BRACE FOR IMPACT
FOREST GAME COULD BE BAD
I don’t normally raise white flags, but I am deeply concerned about the Forest game this evening.
Arsenal lost against West Ham because the players were clearly fried. The fastest player on the pitch that game was David Raya, clocking 32.7 km/h.
Yeah, you read that right, the fastest sprint of the 90 was our keeper at the end of the game.
“Maybe he’s one of the fastest players at Arsenal.”
Sorry to kill that argument—he doesn’t even make the top 10. These numbers come from the Arsenal YT channel.
Ben White – 36.36 km/h
Bukayo Saka – 36.32 km/h
Gabriel Martinelli – 36.03 km/h
William Saliba – 35.56 km/h
Raheem Sterling – 35.43 km/h
Jakub Kiwior – 35.31 km/h
Martin Ødegaard – 34.92 km/h
Riccardo Calafiori – 34.56 km/h
Oleksandr Zinchenko – 34.20 km/h
Declan Rice – 33.94 km/h
Watching Declan Rice get skinned by Wan-Bissaka and our whole defense get taken out on the right just further adds to the hypothesis that Arteta has cooked the players this season, and we are now seeing what fatigue looks like at the wrong time of the season.
There’s no explosiveness in the players' legs, passes aren’t going where they should because brains are melted cheese, and the output is that we can’t score goals against a shit West Ham side, and we needed last minute magic to turnover the most generous team in the league the week before.
Declan Rice getting hooked before 60 minutes because he was playing like a man fresh off the back of a marathon is the chain smoker equivalent of coughing up blood-spattered piece of tar. That should be setting off alarm bells. If Defcon 5 was Mikel Arteta bragging about Kai Havertz's exceptional DNA before breaking him on an R&R trip to Dubai, then Defcon 1 has to be breaking the fittest player in the Premier League by February.
Arteta was also worryingly bullish in the pregame presser.
“It’s been incredibly satisfying to work every day with the players, the coaches, and the staff to try to overcome certain situations. If somebody tells you at the start of the season that by this time you will have played five times with a red card, over half an hour in each of them, and you have lost this amount of players, what’s the bet you are in the middle of the table at least, and you are out of the Champions League?
But that’s not the situation, so that tells you the resilience, the resources, and the ambition the team and every individual has, and that time has probably been one of my proudest moments to work, in that sense. The problem is when you are there, you want more and more. I’m not going to stop—over my dead body that we stop thinking that way and putting everything we possibly can to increase that probability of us winning, being better than the opponent, and hitting that performance, those standards constantly, regardless of what happens.”
All of what he’s saying is right. Liverpool hasn’t had to cope with what we have. They’ve had one red card all season and it was deserved. We’ve had 5, 4 were undeserved. We’ve had countless injuries, they’ve had almost none. The players they are utterly dependent on, who are leaving on free transfers, haven’t got injured or dialed back their performances. Their fixtures were outrageously blessed. They’ve been awarded 7 penalties this season, Arsenal have been given 2.
But Liverpool are more than just lucky—they are strategic. They intentionally hired a coach who doesn’t beast his players like Klopp did. As a result, they’re fresher, and their stars suffer fewer injuries. It’s a very simple approach, but Arteta is acting like injuries aren’t anything to do with him. They are.
The second problem we have is that 45% of our goals this season have come from players we don’t have available. I could stomach that if the rest of the team was popping, but we only have three players who have registered more than five PL goals this season, and we don’t have any that have more than ten. Mikel Merino is our fourth-highest PL goal scorer this season—which is shocking. Only three players at Arsenal have five or more PL assists this season. Bukayo is still leading the PL number by DOUBLE, and he’s been out since November. Martin Ødegaard, our KDB, only has three assists this season.
MISERY INTERMISSION: Those are some bleak numbers and we’re still 2nd, which, in a f*cked up kind of way, should give you solace that the manager has great ideas, and the best system in the league.
So when you factor in a momentum-busting loss to West Ham, clear fatigue in the system, and a squad of players who are struggling badly for goals… it becomes really hard to touch that little bag of hopium stashed under the tear-soaked pillow.
This is the sort of game where we could very easily get absolutely monstered. Forest are hungry, rested, and they have a lot of explosive players in their forward line. Arsenal has come back from the dead lots of times this season, but I think the double whammy of Liverpool cruising past City and Arsenal sputtering like a 90-year-old meth user doing hot yoga probably means you should brace for impact.
I’m sorry I can’t offer you anything more hopeful today. The season is finished, and I think we’re in such a bad state that I’m struggling to see how we breeze past PSV. We’re not going to be hard to set up against when our options are Mikel Merino and a totally dusted Raheem Sterling.
But let’s see where we land. I would absolutely LOVE to be wrong today. But the dark clouds are gathering. So put on a rain coat and hope there’s a sharp breeze and we avoid the worst of it.
Also, just quickly wanted to congratulate Aston Villa who signed a bunch of players in January who all contributed to their terrific victory against Crystal Palace. Just kidding, they lost 4-1 and sit in 10th place having played 28 games, 2 more than City in 5th. Eddie on the score sheet with a blistering strike from 1 yard out. Also wanted to congratulate Man City who spent £260m on players in January and turned things around in the Premier League and powered through to the last 16 in Champions League. Oh, that didn’t happen either? I think the point of my story is most failures in football start with bad summers and are almost never solved in January.
If you are a total sicko and want to join us On The Whistle after the game, sub up now and get seven days free. You could also watch the Before the Whistle with me and Johnny. It was a GOOD one. x
Talk about cognitive dissonance, Pedro. You write about the multiple failures of Arteta and then make the bizarre claim that we have 'the best system in the league' - without any explanation, natch. That doesn't mean a thing, and clearly if we did we would be sitting at the top of the table. More fantasy opium haze about Arteta I guess. Like a top three manager in the entire world, lol. But it's just down to bad luck and PGMOL, rinse and repeat.
If you're talking systems, obviously Pool have a very good one, and despite your faint praise Slot has done a good job in calming the Klopp hysteria and combining his midfield and attack in a very effective, fast and deadly way - Salah of course is the icing on the cake, but he is benefitting massively from the way the players around him work together with him.
Second best system is Bournemouth, despite their recent setbacks, where Iraola has developed a very young team to play a high press with very fast transitions. Arteta still sticks with his one favoured system developed for a specific lineup, most of whom are now crocked. That isn't bad luck, or just fatigue, it's unimaginative, and invested in the Guardiole model which is now clearly creaking - see how much possession they had on Sunday and how that never bothered Pool. We are similar.
Instead of resorting to excuses, have a look at the way we play and how others are playing and changing. That is why Potter could come and have his players coached in a very specific way to deal with us and it worked. He is not a genius, but he is a good coach, as he was at Brighton with an ability to change things up. Arteta is being left behind if he doesn't freshen up his ideas, not to say his lopsided squad.
It was Califiori not Rice who got skinned by Wan-Bissaka. Never mind!
So City and Villa spend and don’t get the results justifies Arsenal not spending. Spending well doesn’t guarantee winning but it improves your chances. This is cry boy mentality, mocking our rivals to cover up Arteta’s mismanagement. Very childish mentality.