, we gave Brighton zero opportunities to get a foothold in the game, we scored one, then made the game comfortable with the second, in which time we shut the game down completely and made it one of those infamous “600 thousands passes” games Arteta referenced a few years back when we played Watford away.

It feels to me like we need a bunch of pretty boring and standard 2-0 wins that shows we’ve got a formula, we’ve got a way of winning, so now we’re going in to a run of momentum building matches that can just be churned out week after week. That’s how you get close to being in the conversation with Liverpool. We all know we need to go on a run, but at this stage that run needs to be because of self-confidence builds rather than looking up or down at anyone.

Injuries aren’t helping and that Saka injury that we’re all concerned about right now doesn’t really help. It’s like “the good Lord giveth and he taketh away” with us this season; we see Calafiori return to the team and Zinchenko back too, but another player goes down before that in Saka, which has summed up this season. We can probably cope without him on 27th at home to Ipswich (I hope that isn’t ’famous last words’), but much like it felt like we could cope without Ødegaard earlier in the season for the first few games he was out for, eventually we’re going to start to realise just how important he is if he’s out for anything other than a couple of weeks. Martinelli performed admirably there and even got some good balls in leading to great opportunities on Saturday, but I get the feeling that he’s not going to have an ‘explosion into life’ on the right for the foreseeable future. It feels like the sort of move that works in small doses; we will probably find out over this Christmas period if that is true or not.

So there’s plenty of Arteta to ponder right now with the tactical set up as well as player positions and where to deploy them to maximum output. The good news is that we all know he will be at London Conley doing just that – quite obsessively too, I’d imagine.

right, that’s me done for today. Catch you peeps tomorrow.

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Gooner born in 1982 from Harlow, Essex, now living in Uxbridge. I say what I see - frequently wrong, but hey, it's just an opinion piece, right? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.