Defeat to Liverpool in Philly + Mikel Merino move nears

Before we dig into things, a massive thanks to Andrew Allen for covering yesterday’s blog after I, well, let’s not dress it up, I got my days mixed up. Next drink’s on me!

As for Arsenal and last night, it’s comforting to tell ourselves pre-season means nothing when we lose. If only the actual season had such an easy out after a disappointing result. Still, as much as pre-season is an exercise in team building and getting minutes in the legs, there will still be conversations around performances, results, individuals when these games are played. Sometimes, like after the win against Manchester United the other day, those conversations are positive. Sometimes not so much.

Waking up this morning after defeat to Liverpool overnight and things feel more like the latter.

As things often go as pre-season goes on and the real thing closes in, there was a more senior feel to the team against Liverpool compared to the two previous games. All three goals in the 2-1 loss came before the break, with Mohamed Salah and Fabio Carvalho scoring for Arne Slot’s side in Philadelphia before Kai Havertz pulled one back following some lovely work from Martin Odegaard. Arsenal were the team forcing the issue and pushing for the remainder of the game but there was no breakthrough and the US tour ended with a loss after the draw with Bournemouth and the 2-1 win against United.

After that win in LA, I was on duty here in Blogs’ absence and wrote about Gabriel Jesus and Gabriel Martinelli, touching on how big seasons from both — after disappointing to differing extents in 2023/24 — could be crucial for Arsenal looking ahead. Both players looked threatening again, picking up where they left off a few days ago but without offering the finishing touches. Punishing teams was a topic last season and Mikel Arteta will not want it to become one again:

I think we started the game fantastically well. I think after six or seven minutes we should be 2-0 up. Then we lost control, especially with two things that we didn’t do well enough and we allowed them to run in transition, which is a really dangerous thing to do against them. And in the second half we improved a lot and we deserved more.

The game would have been very different if the first chance that we had, we scored but that’s the goal. It makes the difference when you’re in those areas in those spaces in the box, putting the ball in the back of the net and we created a situation, we had another two or three big open situations to go better but we didn’t, so we have to improve.

Summers are dominated by transfer talk but the majority of the squad will always remain the same from one season to the next and, at least internally, there must be a focus on how to get more out of the players who were already in situ before the transfer window opened.

And I think it is, unfortunately, easy to fall into that trap over the summer, talking up players who could offer more. Some players are likely have better seasons than in 2023/24. But some aren’t. There will probably be those who stagnate and some who have, on a personal level, worse campaigns.

While it is just pre-season, it’s hard not to feel like the writing is on the wall, to some degree, for Oleksandr Zinchenko and Thomas Partey. Or, at least, it is hard not to worry that relying on either player significantly this season could become a problem for us.

Now, I want to caveat the Zinchenko stuff. He has never been a world class defender but he still made the team tick in 2022/23. Last season that stopped happening and I think his defensive deficiencies became more obvious because he wasn’t playing as well in possession. If we get the calm, probing, technically secure Zinchenko back (with a bit more maturity and less trying to force things, please) I think he can be incredibly valuable. But I do think his confidence has been knocked and that has made him looser on the ball as well as exaggerating the issues with defensive side of his game.

I think there’s a degree of confirmation bias when it comes to the criticism of his performances, which I don’t think have been as bad as made out, but there also isn’t no reason he makes people feel nervous.

Now last night he was up against a fresh Mohamed Salah, who had the pleasure of not playing international football over the summer. As a left-back, keeping up with Salah is the hardest job in football when going back towards your own goal and so it proved for the opener.

Decided to record for a minute and caught the @MoSalah goal! #LIVARS pic.twitter.com/3xeazRPm8M

— John Cappo (@JKCappo) August 1, 2024

I don’t know how much here is a lack of defensive instinct and I don’t think there’s a lack of application. To me, it’s more a bit of nouse — Ben White should run dark arts seminars for the rest of the squad — and, to use what sounds like an Arteta-ism, I don’t think Zinchenko has the physical capacity to compete in that scenario. He didn’t look alert on the second goal but nor did Ben White, the latter just has (much) more credit in the bank for you to overlook it.

Players can turn things around — this feels like a good time to mention Granit Xhaka will be visiting us in north London next week! — but time is running out for Zinchenko and, more than anything, I don’t think he has the full trust of the manager anymore. When it comes to regaining trust, Xhaka remained a regular starter. Zinchenko already lost his place before Jurrien Timber was fit again and Riccardo Calafiori was signed.

Neither player was involved last night, with Timber rested as his comeback is carefully managed and Calafiori literally just a couple of days into his pre-season, Arteta said it was too early to throw him in:

We had to manage him. He had a very busy 48 hours before he took his flight and joined us here, and then it was the jetlag, it’s a lot of things. He hasn’t trained with the team yet and we want to build him up slowly to get to know him first. We’ll have plenty of time to see him.

He’ll surely be making his Arsenal bow at the Emirates against Leverkusen next midweek.

Left-back, then, probably won’t end up being a huge issue with the depth there now. Midfield feels like a different thing, though. While Zinchenko lost his place in the final months of last season, Thomas Partey regained his, with Jorginho dropping to the bench after a strong spell in the side. With Partey back in the side, games became a little more open and hectic again, more 2022/23 than 2023/24. He should be back to full fitness by now but — and it is just pre-season — he still looks sluggish on the move and can be caught on the ball. His positioning was off for that Salah goal above, moving to box Liverpool in when the ball was never going to come back into the middle anyway, rather than dropping closer to the backline in case that ball over the top did come. The goal is much less likely to happen when you add Saliba, Calafiori, Rice to the side but who knows, maybe we have a point in the season where we don’t have those players and more cover is needed from midfield.

That position at the base of the Arsenal midfield either needs a player who basically always is perfectly positioned or can eat up ground like nobody’s business. For a while now, Partey hasn’t looked like either. You have to go back more than a year now for the last time he was really stringing together good performances and, at 31 and with his injury history, things only look to be going one way.

It seems the next reinforcement to the squad will come in midfield, with the latest reports in Spain saying we are close to an agreement with Real Sociedad for Euro 2024 winner Mikel Merino, who is said to have green lit the move already. But Merino is more of a ‘left eight’ than a holding midfielder. Rice excelled in that role last season and it has seemed like Arteta has come around to the idea that the Englishman is best used as a box-to-box midfielder rather than sweeping up in front of the defence and keeping things ticking on the ball. Things can change over time as players develop, and maybe Merino is seen as someone who can tone his game down and be a little more metronomic at the base of the midfield, but right now it looks like we’ll be heading into another season with Partey and Jorginho as the controller-type options at the base of the midfield. Time will tell.

Between Calafiori and Merino, there is a clear effort to improve the left-hand side of the team. We know what we can do down the right, with Jurrien Timber now ready to be thrown into the mix too to compete with Ben White behind Martin Odegaard and Bukayo Saka. But the left, there’s been no clear first choice at left-back with Zinchenko losing his place, Rice shuffling between playing as the deepest midfielder and playing as that left eight, and Gabriel Martinelli hasn’t quite made the position on the wing his own as most of us might have expected.

If we can get more out of the left this season we should be a lot more threatening all over the pitch, dragging defences around and threatening from all angles. Including set-pieces. Especially set-pieces, given Calafiori and Merino are also, like a lot of our recent signings, absolutely massive.

Right, I’ll leave it there for today. If you’re looking for any more Arsenal content, I can only recommend Tim’s look at goalkeeper Daphne van Domselaar after the women’s side completed a deal to the Dutch international from Aston Villa.

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