It’s time to look at Mikel Arteta and an Arsenal team struggling right now, while there are mails on Eddie Howe, Man Utd and cheating.
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Analysing the upgraded Arsenal
So, if I’ve got this right:
Goalkeeper: Spent £40m on a job-share keeper that unsettled everyone.
Left back: Uses a lightweight midfielder who can’t defend, playing as an inverted full-back which exposes him on every transition.
Centre backs: Look pretty good.
Right back: £50m centre back who, in fairness, plays like a £50m centre back playing as a full back.
CDM: possibly unnecessary £100m upgrade for a non-problematic CDM.
No.8: £65m purchase of a player that 5 successive Chelsea managers failed to make work as a No.8.
No.10: Odegaard.
Left wing: May turn out ok if he doesn’t get sucked into the xG Bermuda Triangle around him. Might need a rest at some point.
CF: An xG/big chance wizard let go by Man City for £50m…who then purchased a Norwegian goal bot for the same £50m.
Right wing: The wonderful but soon to be burnt out Saka.
That Arteta…he’s a genius. The title is surely in the bag.
Matthew (ITFC)
READ: Arteta sacked, Salah sold, Ten Hag stays at Man Utd and other football predictions for 2024
No rational fan wants Eddie Howe sacked
It’s unclear how tongue in cheek Andile’s email was, but it’s worth putting some context around Newcastle’s struggles in recent months.
For me, it’s a few things that have seriously compounded, meaning performances have fallen off a cliff.
1. The number of games. Newcastle have already played 8 more competitive games than Spurs (eg) this season due to Europe and Carabao. But they haven’t got a squad big enough for it, yet. You can say they should have planned for this, but thanks to our friend FFP, Newcastle have to grow gradually and so building a squad from one playing in Europe in one summer was impossible. This has been made worse by…
2. The sheer number of injuries. Some of these have been freak (dislocated shoulders, broken backs and feet + Tonali’s ban) and others have come from players being flogged through the combination of some injuries and the number of games we’ve had. Players are having to play unfit or just back from injury and so the risk of more muscle injuries is very high. Almost every player has been injured at some point in the past 2 months. Meaning…
3. The team has to fit to who’s fit. Every week we have 1-2 players missing again. As a result, we can’t build any semblance of structure and training plans. Players keep randomly being injured (Wilson, Willock, Longstaff have all just not been there suddenly). This was the opposite when we only had 11 fit (real) players and couldn’t make subs without the standard dropping off a cliff. We had 3 GKs and youth players on a bench with Matt Ritchie for one game.
4. The style of play has had to evolve accordingly. Newcastle were so good last season and early this due to the impressive pressing and work rate, but those have been impossible with so many injuries. As a result they’re having to work out how to play each game given who’s available and how fit they are. We’ve seen this in some games where performances have gone off a cliff after an hour or so, or we’ve had to deep block and hope given lack of fitness/players.
All of these issues have essentially compounded each other, culminating in this mess we’re seeing now. Poor Lewis Miley is having to play nearly every game at 17, and whilst he’s clearly a talent, he’s a big drop off physically from others in the squad and we’ve struggled in midfield as a result.
How much of this is Howe’s fault? None of it. It’s bad luck on bad luck (our cup draws this year have meant no chance to rotate either!) that’s dealt him an impossible hand. We were a Trippier howler from a League Cup Semi and a refereeing howler from being in the Champions League knockouts, even with this injury crisis.
That said, we will probably lose our next two league games (City at home, Villa away) and that could well ramp up the pressure. But you can’t judge Howe until we have a functioning subs bench, some fresher players and an ability to plan for games.
But, if we lose to Sunderland on Saturday, no doubt those calls from some areas of the press will get louder. But no rational Newcastle fan wants Eddie out – he’s done wonders and deserves a chance to pick it back up when we have a squad again
James (NUFC)
Triggered by Man Utd contract extensions
What’s the deal with Manchester United and their 12-month contract extensions? It’s seems that every few weeks there’s a story about them “triggering” a one-year extension to yet another player who wouldn’t get in any of their rivals’ first teams.
Maybe lots of clubs do this, and it’s only newsworthy when it’s Man Utd, but this seems to be a cornerstone of their recruitment policy. Sign somebody for four years, pay him a fortune while not being particularly great, then “trigger” an extension clause. It’s bizarre.
Yesterday they “triggered” anther year for the mediocre Aaron Wan Bissaka. Last week it was the equally ordinary Victor Lindelof. In the past they’ve done the same thing for mid-range players like Diogo Dalot, Andreas Pereira and Hannibal Mejbri, as well as more valuable ones like Luke Shaw and Marcus Rashford. Didn’t they do it for the permanently injured Paul Pogba and Phil Jones too? Raphael Varane must be annoyed that he’s one of the few to be passed over.
I understand Chelsea’s policy of signing players to 8-year deals to evade FFP, but can any football finance experts explain the purpose of this long-standing Man Utd strategy? And does it have any connection with the way it seems that the only way to leave the club is on a free transfer or heavily subsidised loan?
Martin, BRFC
We’re being denied a lot of good footballers
I’m not alone in realising that this season, seemingly more so than any I can remember, clubs are missing players through injuries – often muscular, and suspensions, sometimes from stupidity (Romero, Bissouma I’m looking at you) but also due to yellow cards being brandished at an alarming rate for offences which don’t really warrant it, but the threshold for suspension remains five yellow cards.
The general consensus among friends is that VAR stoppages are creating more muscular injuries (potentially, although surely players can jog, sprint, stretch during these pauses as opposed to stand around).
My club, Spurs, have been dealt repeated injury blows with two further injuries occurring this weekend…and suspensions (please see above) but as too have Brighton, Brentford, Sheffield United, Newcastle – and that is just the clubs who I have noticed with lengthy injury lists.
Years ago I read an article saying that the increased athleticism of football players, or just athletes in general, increases the probability of injury, which seems like an oxymoron, but makes sense. Are clubs overtraining the players? Are the frequent, and lengthy pauses in every single match – aside from annoying in the extreme, creating more opportunities for hamstrings to go pop? If these injuries to pauses do correlate, is this reason enough to create a maximum of sixty seconds for VAR decisions?
Should the threshold for yellow card suspensions be pushed to six cards? If a second red card is due to two yellows, is a four game really necessary?
Seems like there are vast amounts of players supporters are being deprived of, let alone clubs themselves.
Dan Mallerman
Could the European Super League be actually super?
I know that there was a little chatter about this a few weeks back with some ruling or other that made the prospect of the ESL legally viable, and the impression I got was that everyone is still really cynical about it.
The thing is though – is it possible that what is being proposed could be an improvement?
Briefly, in the men’s game, 64 teams will play across three leagues and eight divisions. Two divisions of eight teams in the top two leagues, four in the bottom league, with fourteen games per league, over the course of a season, all midweek games. The top eight in each league will then play off in a knockout format over two legs.
At the end of it, teams will be promoted and relegated, and new teams will come into the bottom divisions, with twenty of the 32 places decided by their domestic performance. The leagues all have names that people will take the piss out of (Star, Gold and Blue) but the names aren’t really that important.
The games will be free to view, and it looks as though they will be transmitted via an online platform.
It’s not perfect, of course. Bigger teams – and how the Star League will be selected isn’t clear – will have a greater chance of remaining high up in the competition even if their domestic form is poor (although it would be interesting to see how a club like Man United would fit in right now), and they will be cosseted to some degree. But they are cosseted and protected now with the current Champion’s League format that is clearly weighted in the favour of the dominant European footballing nations. It has been pointed out that the league Champions of “lesser” nations would not be at the top table here, but they are only nominally so under the current Champion’s League format. Most get knocked out in the group stage, and it is really rare these days for any of these teams to make it past the last 16.
With this new format, the “seeding” would be better. It should make for more competitive games across the board, with less of the dead rubbers that we are used to in the last rounds of the group stage. It would allow for teams from “lesser” nations to actually win things, albeit at further down the pecking order.
The devil is the detail, of course, and we would only find out if this detail would confirm a lot of the suspicions here if the ESL were to become a reality. But I suppose they could show their hand before then, and let everyone know how the leagues would be formed theoretically for the season 24-25, explaining their criteria and thinking.
And…it’s free to punters. This surely has to be a good thing.
I am sceptical, of course, but do I think UEFA have the fans and football at the heart of their thinking? No, of course I don’t, because I am not a f**king idiot.
I just think that there is a lot about this proposed format that looks better than what we have. I know people are worried about the top becoming a closed shop, but it wouldn’t be that really. Shit teams would get found out, but it might take a year or two for this to happen. I think that shaking up the status quo, the anti-competition monopoly that UEFA has must to be a good thing. Even if the ESL never comes to fruition, it could put pressure on UEFA to be better. This has to be a good thing.
I look forward to being ripped a new one by the esteemed daily commenters below.
Matthew (change is invariably good, and those that run football nationally, continentally and globally don’t care about the game or the fans)
Foul play pays
TX Bill, EFC’s mail asking about which other sports tacitly encourage cheating was a interesting one.
I too am a baseball fan (Detroit Tigers, so much less fun over the last few years than being an Astros fan). He pointed out that they have been punished and demonised as a result of the sign stealing scandal a few years back. But, not too long ago, there was another cheating scandal in Major League Baseball – a period of such prominent performance enhancing drug use that the 90s & early 2000s are now known as the ‘steroid era’ in baseball.
A scandal so egregious that it resulted in congressional hearings, this took place when the rising popularity of the NBA & NFL seemed to be leaving MLB in the dust. It’s widely suspected that the MLB knew that something was going on (Barry Bonds suddenly going from hitting 30-50 home runs a season to 73 is not normal!), but things like Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire battling it out to see who could break the record for home runs in a season was drawing in huge crowds at a time when attendances had been dwindling.
The point being – cheating was so obviously happening, but was resulting in increased attention to the sport and therefore increased revenue, so the sport effectively ignored it/brushed it under the carpet for the cash. In contrast, the sign stealing could be cracked down on because it wasn’t visibly adding to the attention & revenue of the sport.
The Jota penalty at the weekend (despite being only a slightly more egregious version of something that happens countless times a season) is being talked about endlessly, driving clicks and views, bringing in more advertising revenue. Football, like baseball and, I suspect, any other professional sport, will generally, at the very least, look the other way when it comes to foul play if it is clearly bringing greater attention and revenue to their game.
In short, it’s all about the $/£.
Jim, LFC
…So one poster asked why diving still happens?
It isn’t because the FA doesn’t punish it. The reason diving happens is because when players stay on their feet they are far less likely to get a decision even when it’s very clear.
Using jota as an example, imagine he does get clipped as he runs past (like Dubravka outright stated as fact) and instead of going down he stays up but is off balance and fires a shot wide. The referee instead of seeing a player who was unfairly impeded will see a player who was not impeded because he was still able to shoot.
As annoying as it is to see a player go down they’re doing that because the opposite yields no result. That applies to when there is a foul and isn’t a foul.
Secondly foreign players usually get punished for diving with both referees and pundits outright labelling it as cheating and diving. Yet if you’re an England players it’s called ‘dark arts’ and people like Alan shearer say ‘if there’s contact he’s got a right to go down’ England players dive and cheat all the time as well but the media (and refs) largely make excuses and allowances for it because it’s an England player.
Players like Salah and Ronaldo and Pires get labelled diver while Harry Kane, Gerrard, Owen, Rooney , Shearer have all dived just as much yet don’t get that tag.
Finally I think the reason refs and FA don’t punish it as much as they should is because they don’t have the structure to do it. The yellow and red card system is too punitive for certain things in which you can’t be 100% sure it was intentional or not. Things like handballs or borderline tackles or diving require interpretation which will be different from different people. I think a sin bin style system would give refs a greater flexibility and nuance and likely see things like diving punished more regularly.
Lee
…I do hope that TX Bill’s email suggesting there is only cheating in football is the most ridiculous thing that I will read in 2024. Cheating is endemic in all human endeavour and is specific to the requirements of the endeavour it is why we have laws because humans can’t be trusted. Examples of the top of my head in other sports:
Cricket – ball tampering, not walking, and claiming iffy wickets.
Cycling – drugs and using cavalcade to gain an advantage
Amerian HandEgg – some form of holding I guess and drug taking
Basketball – has free throws (penalties) so I guess there has been some form of “buying a free throw” that a fan can direct me ot without any effort.
Golf – scorecards have incorrectly filled in since the first match,
Conservative MPs – just existing really
There is cheating everywhere and there are laws to stop it but sometimes it is missed or wrongly applied.
Paul “not optimistic” Rhodes
Midfield is the real cheating problem
I agree with Texas Bill’s rant on cheating. But I do think that a keeper clipping a player or even flying into a player without touching them that then causes them to break their stride before taking a shot is a foul and therefore a penalty. But as refs and VARs won’t reliably give it and definitely wont give it if they get a shot away and then miss so then the player needs to perform what could politely be called a “post-contact exaggerated collapse”. Perhaps, this is a space where a VAR challenge system could be useful.
Also, football seems to be the only sport where being weaker than your opponent gets rewarded. In particular when a brick shit house centre back has the ball towards his own goal and the striker ever so slightly breathes on the back of his neck causing said defender to flop to the ground.
But the real cheating space now is in midfield. Since the rule change that the ball doesn’t have to leave the penalty area at a goal kick, teams are playing short kicks to lure in a high press and passing quickly through midfield. To “defend” this, teams are committing tactical fouls.
Refs should be booking the player every time, but you have refs who let the game go or don’t want to be accused of ruining the game by sending someone off, or whatever was going through the refs head when he let Joelinton off and booked Salah instead. This means that when a player gets away with it they essentially get a stop an attack free card from the ref.
The only way that this deliberate and tactical breaking of the rules can be changed is through the risk reward equation changing through more yellow cards and second yellows such as Ayew at Palace. If a ref keeps his cards in his pocket until the last 15 then the game is effectively over as it will be cynical foul after cynical foul.
Arsenal got 5 yellow cards against Liverpool which to my hazy recollection were mostly cynical through the midfield and I’m pretty sure that Endo’s yellow would have been for the same. That’s a lot of attacks to remove from a game of football that only had 5 shots on target for not sporting reasons. But no club is innocent in this.
Other than Man City of course because they are innocent of all charges.
Alex, South London
The Kill Bill penalty
A few minutes into the first half of Villa v Burnley the other night, a Burnley defender was shepherding the ball out by the touchline, a Villa player placed a hand on his shoulder/back and the defender went down “snipered”. Stuart Atwell duly awarded a foul. I shook my head in despair, and pondered at what point had Football become a non-contact sport.
Later there was a shoulder to shoulder challenge for a 50:50 ball, one player went down, one stayed up. Foul awarded to the player who was outmuscled. Naturally. Again I shook my head but there was zero surprise.
There seemed to be zero thought given to whether the “victim” in each case had actually been impeded or genuinely subjected to unfair or overly-robust physical attention. It was very much “there was contact, he’s entitled to go down”. I dare say Blades fans would say that criterion was also applied to the Villa penalty that won the game.
In such cases a ref’s response comes across as nothing less than Pavlovian – an auto-programmed reaction to a player going to ground. But then there are multiple counter examples where a series of “robust” physical challenges are let go. As if the ref has temporarily awakened from the Pavlovian spell and remembered that football is a contact sport after all and the game is kept flowing.
Ultimately the issue once again comes down to consistency, or lack thereof, in the way PGMOL apply the laws of the game. What kind of contact equates to foul play? Is it all contact? Is it just contact that genuinely impedes the opponent from playing the ball or participating in the game? It’s impossible for us to tell with any certainty it seems, because the officials don’t seem to know themselves. It’s all over the place, even from the same ref in the same game.
The “there was contact” concept seems to have been taken to slightly ridiculous extremes with the Jota penalty. Clearly Jota was caught by the keeper’s elbow but, from what I saw, that slight contact did not seem to affect his stride or momentum. It looked like he took a second to realise he’d been touched and weigh up whether he may have slightly overhit the ball to reduce the chances of him scoring and to decide to “take” the foul instead.
The result was like watching David Carradine’s five point palm exploding heart death in Kill Bill volume II, where he takes a few deliberate strides before dropping dead. I actually laughed out loud when I saw it, only to be stopped in my tracks by the ref actually awarding the pen. Yikes. It’s all becoming a bit WWE for my tastes.
Kevin Villa (nobody knows any more)
Other jobs for the (Golden) boys
Will spoke about the Golden Generation in the Mailbox and his frustration with the trend of big names getting high-profile jobs is understandable. Carrick’s relative success offers a glimmer of hope, but his scepticism regarding the overall suitability of the ‘Golden Generation’ as managers or pundits is fair in some points.
Having a look back at England’s Golden Generation and the members who were not mentioned we have Ashley Cole who has gone on to become a decent coach and wherever he does go he does get praised for his contributions, David Beckham is building the Inter Miami franchise over in the MLS, Nicky Butt is on the board at Salford, Michael Owen who is successfully throwing apple cores into his living room bin and David Seaman has a podcast.
If i take a moment to get serious. Which remaining members of the Golden Generation do fellow Mailboxers think would make the most successful managers? Or what other jobs do you think they would do well at?
Those members could include Sol Campbell, Paul Scholes, John Terry, Glen Johnson, Jermain Defoe etc since the Golden Generation was arguably the 2000s but i am curious to see what people come up with.
The Admin @ At The Bridge Pod
