Predictable Arsenal lose midfield battle

“Recent Arsenal teams are damned by comparisons with their predecessors. Arguably Arsene Wenger’s greatest side were endearingly revolutionary in their movement. As Villa halted the modern-day outfit, perhaps they were too predictable in their shape. Wenger’s finest front four contained Thierry Henry, a striker who drifted to the left wing; Dennis Bergkamp, the No. 10 who would wander deeper into midfield; and ostensible wide men in Robert Pires and Freddie Ljungberg who avoided the touchline to veer infield. As neither was a winger, they can’t be called inverted wingers, but Pires was a right-footed left-sided player who headed for the penalty box. Even last season, Robin van Persie called himself a nine-and-a-half; neither a No. 9 nor a No. 10, but a hybrid, who could lead the line and drop off.” ESPN

Advertisement

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.