If they were playing good football (and if Arteta was less unlikeable, though that’s beside the point), I wouldn’t begrudge them the title win, or even CL win (unless it was at our expense). The football they’re showing, though…
Ironically, it’s a kind of team Guardiola used to win titles with (minus the world class centre forward). On paper at least, their squad looks so good (again, minus the world class striker). You can see it took years of big but careful investment to get it to this level, every position is covered by two good-to-excellent players (some of the have rightful claim to being the best in the world in their role), and they have also created pathways for their very best academy products.
This season, though, Nwaneri and Lewis-Skelly have been sidelined, Odegaard’s attacking instincts have been subdued, beautiful football has been completely ditched for “make sure you don’t concede, we’re gonna score from set-pieces anyway”. It’s a shame we aren’t in the title conversation - maybe we wouldn’t be able to grind them down but we’d at least give them a good scare. I still expect them to win it, though.
With about 5 mins to go one of the Wolves CBs smashed into Trossard when the ball was going over their heads. It was a bit naughty, one he was entitled to be a frustrated about, but something he should have got up from. Instead he feigned a head injury to try to run down the clock. A couple of minutes before it had taken them over a minute to take a corner. Ok, you have to be savvy to see out a game, but if you look at the rest of their performance they were just so lacking in footballing confidence to do it, like time wasting was the only thing they could conceive of to run the clock out. They maintained possession pathetically constantly just launching it forward to no one. There was even one throw where the Arsenal player did really well to throw the ball over the heads of multiple Wolves players to find Timber around the center circle in a bit of space and he just fucking wellied it forward with no thought of trying to bringing it down and trying to play. Everything about the performance in the last 15 mins made them look like a non-league side trying to hold on to a giant killing result.
I could not understand why they shoehorned the fa cup game against wolves 2 days after playing them on Tuesday 3rd mar since our next game after that is 9 days later? Why not on Saturday or Sunday total madness, I hope LFC complain about this unless they have decided to field youngsters.
As I replied though it’s a usual weekend/midweek set up only different in that we play on a Friday instead of Saturday, its still the average 3 days between games.
I thought this was a bit of fun. It’s “what if” scenarios based on removing things like set-pieces, added-time etc from the league results. It does give some pointers as to where we may be going wrong.
It looks like everyone who is vying for a CL spot will keep stumbling along, dropping plenty of points along the way. It gives me some hope for our prospects, but I can’t go overboard with that as we will likely continue to drop plenty of points between here and the finish line too.
Whoever can find some consistency will be in. Hopefully we get the points we need against Forest, and then keep going.
