Arsenal 3 - 3 Anderlecht

This doesn't even need a proper write-up. We're an absolute joke, somehow throwing away a 3-0 lead against bloody Anderlecht - a bunch of kids from a shit league - because we can't defend a ball into the box. Ridiculous.

The standard of defending from the whole team is embarrassing. They completely switched off at 3-0, then shit themselves when Anderlecht got a goal back. Instead of keeping their nerve and keeping the ball to relieve the pressure, they kept giving it away, then at 3-2, they retreated further and further in a desperate attempt to see the game out.

It's not just in the second half. The defending is the first half was crap, too. The amount of times we got caught on the counter was ridiculous, yet do we do something about it? No, we just keep throwing men forward, and were lucky to not go 1-0 down in the first place.

Just when you think we've turned a corner we go and walk into a wall. It's a joke. This whole season so far has been a joke.

I look forward to playing Bayern or Madrid or Barcelona in the next round if we even make it that far.

Nothing to say really, buch of school boys, defend like crap, and shit their pant 1st sight of trouble. Flamini needs to gtfo asap, fack it, bring in Barry or Barron for all I care

Shoot flaming off into space in January and buy every defender available. Our bench options are an embarrassment

Flaming is worse than santos right now. The fact that we let shite players ruin our team so often is just a joke

At least promote someone from the youth setup! Isn't there anyone who's an upgrade over freakin' Monreal at CB or Flamini at CM/DM/whateverpositionhe'sintendedtoplay?

A Hayde is better than both, heck give RB to Bellerin and put Chambers as DM, cant be worse than the worst.

Play Bellerin RB and Chambers CB. Didn't we buy Chambers to cover at centre back?

Still can't comprehend our amazingly shit game management. Anderlecht get a goal back - a lucky goal since it was offside - and they grow into the game, so what does the manager do? Sit on the sidelines while his team continues to bomb forward and give the ball away.

Surely, at that point, you need to be telling your team to keep it tight and not go forward too much. Maybe take off a forward for another midfielder or defender to help shore things up. Why wait until the 82nd minute, when the score is 3-2, to make your final two changes?

Seriously, why is Wenger so shit with his subs?

And those subs didn't even change anything. Even at 3-2 with five minutes to go Arsenal are countering with four or five players. FFS guys just stay back at defend the lead. Why take the risk?

We never had this issue last year. Last year if we got a 2 or 3 goal lead we shut the game down, kept the ball, kept our shape and our composure. Where the hell has that gone this season? It can't just be down to injuries. Surely Flamini and Monreal have the experience to help shut a game down and not be complete liabilities. Surely Mertesacker can remember how to defend properly without Koscielny alongside him. Surely Ramsey can stop thinking he's the dog bollocks and start being a good player again.

I've said this before, but this season is going to be completely rubbish with the way things are. Alexis can't keep bailing us out; he can't play CM and LB and CB and RB all at once.

This kinda game makes it extremely hard to defend Wengers. One would think maybe Wengers know the team fate ( knocked out 1st 2 legs tie againt some power house) and didnt care much to manage the game.

Anderlecht got one back and then we just crumbled
We just crumbled...
WE JUST CRUMBLED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We didn't play well to be fair, We only went 3-0 up because of the mistakes Anderlecht made. we kept turning over possession which led to Anderlecht counter attacks. Ramsey, Ox, Alexis were all guilty of it tonight, lost count of the amount of time they kept giving the ball away in midfield. Arteta went off and the all thing collapsed like a deck of card. Flamini came on and he bought panic in midfield and it affected the team especially the defense. We were unable to control the game and take the sting out of it when they got the 1st goal.

Defensively we are all over the place at the moment even pub players like Van Den Borre can score twice against us and this was only against Anderlecht yet we were unable to see things out. What happens when we need to hold on against better opposition. Tonight we were meant to build on the results we got against Sunderland and Burnley but we failed to do that. We are still lacking cohesion, still struggling defensively and still conceding silly goals. We need to improve quickly, i worry about us against the better sides to be fair.

If there's one simple problem that explains everything, it's that the team lacks balance.

All season we've been trying to build a better attack but in the process we've neglected the defence. We've improved recently due to the change of shape and putting Alexis closer to Welbeck, and against Sunderland and Burnley that attack was balanced out by the Flamini/Arteta midfield. So when the ball was turned over we always had two players in midfield cover.

Compare that to the early season games where it was just one player covering, or tonight where it was meant to be two players covering but ended up being just one because Ramsey played with zero discipline. Right from the start he was playing ridiculously high up the pitch, trying to do everything himself and leaving Arteta to be the only player we had in midfield. You can't get away with having five attacking players and no cover at this level. That one player is just going to get out-numbered and over-run.

All that achieves is leaving an already depleted backline with more work to do. It's placing more strain on a make-shift centre back and a young full-back. We've talked about how Wilshere wrecks the balance of the team and whatnot, but Ramsey, this season, has been just as bad.

And the more unbalanced the shape gets, the harder it becomes to keep the ball. Arteta got on the ball tonight, looked up and saw five players ahead of him and nobody close to him to play a simple pass. An attacker gets the ball and has only one passing option because everyone's trying to play in the same area of the pitch. So of course you lose the ball more, and that just means more counter attacks and more defending.

Ramsey really does need to go back to basics. He needs to stop trying so hard to be the main man and focus on just being a part of the system. The rest will follow after that.

At 3-2 chambers and Gibbs were still bombing forward, we have an absolute clown as manager.

It's unreal how much better Arteta is at DM than Flamini. My god, we're so poor without him on the pitch, and he's not even a very good DM lol.

It all went wrong as soon as Arteta clutched his leg, he let the man on the ball go through and they scored their first and very offside goal. Then Flamini replaces him and our already suspect defending turns nervy and crap, as one would expect a makeshift backline to be when protected by a pint-sized pointer and shouter.

I didn't expect us to win the group so it's not a big blow in that regard, a win over Gala or BVB (both very tricky if we can't beat Anderlecht at home) should see us through but goddammit if we don't like making things ridiculously difficult for ourselves.

Wenger :

'' When they came back to 3-2 you want to be secure and we were maybe not cautious enough because we wanted to score a fourth ''

GoonerJay29 wrote:Play Bellerin RB and Chambers CB. Didn't we buy Chambers to cover at centre back?

Still can't comprehend our amazingly shit game management. Anderlecht get a goal back - a lucky goal since it was offside - and they grow into the game, so what does the manager do? Sit on the sidelines while his team continues to bomb forward and give the ball away.

Surely, at that point, you need to be telling your team to keep it tight and not go forward too much. Maybe take off a forward for another midfielder or defender to help shore things up. Why wait until the 82nd minute, when the score is 3-2, to make your final two changes?

Seriously, why is Wenger so shit with his subs?

And those subs didn't even change anything. Even at 3-2 with five minutes to go Arsenal are countering with four or five players. FFS guys just stay back at defend the lead. Why take the risk?

We never had this issue last year. Last year if we got a 2 or 3 goal lead we shut the game down, kept the ball, kept our shape and our composure. Where the hell has that gone this season? It can't just be down to injuries. Surely Flamini and Monreal have the experience to help shut a game down and not be complete liabilities. Surely Mertesacker can remember how to defend properly without Koscielny alongside him. Surely Ramsey can stop thinking he's the dog bollocks and start being a good player again.

I've said this before, but this season is going to be completely rubbish with the way things are. Alexis can't keep bailing us out; he can't play CM and LB and CB and RB all at once.

This! When will he realise this? i mean everybody can see the problems except him. He must be seeing something diffrent in training thats why he choose Monreal to play at CB and not chambers.

A horrific capitulation in that last part of the match. Cruel reminders of a few seasons ago when this was very common. It was harder to take, IMO, because the attack in this new 442-ish shape looked like it was starting to finally gel. Alexis of course was a boss, Ox looked good, Welbeck had a few chances, Santi was industrious even if the guy still hasn't found his lost shooting boots. Arteta had a good match before he was injured and then it went to hell with two lucky goals of Anderlecht's, and we caved in.

To be fair, I thought both penalties of the night were pretty soft. Had I been a ref in that situation I would have erred on the side of caution and not given either one.

It's a shit result, embarrassing and ludicrous, no doubt about it, and there's plenty of blame to go around. But it's not the end of the world. It's not even close to being the end of the CL campaign. The team can still recover in a big way.

My sense is that the best thing is to down a cold drink or two, shrug and say "that was crap," and hope the next match is a lot better. We should expect much better.

Or at least Chambers as CB and Nacho as LB

Bénin wrote:Or at least Chambers as CB and Nacho as LB

I feel bad for Monreal, he is not a CB and has actually been good for us. The player who has been embarrassing so watch is Mert, gets beating by almost every header.

We have a clueless manager who refused to buy a CB and DM and now we are paying for this circus show. We haven't seen anything yet...wait till a proper team with good attackers come to town. This season is done, no chance in hell in CL or EPL.
When will people learn Wenger isn’t the manager to take us forward. You have to feel sorry for Sanchez, gives everything every game and the rest dont give a shit.

Wenger blames fatigue and says there was a problem with the defense from the first minute. Instead of addressing the problems he just sat with his pet Steve Bould playing with his new zipper. The result should not surprise any of us, we have seen this far too many times.

2.5 more years of a circus show leading Arsenal.

Chumlum wrote:
It's a shit result, embarrassing and ludicrous, no doubt about it, and there's plenty of blame to go around. But it's not the end of the world. It's not even close to being the end of the CL campaign. The team can still recover in a big way.

My sense is that the best thing is to down a cold drink or two, shrug and say "that was crap," and hope the next match is a lot better. We should expect much better.

As long as it doesn't affect our morale then we're on course to finish second in the group, as we were likely to do anyway.

Couldn't be bothered saying anything last night. But this is what I genuinely think

We suffered from complacency. It's not an Arsenal special, as most teams goes through this. Madrid went 2-0 up against Sociedad and thought the game was done and lost 4-2. This happens with most clubs but the way it happened to us at home is the embarrassing part. I thought we were over the complacency issues years ago but maybe not.

I don't think it was a tactical issue with the way we lost the lead. Podolski who should have no fatigue issues at all letting his man walk past casually to cross which eventually ended up in net. Mertesacker playing like prime Joesph Yobo. Flamini is awful but we can't blame him for being past it.

Whatever though.

playing the same players again and again every 3 days and saying fatigue as the excuse when things go wrong..

Wilson37 wrote:playing the same players again and again every 3 days and saying fatigue as the excuse when things go wrong..  

We have to live with this for another few years, I just hope by then Wenger hasn't turn Sanchez in to Santos. The manager is simply not cutting it and hasn’t been for some time, always same excuse.
This was his answer after the game. To me Wenger is no longer a coach but only an football fan who watches Arsenal games from the best seats.

on whether he will strengthen defence in January…

Wenger:Honestly it’s not the worry tonight. We just came out of two clean sheets.

This man man has really lost it.

I am still trying to figure out the late substitutions that brought in Podolski and Rosicky.

Already lacking defensive coverage with a LB and RB that are too far forward. Up 3-2 with 10 minutes left and the only person in the world that would have not sent in an extra defender is Wenger. The last sub should have been Belerin at RB moving Chambers to a 3rd CB.

So, I've had 24 hours or so to sink it all in. I must admit, when I woke up this morning, I did think 'did that really happen?!' to myself.

3-0 up at home against Anderlecht and you don't win the game - wow.

Looking back at the highlights again, the first (offside) and second (infringement) goals shouldn't have stood, but the overall defensive collapse was unforgivable. It's not the first time, either (think Newcastle and Spurs and those 4-4's etc).

Where do we go from here? Well, quite simply, we have to respond quickly against Swansea on Sunday. Swansea always give us a hard game, home and away. This won't be easy. They have only won 1 of their last 7 games, but so had Anderlecht before last night.

We don't have much room to change our (woeful) defence. And losing Arteta is a massive blow. This is a major concern.

I'd like to think Bellerin will come in at RB with Chambers tucking inside to CB, but I can't see Wenger doing that.

Flamini (depressingly) is our only Arteta alternative so he'll start. I'd like to see:

Szczesny; Bellerin Mertesacker Chambers Gibbs; Flamini Wilshere; Chamberlain Alexis Cazorla; Welbeck

Ramsey's form has been dreadful, and Alexis has to stay in his no.10/striking position where he has been amazing. Maybe Podolski or Rosicky could replace Cazorla.

We have to win and get our 3rd League win in a row.