I have to admit, after the Villa game I was furious, absolutely fuming with our performance. After today though I don't even feel angry. Don't get me wrong we were completely awful, but to me we looked like a team that had just begun our pre-season, and as a group were woefully off the pace. Even players like Sargent and Pukki who we know will run all day long and press lost causes, didn't seem to have any intensity about them at all. It was, after all, only a week ago we only had 8 players in training. In contrast Arsenal are a team that have had practically none of those issues, and have been able to keep continuity with pretty much the same team each week, while we've been forced to chop and change every week. I'm not trying to make excuses because today was crap and we didn't even do the basics right, but I do feel you can't really just disregard the mitigating circumstances. I'm actually quite surprised by all the uproar on twitter, today was abject but for me it was clear to see a lot of players weren't in the right shape.
Like I said though, you still need to do the basics right. When you're one on one with Saka, don't let him cut onto his left foot. You could see for both his goals from an absolute mille away what he was gonna do, but Williams, particularly for the 2nd goal, let's him do it so easily. I don't know if Giannoulis was still struggling from the illness that kept out of the Villa game, but I'd get him straight back in for Williams when we can. It feels as well that without Normann no-one in our midfield is prepared to take responsibility and set the tone for us. Another shocking performance from Gilmour today and McLean wasn't any better. I don't really know why Sorenson was dropped as he's probably been our best player last couple of games, but I'd definitely get him back in. All 5 goals in general were really poor ones to concede.
In all honesty I hope our games against Palace and Leicester get called off. Both of them are having Covid issues and it's clear after today we won't be able to go again in a couple of days time. I feel like we could really just use a regroup, and then we can go against after the cup game.