Was genuinely impressed with Ludogorets to be honest. Had never seen them play before today. They came and tried to play football and created some great chances. They remind me of how Shaktar was with their vast number of Brazilian etc players. Kudos to them for having a go and not sitting back but we often come out on top when teams try to play football against us.
Was at the match last night - thought Wanderson (#88) for Ludogorets looked class. Him and Cafu will be a handful again in the return.
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Under Wenger: definitely.
A good manager, though, couldāve certainly put out a team of Ox-Lucas-Walcott Cazorla-ElNeny-Xhaka and won as easily, and had a better control of the match than we did at that.
In the end we were rather lucky it was as easy as it was, Walcottās goal came against the run of play when Ludgorets surely shouldāve been equal, and then we scored fortuitously in the first minute of the 2nd half to put the game away and make things easy. That said itās true the 2nd half performance in general was much better than the shambolic first half one, but itās frustrating it still comes to this, shambolic first half performances before Wenger finally puts it right, even when we are so heavily out-talenting the opposition. As I said last night, we properly Real Madridāed them last night, and tbh Zidaneās (rightly criticised) set up last night in similar circumstances against Legia was actually more coherent than ours, we Real Madridāed them purely through much better individual quality, which is what Real Madrid as a verb means of course.
Wenger is a good manager though. What makes you think a different manager could have put out a weak side and still won comfortably?
I think you are underestimating that Ludogorets side tbh.
http://www.espnfc.co.uk/lineups?gameId=466244
http://www.espnfc.co.uk/lineups?gameId=466220
Thereās an example of a manager whoās chopping and changing a lot more and getting results in harder circumstances in Europe.
Having watched Madrid-Legia on Tuesday Ludogorets and Legia were quite similar, both were rather brave and tried to play out, the difference was Madrid had a somewhat coherent approach and made it very hard for them to play out, whereas we had a pretty incoherent approach and so relied on individual quality and a bit of luck to win easily.
Will we win as Dortmund did at Legia, at Ludogorets, if we rotate?
Good for Dortmund but who cares? All managers regardless of quality fall foul to over rotating their side. It worked for Dortmund fine here but simply your less likely to win if you play a side that is worse then your best.
Weāve won 6-0 and made 4changes.
And whose to say that team wouldnāt have comfortably won anyways.
Lmao your using a hypothetical situation which hasnāt happened as a reason to dig at Wenger.
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AC has completely 180 degree flipped on his views of Wenger in the last year. From being positively pro Wenger, to negatively against Wenger. Itās like heās an all new @Persona 
Of course. But are you purposefully missing my point here? The question is if you can coax acceptable performances, through ātacticsāāor through team building by having/developing better reserve options than we doāunder less than ideal availability situations. Wenger wasnāt even able to coax a coherent performance out of a nearly full strength side last night, so we know the likely answer to this.
Thereās nothing hypothetical about it, and Iām not out to have a dig at Wenger, thereās no one who gets more romantic about him than me, when things are going well I start to convince myself heās up to it, Iāve been doing this recently in fact, unfortunately last night was a bad wake up call/reminder of the reality that was clear last season.
Your god Pep just tried to sit Aguero against Barca and got smashed worse than Wenger ever has against them. So apparently according to your logic there must be something terribly wrong with the management or team building at City right? Shut the fuck up AC. Stupid ass overanalyzing of the situation. A professional European football club, champions in their country, almost scored on us a couple times, and we smashed them 6 nil. Fuck sake Sigmund Freud of football over here.
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No team in the league look good with rotations. Liverpool lost 100% of their balance by simply removing lallana from it. Have you seen Spurs rest a couple players in the EL? City just got spanked away at Barca resting Aguero for some reason and Chelsea and United are so shit you canāt even consider rotating their squads due to lack of depth.
Generally speaking we donāt look good with our first 11. But we do something right to be pretty consistent in grinding out results.
Iām always surprised on here that there is something to talk about lol. Is Wenger going to play some masterful system that is repeatable? No we know what to expect. If we keep our core fit for the entire season are we still capable to winning the league however? Yes. Itās basically as simple as that in my eyes.
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We should have rotated a bit.
But I am pretty sure we would have won even with rotation.
Wenger perhaps wants to give Sanchez & co more games with this new system.
We tend to forget that this new combination is only few games old and tons of work still needs to go into it to make it work long term.
How is that a good example of rotation? I count eight of the same starting players and if Iām not mistaken Guerreiro/Castro are injured. The core of the team for Dortmund in the CL has been pretty much the seem for every CL game.
Agree with most of your sentiment here. However its more than keeping the key players for me.
Id say its more the team and Wenger dealing with the expectation thats our challenge for the title.
I think that plays a part but imo even if we solved the physiological aspect that wonāt help us if we go through a key period missing some of our core players. And the answer to solving the physiological aspect could also be to simply having your best players play the majority of games and Wenger not playing shit teams which donāt make sense (like OT away last year).
There is no middle ground. AC works on extreme end of the spectrum.
Worship Wenger before and now dislikes everything about Wenger.
Who says we had less possession?
All the outlets Iāve looked at today had it at around 55% Arsenal.
I think if LudoRaz score through Wanderson to make it 1-1 itās a difficult game all of a sudden, donāt forget they took the lead against PSG. I think theyāll be a tricky enough proposition on their own patch.
Their defence was shit though, a player far inferior to Santi CARZOLA couldāve cut through them like a ribbon last night.
I think their goaltender was a bit suspect for Walcottās goal, the pick of the bunch for me was Ozilās first one, sumptuous take and finish.
Yes. Donāt get me wrong weāre on a great run. But thereās still the question out there if we figured out our set-up and Liverpool and PSG were early season flukes (which they were not if you look at the manner we had been dismantled in past seasons). We could very well regress to the mean still, which is 4th for us.
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