Quote Originally Posted by WES View Post
Midfield passing was shocking, Partey, Sami and Odegaard.

At one point Partey had the ball in the middle with Pepe in acres of space on the right with one man to beat, Boomerang in a good position at the opposite side. I was screaming for him to ping it to him and instead we got a lazy looping ball that meant the chance went begging as the defenders recovered. That was a common theme, we just didn't pass the ball well enough in midfield. Would also liked us to have used Tierney more, that left sided obsession seems to have disappeared.

Not too sure how we blame Arteta for the fact that the midfield players had on off night on the ball.
I wonder if Tierney's form is partly due to Xhaka not being in the team to find him with those long direct passes with good timing. Usually KT can just take the ball in his stride and be pretty much past his defender, whilst now he has to work harder to get past.

Also, I think the strategy is to often overburden Partey but we fail to take advantage of the superiority (in numbers) that should give us elsewhere on the pitch. We paid extra for Ramsdale & White because they have fantastic feet for longballs, but we didnt manage to find our forwards in the space Palace must've given up for committing to their press and outnumbering Partey.

Ramsdale looked frustrated at our forwards yesterday when we struggled to play out, but I couldnt see on the telly for much of the game whether they moved well or not. I'm guessing Auba & Pepe didnt, atleast during some spells of the game.

I reckon we lack Laca at CF or Odegaard at 10 in our buildup. I think with one of those recieving the ball a bit further up in the middle of the park our game starts to look much better and more difficult to predict.