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Among Mikel Arteta’s great coaching triumphs during his spell at Arsenal is his ability to find solutions and problem solve. The absence of Martin Odegaard to injury posed a significant issue to Arteta and his team. For consecutive away matches at Spurs, Atalanta and Manchester City, the latter with ten men for close to an hour, pragmatism reigned. Arsenal gritted their teeth and relied on their off-ball shape and endeavour to take five points from those three games.
Last week, I posed the question as to how Arsenal would replace Odegaard during a block of three home games, where they would expect greater territory and more possession. In that article, I posited that Arsenal couldn’t repeat the pragmatic approach against Leicester, PSG and Southampton. With one of those games still to play, it is fair to say that I was probably off kilter.
Arsenal have largely played the same system with the same personnel, with Trossard and Havertz forming a sort of false 9 partnership where it is difficult to distinguish who is higher and who is lower at any one time. (And sometimes Havertz is stationed right out on the right wing). They have largely stuck with this sort of 4411 formation with Trossard and Havertz alternating, but with some adjustments around the edges.
The full-backs are turning up in ever stranger places as Arsenal look to build out in a box shape with the bottom left corner of that box, in particular, rotating regularly. But it is the partnership between Havertz and Trossard that propelled the Gunners to creating over four goals worth of XG against Leicester on Saturday and the pair combined to open the scoring against PSG.
Both are hybrid players, nobody really knows whether Havertz is a 9, a 10 or an 8. Nobody really knows whether Trossard is a centre-forward, a winger or a deeper lying forward. The truth, for both, is that they are all those things depending on the phase of play. The team is simultaneously strikerless and striker….full?
The…
Source link : https://arseblog.com/2024/10/layers/
Author : Tim Stillman
Publish date : 2024-10-03 12:00:23
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