- Aug 25, 2010
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It’s highly unlikely we’d be able and we shouldn’t still be pressing from the front with our fb’s etc as we would earlier phases in the game. Dropping deeper and being pragmatic is fine, and Alli and Eriksen has both dropped into midfield to do this, but, if we were going to continue to play a high line, we still needed to press the ball in those deeper areas, not allow Arsenal’s creative players time and space to pick passes, that’s the mistake they made for our goal, and the mistake that allowed Iwobi to play a pass from the halfway line all the way through to our box.
And it’s not just about the press, it’s about being prepared to offer up and get on the ball, because for me, that’s a much braver but more intelligent way of protecting it.
And it’s not just about seeing out a game, we saw the same deficiencies in the first half at Liverpool last week, with the pair of them unable to cope/play when the pressure was on us, especially Dier.
Dier was largely decent, Dembele had a very good spell in that game, but I’m not buying into the whole “they were magnificent” throughout thing either, is all.
Overall, over three tough league games, how would you rate how they did. Barring that mistake against Liverpool, surely you would concede they've done extremely well?
That's 270 minutes against the better teams in the league and if you total up the dominance combined, 200 minutes plus at least I'd say, that's extremely impressive, and it certainly wasn't achieved in spite of these two, they were at the core of it.