The offseason needs:"Our commitment to being Arsenal is absolutely unrivaled. Take Arsenal away for however long you like, bury it deep beneath the earth for eons in a titanium capsule from which no part of our essence can be seen, heard or felt, and we can just dig it up and go from zero to full-on, turbo-charged, hyper-drive, light-speed Arsenal in the blink of an eye.
"What a club."
-Arseblog today
Well, the return featured Arsenal playing some of their latest, greatest hits:
As Arteta said afterwards, "I want to delete the game from the hard drive." City is obviously at a different level from Arsenal, but the dominance was staggering.
- Controversy over Ozil not making the match day squad for "tactical reasons"
- Untimely injuries (Xhaka and Mari)
- Luiz deserving man-of-the-match for creating two goals for City and then having a bizarre press conference afterwards
- Leno getting barraged with shots, and fortunately, looking pretty good
I am struggling to look for a few positives (besides Leno), maybe a few early moments where Nketiah looked a little dangerous...? Bellerin and Tierney playing a full match was good to see. Not much else.
- City shots: 20, City shots on target: 12
- Arsenal shots: 3, Arsenal shots on target: 0
The fact that Arteta started Nketiah, Willock, and Saka (at wing) over Lacazette, Ozil, and Pepe seems to indicate he's going to give the younger plays a shot to close out the season, so maybe he'll at least get a better idea of what he has with them.
- Two or three players on defense - get rid of Mustafi and Luiz yesterday.
- Two mids that can pass... if you're not going to play Ozil you need another creative mid. It makes no sense to play three up top if you have nobody to pass them the ball.
- The three subs in the second half.. I can't think of a single positive contribution that any of them made.. Luiz in the first half was obviously the worst.
- Aubameyang is completely wasted on this team currently. He's getting zero service and I feel like he needs to be in the middle and up front so that other players are not constantly in his space.