TRon

It does look like that when you watch us struggle to keep possession put under even moderate pressure. But you would expect that if we had not spent big money on more or less all areas of the pitch. £40m full backs, £50m midfielders, a £60m striker. That's not going to win you the title, but you should be able to pass the ball around without much issue. Especially when you've got £100m worth of talent sitting on the bench.

I wonder if he's a really shit finisher in training? He didn't have a great scoring record at his previous club. Maybe we've just bought a player who's not suited for this level?

No it doesn't. All of those "maybes" and "what-ifs" mean nothing. We come up against Liverpool we can be leading against 10 men before half time and still find a way to lose. Write it off and think about the next round of the Carabao cup instead.

He's not getting dropped after today's performance like. If Longstaff comes back in it will be for Willock most likely, with Joelinton being shifted left to make room for him.

I'm not even seeing our patient build up play. I see us attempt it, get closed down and lose the ball pretty quickly. The players look like they are being told to press with high intensity but don't really have the confidence to hold the ball under pressure themselves.

Not sure that will be the case once this weekends fixtures have played out. Plus I imagine the second half of the season will be a lot harder than the first since we had a relatively easy start.

Yes. Just not sure there's that many elite managers who are available.

Plus we've spent enough on that squad where no one bar the striker should be irrplaceable. We've had a very strong bench in the last couple of games which shows there are options.

He needs to see the season out. It could still turn around on a few good games, he should have enough credit in the bank to have earned that.

That doesn't explain the inability of the team in general to string a few passes together.

If that's true, the answer is to sell them and start again. Although underperforming players inevitably drop in value so not ideal to sell in those circumstances, but not really sure what choice we have. They are on too much wedge now to be performing consistently poorly.

And we still don't know if they would have done any of those things if the best they thought they could achieve was 6th in the table.

Might have been one of those times when an unpopular forced sale would have turned out to be a good thing. He's showing very little craft this season, and the non-stop running seems to have disappeared as well.

You would think that the way some of the heads seem to be down, but I don't think so. Maybe they don't all buy into the tactics though.

Not being able to get Tonali into a team where players struggle to pass to their team mates is a bit of an indictment.

Your second sentence kind of neutralises the first.

That's a decent take. It's more difficult because compared to what we were used to, Howe has been such a breath of fresh air. He's intelligent, and as you say, the perfect ambassador for our club. It's difficult to imagine someone who would put more heart and soul into it, and you really can't undervalue that. But he does seem to know only one way to set a team out, and if that doesn't work, he's lost. Losing an FA cup final to a rank Man U side was maybe more telling than some of us thought at the time. He's a good manager, just not sure he's got the tools to compete with the best.

Can actually do a job as a no 6. This is mind blowing stuff.

At Arsenal.

I think the damning part for me is even if we had won I would have been worried. We looked awful...again. We've had one spell of three games where we looked like a team, the rest of the season has been us groping to put one foot in front of the other. We've largely been shit, can't really see how to describe it as anything other.

Our passing is so disjointed it's hard to work out what we do on the training pitch. Might be a confidence thing but I don't see how. We were 6th a couple of games ago.

He's normally pretty good at injury time subs tbf. I think he just probably got too caught up with his nerves and lost sight of the bigger picture.

Injury time late goal pretty much summed up our night tbh. We looked shit scared for the whole 90 mins. Shit scared of a shit team at that.

Not after dropping 3 points at home against Wet Spam.

Nawww...it's because Isak and Gordon keep missing chances innit?