Raya 5 - Looked more like the Raya from a year ago


White 5 - Looked shaky against pace


Saliba 4 - Gave PGMOL an excuse to fuck us over


Gabriel 6 - Did his best after the sending off


Calafiori 6 - Didn’t offer enough going forward


Partey 6 - I don’t get why he’s not played further forward as he’s a better passer of the ball than Rice but worked hard


Merino 5 - Demonstrated the difference between English and Spanish football, in the former you’re not going to get time to dwell on the ball


Rice 5 - Frankly has been poor all season


Sterling 5 - Isn’t good enough to be starting for a side going for the title, not even as a squad option


Havertz 6 - Largely isolated


Trossard 4 - Fucking mong



Subs


Kiwior 4 - Can see why we were looking to sell in the summer


Martinelli 5 - Sums up our problem, we need clinical attacking players


Jesus + Nwaneri - N/A



I just had a bad feeling about this fixture from the outset because of the injuries we had going into the game, which meant that we’d be reliant on sub par players in attack. Trossard lacks the explosive pace of Martinelli and despite his strops he’s far better as an impact substitute. Sterling is finished at this level….that he is the understudy for Saka leaves me very concerned if the latter is out for any time.

In principle I can get the argument that when we go down to ten men we should go for it, but because we don’t have clinical players we have to push up more and in doing so leave ourselves more exposed. Nothing would have guaranteed a defeat this evening more than going gung ho. We have to accept that referees are going to be dicks to us and not give them an opportunity.

But the fact is if we had stayed at 11 men, would we have gone on and won. Maybe…but we are struggling away from home creating chances and this was the case even before Odegaard was injured. The 2-0 win at Villa belied the fact that we were terrible and deserved to lose then. Arteta has become so monomaniacally obsessed with being defensively impregnable that we have sacrificed a proper attacking philosophy.

It’s fine to dig in and be defensive away at places like City, but we were having to defend far too much for my liking against Bournemouth for the first half hour because our midfield just couldn’t cope with the closing down they were doing.