I don't think the title will be decided with 15 points to play!
Arsenal's title credentials...
- Thread starter Lynk
- Start date
I don't think the title will be decided with 15 points to play!
I think I'm right in saying that United have actually won more and lost fewer games than Arsenal this season.
You may be, but that's irrelevant to the league. They've won more and lost less than us in it, obviously.
It's not entirely irrelevant. Purely on a numbers basis, it suggests that their form is no better than ours, despite their lead, and hence are more likely to be overhauled than you'd expect from looking at the table alone.
Anyway, I thought it was a surprising factoid.
Anyway, I thought it was a surprising factoid.
There are no easy games at that stage of the season. There are hard games and there are really hard games.
With the excepting unknown of the January transfers, I do think Arsenal will slide of out contention in 2014. I just do not think they have it in them to stay near the top. Liverpool, on the other hand, impressed last night and though they lost, they could even win on Sunday.
Pointless facturd.
Damn, I'd forgotten that you guys had to qualify for the CL.
Not entirely surprising given our piss easy Champions League group and Arsenal's difficult one.
Me too. That's pretty much what everyone has been saying all season. They haven't got the squad to maintain it and haven't been very good lately. They really should have gotten beat yesterday. West Ham missed an absolute host of chances.
We had 29 shots. Should have been 4-0 up at HT. Blew them away with a ferocious onslaught in the last 25 after going behind against the run of play.
So what's that got to do with all those missed chances (most of them ones they should have scored) during that period between being 1 up and your equaliser?
pfft, can't even get 30 shots on target, useless.
Having said that, Joey O'brien should have probably been sent off about 3 times...
We've maintained title winning form for half a season now. But we're in bad form and Liverpool are in good form so they're suddenly a better chance even though they could go into the halfway mark six points behind us.
The front 6 haven't played that well except in patches and except for Rambo, there's more to come.
Arsenal will go close but City will win it.
Chelsea and the Gooners to duke it out for second spot.
Then it's a scrap for the fourth place. I have us as favourites for that one, barely.
Chelsea and the Gooners to duke it out for second spot.
Then it's a scrap for the fourth place. I have us as favourites for that one, barely.
Leverkusen (2nd in Bundesliga) / Dortmund (4th in Bundesliga)
Shakhtar (top of UPL) / Marseille (6th in Ligue 1)
Sociedad (5th in La Liga) / Napoli (3rd in Serie A)
Objectively speaking, on current form there's not much in it.
Only on this forum could you find anyone comparing our CL groups and say there isn't much in it....
Sociedad have been extremely poor this season after selling illarmendi and losing their manager, while napoli are challenging for the league or were at that time. Leverkusen are extremely poor in big games according to all german posters, have a huge inferiority complex while dortmund are ucl finalists and managed to qualify with their first choice back four missing. I will give you shakhtar, all in all huge bias.
Arsenal's group was way tougher than ours. Ours was a tricky one which we navigated successfully and credit should be given to Moyes for that. It certainly wasn't easy as most people are now saying. We won the home games which we were expected to do and got a good result in Germany and remained unbeaten overall.
So 5th in the Liga is "extremely poor", wheres 3rd in Serie A is "challenging for the league"? It seems to me you're making too big a distinction between just two league positions.
And Leverkusen are "extremely poor in big games", despite winning 4 and drawing 1 against the rest of the top 6? Whereas Dortmund have the big-game mentality of losing all 5 games, including at home to Leverkusen, who they trail in the league?
I'm perfectly willing to accept that Arsenal's group was tougher, but it seems people will go to any lengths to talk us down.
When we played them they were languishing in lower mid table, hence me labeling them as extremely poor while napoli at that time were challenging for the league. With regards to leverkusen,thats not my opinion but of the german posters who watch them on a regular basis. And who obviously have more of an idea aboyt the team strengths than most of us.
How and where did I talked us down?
Mad? Yep. Thinker? Nah.
It's not so much the quality of these sides as how they actually performed against us. I think it's quite obvious that especially Leverkusen failed to show up - and gave us a fairly easy ride. We did well, no question about it - but our opponents didn't exactly give us hell. Both the Germans and Sociedad failed to press us much - which is strange enough given that everyone and his granny seems to have realized it's an Achilles heel of ours.
Your first mistake is equating big games in the league to the ones on the international level. Leverkusen on a good day could always cause Bayern or Dortmund problems in the league while crashing out in the EL vs. weaker teams in sometimes an embarassing fashion. Their problem is largely mentaly, which caused the two worst performances of their season in the games vs. United.
The second problem is, that you use Leverkusen´s win vs. us (Dortmund) to make an argument. We had two entirely different halfs of the season so far. When we faced Arsenal we came on the back of the best season start, being able to field a good defensive formation aside of the long term injured players Gündogan and Piszczek in both games. In the one month between the second Arsenal game and the one vs. Leverkusen we lost Hummels, Subotic and Schmelzer for the rest of the season half. On top of that both CB talents Günter and Sarr laboured with smaller injuries, which forced us to give the former Leverkusen defender and teamless Friedrich a contract. Now guess who made the fatal mistake, which served Leverkusen their winning goal on a silver platter? In that game we also had to sub both Sahin and Bender because of injuries.
The different circumstances of the single games and mindsets in terms of international football (we won our group basically on crutches) make it hard to draw conclusions in terms of difficulty for the groups. In the CL we are still better than Leverkusen especially in high pressure situations and Neapel is comfortably a better team than Sociebad. That is frankly not even debatable.
Aren't you supposed to be the WUM who's actually really knowledgeable? You've been a bit underwhelming so far.
Hummels didn't play in the second Arsenal game.
Not wanting to draw this out into a long debate, but all this talk of being Leverkusen not being able to do it in the big European games smacks a bit of post-event rationalisation. I don't believe that after half a season, with the results they've had, one set of 3 teams can be described as "piss easy" and the other "difficult".
I don't really see why the x number of games before a particular point in time are any better an indication of a team's form than the x number of games after (or better still, the entire league season to date).
You appeared to be dismissing United's thrashings of Leverkusen by claiming that they don't do it in the "big games" (as opposed to Dortmund, presumably), when in fact a quick glance at the big games so far in the Bundesliga reveals the exact opposite to be the case. That's what I meant by (not just you) "talking us down". If you meant "big European games", then that's a different argument, but not one that I entirely buy.
Seriously? My last post on this subject. Ofcourse form is determined by how the team was performing while the fixture was played. Not their results months after the fixture has passed. Again on the issue of leverkusen, I will trust the views of the german posters some of whom are neutral with regards to united about the two teams than your quick glance at the table. They were by far one of the poorest sides we have faced this season which lends credence to the theory of them having an inferiority complex.
Yours was trickier, though United still had a remarkably difficult group. They didn't have a world beater, but there were three very good teams in there.
Against youse, yes, but both have shown over the past season and a half that they are very good teams.
Decent sides having a good season.
Sociedad at the very least are having a poor season in Spain. Their group was much more difficult IMO.
We dealt with ours profesionally enough mind you.
I know that. He had back problems and missed a couple of days. We still had a strong CB pair with Subotic-Sokratis on the pitch.
The injury, which ended his season half came two weeks later.
Post-event rationalisation? I wrote a lengthy post before the first game against United stating that while Leverkusen is currently Germany´s third strongest team (especially at home) with a fair share of good football players they have a tendency for years to not turn up in crucial games at the international stage.
Anyone who followed Leverkusen at least slightly this season will have seen a clear difference in performance between the games vs. United and the rest of their fixtures. This is partly because of a well playing United, but also because they were incredibly poor and did not fought back with the tools they undoubtly had. Their display in their home game after the first half hour was simply pathetic.
Having a discrepancy between domestical and intertational results is also not something really new or special. Dortmund did not make it out of the group stages in both title winning years. Manchester City is for a couple years now a power in the EPL, but accomplished basically nothing in Europe until this years campaign in a fairly easy group.
United´s group was not "piss poor", but it was not very challenging either, also because it looked harder on paper. Donetsk and San Sebastian lost a lot of quality in the summer and Leverkusen could not show what they are actually capable of.
Arsenal´s group was harder, also because Marseille turned out to be a point feeder to the other three, so the direct fixtures between them and arguably the strongest clubs from pot 3 and 4 gained even more significance. At the end the third place finisher missed out by a single goal and despite four won games, which would have been enough in every other group.
There's no such thing as "whilst" in this context. If you want to put a result into the context of an opponent's form, you look at games before and after. You only want to look at the former and not...
Except it's not been "months", but in fact just 18 days since the end of the group stage - a lot less time than between the first game of the season and the start of the group stage.
You're playing the man, not the ball. Besides, I said that it only took a quick glance at the results to disprove your second-hand claim.
You said that you lost Hummels between Arsenal and Leverkusen. If you weren't claiming it to be relevant to those results, then it's not very clear.
Then I don't see what our disagreement is. Everything you've written above can plausibly explain why Dortmund were a tougher proposition in the CL despite their league position, and that Arsenal's group was tougher. I've no intention of arguing the opposite.
Wenger has finally bred some self belief in his team. If his key players stay injury free.....they will give City a run for their money.