Two weeks in: cause for optimism

Francis Coquelin and Arsenal’s system
Officially, Arsenal play 4-2-3-1. More realistically, it’s closer to a diamonded 4-3-3, with a midfield three of Francis Coquelin with Aaron Ramsey and Santi Cazorla ahead (with Cazorla drifting in so much, he can only nominally be considered a left-sided player, even when deployed there), and Mesut Ozil at the tip of that diamond.

The set-up puts a lot of pressure on all three of them, but primarily Coquelin. I’ve been one of his biggest critics, but here’s a player where one of his primary responsibilities is not to give the ball away and yet Arsenal don’t tend to play wingers (a by-product of most off the squad wanting to play centrally) meaning he has no real wide option to distribute to, except full backs he is also presumably supposed to cover for, leading to the unsurprising eventuality where either he goes backwards, or one of the ostensibly more attacking players has to drop back to receive the ball.

What's expected of Coquelin involves him being asked to cover at least one full-back, distribute the ball without the other midfielders having to drop deep, not lose the ball, intercept through balls and high balls, mark runners, tackle and more.

I’m not sure he is good enough to be a first choice defensive midfielder and deep-lying playmaker at the same time, but I’m also unsure anybody in world football is. Perhaps Sergio Busquets is, but he benefits enormously from Barcelona’s unique strangle-hold on possession.

What Coquelin lacks in his game is not medium-length passes to the wings - although he doesn’t often play these, that’s mainly because his team-mates don’t show for them much. What he does lack is intricacy in short passing, like blind passes that fool a marker and clever through balls. I don’t think he’s ever going to have the vision to play those balls, but I’m really unsure he should have to, and it places an enormous weight on his shoulders.

To the extent that Coquelin could try, it involves Arsenal playing a proper double-pivot again - a tactic which was very effective, but has largely been jettisoned. Put less pressure on Coquelin defensively, and it’s intuitive that it would help him, and perhaps the whole team going forward.

A more defensive season?
Although Burnley are a very recent exception to this, teams usually get relegated because they’re incompetent defensively. To the extent Burnley are even an exception, scoring three goals in their final twelve games of the season is such a low scoring rate that it doesn’t really count: few teams in history have ever had such a poor scoring rate - it’s impressive work.

The main thing I’ve seen so far from Watford and Norwich is that they’re teams who are set up reasonably well and aren’t likely to leak many more than fifty goals over the course of the season. That’s bad news for a lot of the other teams who looked like they might go down last season - Villa, West Brom and Sunderland in particular - but it also affects the bigger picture: if you’re less confident you can score yourselves, you’ll probably defend more, leading to more tense games finishing 1-0 and 0-0.

Already last season, there was a marked drop in goals per game in the Premier League to around 2.6. The teams at the bottom of the League have strengthened defensively (a by-product of the massive TV deal allowing smaller clubs to attract really good players from around Europe) but perhaps more importantly, the teams at the top have too.

Arsenal’s major summer business has been the purchase of Petr Cech. Manchester United’s weakness last season was how easily they were cut through in midfield - they’ve responded by purchasing Bastian Schweinsteiger and Morgan Schneiderlin. They may still lack a cutting edge up front (they do, I just like caveating everything), but with proper central midfielders they will be even more solid defensively. I wouldn’t be shocked to see them end the season with the division’s best defensive record. Spurs conceded a massive 53 goals last season, but have strengthened at centre back with Toby Aldeweireld, Chelsea still want John Stones, Eliaquim Mangala will probably kick on for City and even Liverpool haven’t bought badly with Nathaniel Clyne.

Particularly given there’s four teams who could plausibly challenge for the title, it’s relatively easy to envisage a series of close, tight matches between the top four, with teams more afraid to lose than to go for the win.

I think there’s a case to be made that’s good for Arsenal, chiefly because in Mesut Ozil, the Gunners have the best player in the division at unlocking a deep defence and finding the killer ball which is so difficult to defend against, however hard you try. Yesterday’s assist was just such an example of this.

Chelsea look really weak
When I wrote my season preview and tipped Arsenal to come second, I was a little worried that this was more based on hope than anything realistic: most people predicting Arsenal to improve on last season thought City would go backwards. I’d felt for most of the summer - but particularly after City had spent well - that they were the most likely team to win the League this season, and while I was reasonably happy they are a better team than Chelsea, I was really unsure Chelsea were going to drop off.

Still, the evidence against Chelsea isn’t just based on the first two games of the season: the only thing which could be used to defend Chelsea’s terrible performances in the Spring (even against rubbish teams like Hull and QPR) was that they a) they were not playing at full intensity as they did not need to, due to their lead at the top of the table or b) they were knackered from having been over-played earlier in the season.

Given they’re now a) no longer really far ahead and b) coming off the back of a long summer break, neither of those explanations really stand up. Granted, the whole team seems to lack a little fitness, but when the whole League looks less well-prepared than usual, that isn’t sufficient to mitigate two terrible performances, particularly as they’ve struggled at exactly what Jose Mourinho teams usually do very well: they’ve been conceding a ton of shots on goal. As many noted, Asmir Begovic was actually pretty good yesterday.

Last season, when Arsenal suffered a load of injuries defensively, I pointed out how although it might have been a good idea to invest in more defenders, Chelsea actually had fewer defenders in their squad. The response was that it was far more likely Arsenal players would be injured than Chelsea players and so the board should have known better and planned for Arsenal’s injuries.

I’m still doubtful that Arsenal defenders necessarily are any more likely to be injured than Chelsea’s, but regardless, it’s a moot point. Before last night’s signing of Abdul Baba Rahman, Chelsea actually had even fewer defenders than last year, with Filipe Luis having returned to Atletico Madrid. Even with Rahman, they now have six first-team defenders.

Of those six, there’s serious question marks over five of them: Rahman has never played at the top level before (although will probably be a success); Zouma is very young and has mistakes to iron out; Gary Cahill has lost form and Mourinho does not seem to fancy him anymore; and both Branislav Ivanovic and John Terry are getting very old to play every week in the Premier League.

That’s why I say the fitness of Chelsea’s players does not necessarily matter: it doesn’t matter if Terry and Ivanovic are fit, if while they’re fit they’re incompetent. There’s no doubting Terry had a great season last year. But the warning signs were already there with Ivanovic, and at some point Terry’s age was bound to catch up with him.

Clearly, there’s a danger in reading too much into two games, not least when Chelsea have just played probably the most difficult domestic game of the season. But unless Chelsea bring in at least one more top-level defender (John Stones’ price will keep on going up while Chelsea defend this badly), I’m reasonably confident Arsenal will finish above Chelsea.

Keep the faith.

Arsenal season review 2014-15

When I wrote my season preview back in August, I suggested that Arsenal would need to improve markedly this season just to stay still. It was oddly prescient of a debate which has been playing out over the last few weeks over whether Arsenal did indeed improve over the course of 2014-15, compared to the previous season.

The argument that Arsenal didn’t improve runs something like this: in both seasons Arsenal won the FA Cup, reached the last 16 of the Champions League and were knocked out early in the League Cup. In 2013-14, Arsenal challenged for the League (at least until the end of March) and finished on 79 points, only nine points back from the Champions. In contrast, 2014-15 saw no title challenge, the team accruing only 75 points and finishing twelve points back from the League leaders.

Let me make one thing clear: the area where Arsenal definitely regressed was in the Champions League. Although it had an element of tragi-comedy about it, the 3-3 draw at home to Anderlecht was a throwback to the worst of Arsenal a few years back, and losing 3-1 to Monaco at the Emirates (despite bad luck) was, under the circumstances, the worst result in a very long time. Bizarrely though, that’s not the claim peddled by those who say Arsenal regressed. If it were, I’d have a lot more time for it - the Champions League is supposed to test Arsenal against the best teams in Europe and despite not playing anybody particularly good, the team struggled except for against Galatasaray. I’ll come back to this later when I look at how the team could improve.

In the FA Cup, there was no Hull-style early collapse in the cup final and there was an impressive win away at Old Trafford but the overall standard of teams beaten was lower. Call it scratch.

And so to the League campaign. The pure maths is somewhat misleading. It was notable to me how the team seemed to be playing with less intensity after the 0-0 draw against Chelsea, only beating a Hull team which was saving itself for a huge weekend game against Burnley and a disinterested West Brom on the final day of the season. This contrasts hugely with spring 2014, where only the last game was a dead rubber. Certainly, the dropped points against Sunderland and Swansea pushed the club down from 2nd to 3rd, but given neither of those involves a Champions League qualifier, there is little tangible difference in finishing a place higher.

That’s important insofar as had there been more on the line, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that Arsenal would have beaten Swansea and Sunderland and improved on both points and distance to the champions compared to 2013/14.

So the final area where Arsenal might be said to have regressed was a lack of a title challenge. As I wrote in my season preview, for years the club has struggled when playing away after a Champions League game. Of ten Champions League games this season, eight were followed by away League games. In those eight games, Arsenal won just four (away to Villa, West Brom, Sunderland and Newcastle) and dropped some very disappointing points away to Leicester, Everton and Swansea.

First, this wasn’t a problem posed the previous season where far more Champions League games were followed by home games which is just a tangible benefit and a quirk of this year’s fixture list. But in addition - and this is why finishing third is so important and such an improvement - not only is the qualifier bad in of itself, it also has knock on effects on League form. One of the key reasons the club struggled to build momentum in the first half of the season compared to 2013/14 was this problem of playing away after Champions League games, something which was compounded by a lack of options to rotate, as a result of injuries.

The great irony is that the explosion in interest in tactics around 2010 coincided with what those in the stats community call the ‘enlightened era’: teams are generally better organised and more focused on retaining possession, leading to marked drop-off in shots per game, shots on target per game and this season, goals. In effect, since interest in tactics increased, stamina has become more important: it’s become less likely that a player is in a bad position because of organisation, and so being able to run more late in the game has a significant effect.

While it’s fashionable to talk about systems and formations, in reality, Arsenal’s lack of effective options to rotate into the team (particularly when playing twice a week, compared to opponents who had a full seven days to prepare) was something which had a significant effect, a problem exacerbated by a lack of a full pre-season for the World Cup stars.

In addition, and I appreciate this isn’t something which most people who go to matches care about, the start of 2013-14 was marked by unsustainable conversion rates from very few shots. In that sense, the drop-off in the second half of the season was simply regression to the mean. In contrast, the first three or four months of 2014-15 saw a freakishly high number of opposition shots going in, and it was always likely results would improve given the team was playing pretty well.

There are those who argue that this is a problem of mentality and that the players can only do it when there’s no pressure on. But this is counter-intuitive given that when you’re a team expected to challenge and you’re 6th or 7th at Christmas, that actually puts more pressure on.

Regardless of all this data-crunching (as I always say, it’s supposed to be fun following a football team), in terms of transitions and movement off the ball, the team is playing far better now, with several individuals hugely improved (Olivier Giroud especially) and more players who you think can ‘make something happen’ when a game seems tight. Perhaps some of the issues of the first half of the season were systemic, but more broadly it was a question of a (im)perfect storm of a tough fixture list, bad injury list (particularly defensively) and bad luck.

Moreover, the team seems more balanced, with a more sensible approach to big away games which has yielded much improved results. And yet, in terms of where the team goes next season, I have to disagree with my friend @RoamingLibero.

He says the problem against Monaco was one of panicking when going a goal behind, and that proper on-pitch management would be sufficient to fix this.

While clearly this would go a long way to counteracting the issue, it overlooks the root cause of the problem, that the specific players being picked make Arsenal play in a certain way. It was definitely an issue in the first leg that the team was overcommitted in attack after going behind; but it was a much more telling issue because of the personnel in the team lacking the mobility to play a higher line, leaving huge gaps for the opposition to exploit on the counter-attack, or alternatively, leaving Per Mertesacker engaged in a pace battle he could never win and therefore committing to a tackle.

But it also affects how the team attacks. Go back to the second leg against Monaco, a game which most observers thought Arsenal were very good in, and the problems were still on show there.

When Arsenal were attacking, the team had to sit far too deep to counteract a lack of pace of both Per Mertesacker and David Ospina. Had it been possible to push the centre backs up, so that Francis Coquelin could win the first ball out of the opposition box, rather than midfielders like Santi Cazorla and Mesut Ozil challenging for it, there would have been far greater attacking impetus, and the stronger Coquelin is also more likely to win these duels.

To me, it’s self-evident that not pushing the team up the pitch is a result of Mertesacker (and to a lesser extent) Ospina’s lack of pace. Not only that, but this also has a knock-on effect on the shape of the rest of the team: quite a few times, Hector Bellerin received the ball with Nacho Monreal quite advanced on the left. He didn’t want to pass to Coquelin because of Coquelin’s limitations on the ball; he didn’t want to pass to Cazorla because Cazorla was too far left for him to safely reach; and so, because of the positions Mertesacker necessarily must take up, when Bellerin passes to him the ball goes a long way back.

Given Mertesacker’s fondness for passing laterally to Laurent Koscielny, this means Koscielny has to sprint back to get the ball, and Monreal tries to cover for him in case he doesn’t get it easily and to offer a passing option by also dropping back.

The effect of this is to create a sort of split in the team which hampers the attacking harmony, allows Monaco to regain their shape and makes breaking them down significantly harder. And while needing to win 3-0 away is an anomaly, struggling to break down well-organised opponents is hardly something particularly rare for Arsenal.

Clearly, the organisation Mertesacker lends the team is enormously beneficial and he is an exceptionally good centre back. But he does require the team to play in a certain way to mitigate his weaknesses.

The problem with changing this next season is that Koscielny definitely cannot organise effectively, and it’s unlikely that Gabriel Paulista can, particularly while he’s still picking up the language. Definitely, part of the problem is mitigated by picking a goalkeeper like Wojciech Szczesny who isn’t afraid to come off his line, particularly when the alternative is Ospina. In addition, a better defensive midfielder than Coquelin would do a lot more to help organise the team effectively, lessening the chance of an effective opposition counter-attack and allowing the team to push up a bit more, even with Mertesacker. That’s where I’d prioritise improving the team over the summer and it should leave the team strong enough to challenge for the League title.

But there’s a part of me which is dubious that despite having an exceptionally high quality attack, Arsenal can challenge for the Champions League with Mertesacker at centre back. At any rate, an exciting summer awaits.

Keep the faith.

Arsenal 1 Manchester United 2. Confirmation bias is alive and well.

Arsenal 1 Manchester United 2



In his book about Pep Guardiola’s first season at Bayern Munich, Marti Perarnau recounts asking Guardiola what the best performance was from his Barcelona side in the time he managed them between 2008 and 2011. Guardiola ponders for a while before answering.

You might think he would choose one of his two Champions League final wins. Perhaps the 5-0 win against Real Madrid in the Clasico. But instead, Guardiola names the first half of Barcelona’s 2-2 draw at the Emirates in 2010 as the best he ever saw his team play, a half which finished 0-0.

Here we have the man acclaimed as perhaps modern football’s greatest coach, thinker and tactician naming a half which finished 0-0 as the best ever performance from a team which won everything and dominated European football for three seasons. If this isn’t evidence that sometimes performances don’t translate into results - but you can still appreciate it as a good performance - I’m not sure what is.

Which is why I find criticism of Arsene Wenger based on Saturday’s Arsenal-Manchester United match utterly misconceived. Honestly, it’s reached a point where people are so keen to draw an artificial binary distinction in the Arsenal fanbase between “AKBs” and “#Wengerout” that every single negative event has to be spun in such a way that if you want the manager to leave, that negative event must be his fault. Presumably people are worried that it’s intellectually incoherent to argue that you want the manager to leave and then acknowledge that some of the problems with this team are not his fault.

As it happens, I’m for Wenger staying but that doesn’t mean I defend everything he does. But to watch the United game and say defeat was the manager's fault just proves that confirmation bias is alive and well amongst many Arsenal fans. Given that the team was set up perfectly to take advantage of United’s weak defence, didn’t have its goal threatened until a highly unlucky own goal, and should have been out of sight before half-time, I find it hard to blame the manager. I do wonder whether people who are criticising the manager for this result, would do so if you conducted a thought experiment where one team played in blue, one in yellow, and they didn’t know the wider context of the two teams. I’d hazard a guess they wouldn’t.

Personally, I’d blame the loss on the poor conversion rates of the forward players. But note that while Santi Cazorla, Danny Welbeck and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain are going through barren patches in front of goal, only Chamberlain has a habit of pinging hopeful shots from distance and even his conversion rates are not that bad. In other words, in a normal season, you would write off Saturday’s match as a statistical anomaly and move on - even Arsenal don’t often lose games in which the opposition only had one shot on target.

Unfortunately, it’s not a normal season. I think most people acknowledge that a team can be unlucky in one game, but few would accept that as an excuse for prolonged poor form. Alas, they’re wrong.

I think that’s what happening to Arsenal at the moment, and the numbers bear it out. This Grantland piece details how Arsenal had the best underlying numbers in both defence and attack before this weekend’s match - a match in which Arsenal had nine shots on target to the opposition’s two.

This sort of thing has happened before. The reason Liverpool’s title run last season was actually reasonably predictable was that they were scoring far fewer goals than would be expected per match, based on the chances created in 2012-13. Over time, things regress to the mean.

A similar story is currently available at Newcastle, where a team which had been on an unlucky run starts to turn it around. And the ongoing bad run of form is similarly in evidence at Borussia Dortmund, who blew a two goal lead this weekend and continue to sit in the relegation zone of the Bundesliga, despite dominating match after match.

And this is the issue for me with claims of it’s “same old, same old” for Arsenal. Sure, Arsenal dominated the match against Manchester United and conceded a soft goal on the counter-attack. But claiming this was like the Arsenal of, say, 2009-10 is simply untrue. Then, Arsenal let teams counter-attack repeatedly, didn’t have significantly more shots on goal than the opposition against big teams, and had a defensive midfielder in Denilson who was dribbled past over and over again. When Arsenal lost 3-1 at home to Man United in January 2010, it was difficult to claim that was unrepresentative of the match.

More importantly, that was almost five years ago. In the meantime, Arsenal won a few games against big teams but never really dominated the game. That changed in an enormous way on Saturday. Last season, against a poor United team, there was very little pressure on them in either game. This time around, Arsenal created a hatful of chances and should killed the game by half-time. That it remained 0-0 was a result of extremely poor chance conversion but in the long-run, given these players aren’t shooting from sub-optimal positions, there’s little reason to expect Arsenal’s poor results to continue.

That shows that at least in terms of the tangible, Arsenal have improved and there’s a lot to be optimistic about. Ah, you might say, but the mentality of this team is one of underdogs against bigger teams, and Wenger spins a narrative of how Arsenal are fighting an uphill battle. In other words, there are intangible, statistically unmeasurable factors at work which are impacting on Arsenal’s form.

I don’t doubt it’s possible for statistically unmeasurable things to have an affect. Certainly, once Arsenal start to win a few games, confidence will rise and momentum will return. But I find it hard to believe that this manager is a block to that occurring. I appreciate this is more opinion than fact-based, but given the way Arsenal attacked United on Saturday in a manner which I hadn’t seen for years, I reject the contention that Wenger instills a negative mentality in the players. Quite the opposite in fact. Consistently, even when Arsenal were not very good, Wenger would be in the press bigging the players up and saying they could win the League. If anything, it’s the case that he goes too far the other way.

In terms of this season, winning the League title is almost certainly a write-off. But it was only a small chance at the beginning of the season - and that was without losing our best defender for a prolonged period, best striker for a prolonged period, and best player for several months.

For me, the manager is at fault for not bringing in another defender. But equally, Chelsea have exactly the same number of first-team defenders (six). Go and check their website if you do not believe me. Neither Koscielny or Debuchy’s injuries are the result of the dreaded ‘over-training’ but rather in one case, a trauma injury, and in the other, an ongoing medical condition, for which there is limited medical treatment.

What people fail to recognise is that the issue with the defence at the moment is less one of personnel, and more one of a lack of playing time together. That’s when players get the understanding necessary to defend effectively. In time - even were Debuchy and Koscielny to remain injured - I would expect the occasional defensive error which is drifting in (quite literally, sometimes) to Arsenal’s game to lessen in frequency.

Thus far this season, while missing a series of key players, Arsenal have still dominated almost every match they’ve played. In time, the goals will come, and Arsenal will move up the League table.

Keep the faith.

It Ain't So Bad

A couple of years back Arsenal had a Dutchman playing up front who scored lots and lots of goals. So people drew up pointless League tables showing “Arsenal without Van Persie” to show the team’s dependency on him.

In case you were in any doubt, this was an immensely stupid thing to do. Because - here’s something amazing - if Arsenal hadn’t played Van Persie, they would have played somebody else in his place. In fact, the sheer ridiculousness of this so-called thought experiment was born out the following season when Arsenal were indeed without Van Persie but finished fourth, rather than the fifteenth the tables indicated. Funny that.

I mention this because the latest one was this weekend people tweeting that not only were Arsenal doing worse than last season but “imagine where we’d be without the late goals against Everton and Palace”. Apart from anything else, this is a facile thing to tweet because it doesn’t require much imagination.

But much more importantly, football matches last 90 minutes. It’s a drum I’ve banged relentlessly but to reiterate, having good stamina is something incredibly valuable in football. Arsenal scored those late goals because they were fitter than the other teams. Which was partly a consequence of tactics in the Everton game, despite those tactics being feverishly criticised, probably by the same people.

If you watch the closing act of Ben Jonson’s “The Alchemist” on its own, it’s impossible to suspend your disbelief and enjoy the farce ongoing. Watch the whole play and it sort of makes sense. At risk of a very stretched analogy, most of the discussion around Arsenal has reached the point where people are so determined to be ‘proved correct’ that they stretch the bounds of logic to breaking point and beyond, and it is just a constant farce.

To be clear, it hasn’t been brilliant so far this season. But the way idiots come out of hiding with the slightest sign of a bad result is ludicrous. The other one so far this season (back, in case you’d missed it since April) is that “Wenger is done at the top level”. The evidence for this seems to be that Arsenal took a bit of a shellacking against Dortmund.

This was then coupled with the untruth that Arsenal had consistently struggled in the biggest European games to ‘prove’ some sort of point.

But here’s the problem: on matchday one of this year’s Champions League, ten home teams won. One away team out of sixteen won, and they played against ten men for 75 minutes. All PSG’s money couldn’t get them a win away to Ajax. Atletico Madrid (with the manager many seem to want for Arsenal) lost away to Olympiakos. And yes, Arsenal lost to Dortmund.

But if you want to spot the odd one out, it’s that Dortmund are much better than Ajax or Olympiakos. And that this result was a rare aberration: Arsenal have consistently had an excellent away record over the last three seasons, roughly the life-span of the current team - seven wins, three draws, and four defeats, two of which came in dead games in Athens. It doesn’t exactly strike of being done at the highest level.

For all Arsenal’s relative lack of success in the Champions League, you’d be hard-pressed to claim Arsenal had been knocked out by an inferior team since 2007. Since 2005, only three poorer clubs have reached the Champions League final: Liverpool, Atletico Madrid and Dortmund. Liverpool have since endured four years outside the Champions League and now appear to have a manager who isn’t much cop at signing players. Dortmund have done well in big games but struggled to beat smaller teams - I think Klopp is an excellent manager but struggling to beat Mainz (etc) is an issue for a top manager. Diego Simeone has done brilliantly so far but is also batshit crazy.

But it’s also a bit of a moot point - I think very few people would deny that there are some managers who are tactically better than Arsene Wenger. It doesn’t mean he’s completely useless, or anywhere close to it.

And here’s the key point - Arsenal haven’t changed their system this season just so that Wenger could save some money and not buy a defensive midfielder. That’s the argument of the people who genuinely think the manager gets a bonus for not spending money and is desperate to wallpaper his downstairs toilet with fifty pound notes.

The reality is that on a base level, Arsenal’s system last season went against the manager’s principles. It was, truth be told, a little boring. And so by playing a 4-3-3, Arsenal have greater fluidity, greater attacking purpose, and more bodies who can pile forward. Ignoring the Dortmund game as a freak game (the team was knackered from playing City), the stats show the team having more shots and more possession. Exactly the sort of stats you look for as positives. As it happens, I think Santi Cazorla needs to play more to give us greater defensive balance higher up the pitch, but in general there’s a lot to be optimistic about.

Because here’s the key thing: without playing particularly well (except for in patches against City), Arsenal are still fourth in the table. The only people who are really down are those who expected Arsenal to win the League this season. I was never one of those.

Keep the faith.

Arsenal 2014-15 season preview

It feels slightly weird not to be going into the new season wondering at what point Arsenal might actually spend some money and strengthen the playing squad. For the first time in years, the Arsenal squad looks at least somewhat better than when the season ended.

What’s more, positive feeling in the stands tends to help on-pitch performances and there’s no doubt that Gooners are buoyant, with many even talking of winning the League. I’m just unsure we really should be.

The truth is that to get 79 points last season was a remarkable return from that squad, particularly considering the injury problems in the second half of the season. Sagna was nowhere near as good as he used to be, Kieran Gibbs was improved but nothing special, Flamini is superb at kicking people but less good at kicking the ball and Szczesny was better without ever being brilliant.

And that’s just defensively. Offensively, you have a choice on the left wing between Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain (yet to consistently deliver in goals or assists), Lukas Podolski (yet to actually ever sprint in an Arsenal shirt) and Santi Cazorla (not really a left winger). Combine that with question marks over Jack Wilshere, Mikel Arteta and Tomas Rosicky getting no younger and a great deal of uncertainty about how Theo Walcott will recover from his ACL and the optimism around the Arsenal camp seems more misplaced. That’s without even mentioning Olivier Giroud’s pretty average finishing.

I’m not trying to destroy the whole squad here, I’m just making the point there seems to be an awful lot of pressure on Koscielny and Mertesacker staying fit once again, and an expectation that Aaron Ramsey will continue to excel and Mesut Özil will kick on from an impressive first season.

So, the question is can Alexis Sanchez, Calum Chambers and Mathieu Debuchy push Arsenal on to greater things? I think there’s no doubt that Sanchez is an excellent signing for Arsenal, especially with Walcott injured. Even when Theo returns, Sanchez could fill the troublesome left-wing spot or provide an alternative to Giroud up front. With Özil delivering through-balls for both Walcott and Sanchez, Arsenal could score many, many more goals, as they really need to.

When I was previewing last season I said there needed to be more goals from midfield to really challenge - while Aaron Ramsey provided them, Theo Walcott’s injuries meant that the team was still short of goals. 68 goals scored is not nearly enough to win the Premier League these days, especially considering the number of shots on goal conceded last season. I fully expect Sanchez to help address this and I’d be surprised to see Arsenal score fewer than 80 goals over the League campaign.

Of the other signings, Debuchy is a good player but it’s not exactly inspiring and I think very few people would pick him over either Cesar Azpilicueta or Pablo Zabaleta. Calum Chambers is a lot more exciting and was secured for an excellent price, particularly in the context of the English player premium and the way transfer prices seem to have spiked this summer. Even so, I’d be surprised to see him start more than 20 Premier League games unless Koscielny’s achilles injury is worse than feared. I don’t expect David Ospina to play in the League unless Szczesny is injured.

Given that there have only been two major departures (Sagna and Vermaelen), its certainly fair to say that this Arsenal squad looks better than last season. And I should add that I’m basing my predictions on no there being no further major additions to the Arsenal squad.

So why my lack of shared optimism? First, to get 79 points last season was the squad massively outperforming itself. Momentum is incredibly important in football and Arsenal definitely benefitted from having easy fixtures stacked together in the first half of the season. The fixture list doesn’t allow Arsenal to (easily) build up momentum in the same way in the season ahead. In other words, just to stand still the squad needed to get better.

Not only that, but Arsenal have a very poor record playing away after Champions League games: over the last four seasons, Arsenal have played away 19 times after Champions League games, winning just seven times and losing eight of those matches. Providing progress is secured against Besiktas, the Gunners will play away after seven of their first eight Champions League games: that’s a minimum of 20% of League fixtures in which you can expect Arsenal to only win one out of three games. That’s going to be a major stumbling block to winning the League.

Most importantly, I just think Manchester City and Chelsea have superior squads to Arsenal. Chelsea have filled the obvious defensive holes in their squad while at the same time signing Cesc Fabregas and Diego Costa. I certainly think its plausible that Costa could struggle - I’m just unconvinced it matters. Chelsea were pretty good last season without a decent striker and have now added one of the best playmakers in the world. City only got better as last season went on and if Sergio Aguero can play over 30 games will probably win the League again.

There’s definitely some important caveats I should add here: an easy Champions League draw for Arsenal (assuming qualification) would diminish the importance of playing away repeatedly after playing in midweek. But equally, if you want more pessimism, Arsenal haven’t made a serious title challenge in a year after an international tournament since 1998-99.

So, realistic predictions: 3rd in the League, Champions League quarter-finals and maybe a domestic cup.

Keep the faith.