Wasted on the touchline? (Credit: Arsenal.com)
No need to ask you all how you are feeling today but for me the first adjective that come to mind would be frustrated.
Frustrated we dominated a good Liverpool side and lost.
Frustrated we carved our several genuinely good scoring opportunities but in similar fashion to the recent match with West Ham, failed to convert ANY of them.
Frustrated to be out of a competition we all have huge affection for and love to win.
Frustrated, looking at social media today, that we spent £65 million on a player we arguably did not need.
Frustrated at a coach, who whilst we all back and love for how far he had brought us, who seems reluctant to change the shape of our team, even when Plan A is failing.
In short, all kinds of frustrated and apologies if I have omitted your individual frustration but then I failed to mention my own….
Gabriel Martinelli – Discuss
As my partner, @invincliblog outlined so well in a recent piece here, the young Brazilian can be super brilliant, but equally super frustrating.
As my long-suffering pals in the lower echelons of Block 31 will tell you, Martinelli frustrates the hell out of me. For a player with so much God given ability, I cannot help but feel he, or perhaps the system is selling him short this campaign.
Now we can argue the semantics of our system but in the current 433 (ostensibly) Martinelli is our left winger, when his attributes are those of an inside forward. Think Salah, or even think Thierry Henry to be honest.
Like Henry, who invariably, whilst our CF, played from the left, Martinelli is right footed, has ice cold finishing ability and electric pace. As he is deployed at present, hugging the touchline, waiting for the switch of play, he is not using these attributes. Worse than that, as he is playing a left winger, he can easily beat his fullback but cannot cross well with his left foot, and even when cutting in on his right, which every defender know he wants to do, his crossing accuracy is erratic, if I am being kind.
So, we have a left winger, with insane pace and fabulous finishing ability, playing in a team whose centre forward and 2 8s are seldom in the box, who cannot cross, and if he could to who? Is that a fair assessment?
Last season, in the Premier League Martinelli in 36 appearances scored 15 goals, and assisted for 5, which probably confirms his finishing is better than his crossing. This season after 20 matches, he has a poor return of 2 and 2. So, why are the alarm bells not ringing somewhere in and around Arteta, and his staff?
To make it worse the team is not converting chances, our main striker, when fit is in the box less than either of our 8s, and the team’s most clinical finisher is hugging the left touchline, nowhere near the goal.
We have seen Martinelli tried as a sole striker, and it has not worked so far, and the player professes to prefer being on the left, but I am sure in his own mind that is a left striker, not a winger. Sucking play to our right, leaving Martinelli free and then switching it to the Brazilian in space is laudable but only if he is allowed to head goalwards. This tactic actually won Arteta the FA Cup in 2020. Manufacture a situation where your best finisher, back then Aubameyang, receives the ball and can attack the goal and do what he does best.
Give your best finisher the best openings
With Jesus out of form, and Nketiah not high on confidence and potentially available for sale, is it time to alter our set-up to get Gabi closer to the opposition goal and get our creatives to carve out openings for the player simply most likely to take them?
Either play Martinelli through the middle, but with license to roam, and play on the last shoulder, as Henry was allowed to do, or keep him on the left and change the structure at left back to give him less need to stay so wide.
There is simply NOBODY else in our squad who can do this:
Or this:
And we all know what he did this season against Sevilla. So, let’s get that player in position to do it more often.
Discuss in comments….
Passionate fifty-something Arsenal supporter who has been making the journey to N5 regularly since the early 1980s – although his first game was in 1976. Always passionate when talking about The Arsenal, Dave decided to send a guest blog to Gunnersphere in the summer of 2011 and has not stopped writing about the Gunners since.
He set up his own site – 1 Nil Down 2 One Up – in February 2012, which he moved on in 2016 to concentrate on freelance writing and building Gunners Town, which he launched with Paul in 2014.
The objective of GT was to be new and fresh and to give a platform for likeminded passionate Arsenal fans wishing to write about their team. Dave still of course, writes for the site himself and advises the ever-changing writing crew.
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