You won’t get an argument from me re: massive overperformance the spring of 2024.

Something I did want to point out, however: we began the season with some massive overperformance at the back. At our luckiest, 0.5 GA from 1.1 xGA per 90. Around Gameweek 5 (City), it sharply pulls up. That plus the Saliba red at Bournemouth (not to mention the fact that he missed the Liverpool match due to it) has flattened our defensive performance this season, and it doesn’t look like we’re likely to recover.

They certainly do not. If it wasn’t true, you’d start by saying so.

Some fun graphs from our friends at CannonStats… (rightmost is current season)
https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/c709835f-8359-44dd-a03d-c9a2feb82618_1126x703.png
https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/7d9535ad-1fdd-424b-8147-c878c5fa4dab_1106x703.png

Sigh.

No, because when someone accuses you of something, you start wildly shouting “show me where I said that” instead of “no, that’s incorrect”.

As we’ve seen, they don’t work at all if countries like India and China are still willing to trade with them via backdoor channels.

If there was any justice in the world then he would have died during his first term.

Getting harder and harder to remain a peaceful person in current year.

In fairness, it should probably not be Rice in that position.

Honestly, the easiest way to do that is probably to process the image to detect the bounds of the pitch and then black out everything outside of it.

Yeah? I didn’t say anything positive about it. I said that it’s likely to be the alternative to email in a lot of places.

Many parts of the world use Whatsapp as their primary form of communication. It’s depressing.

I would assume Whatsapp or equivalent.

Lol the NWSL (American women’s league) is listed as a separate sport on the ESPN page that the bot links.

Unless, of course, the Boomers benefit from advances in medical care and are rich enough to prolong their lifespans. Then they could continue ruining the world for half a century!

The worst part is… this is going to keep happening. Everything is cascading into everything else. We need to sign at least two players real soon, or Saka is going to come back and immediately be burned out from having to cover for others.

Right now Arteta is doing the FM thing of “no he doesn’t play there but we need to get him in the team somehow”. I don’t want to see Tierney at anything but LB and I don’t want to see Kiwior at all right now, man has had a nightmare of a season.

You won’t get an argument from me from a moral perspective. But who else do we play at right back? Kiwior is in terrible form and our bench is barren.

We’ve definitely had our files open for weeks and now we’re actively making inquiries. My guess is that we’re not going to get Gyokeres or Vlahovic or Sesko, their teams need them too much this season. We’ll get a lower key option and we’ll have to overpay a bit. But if they can put half of these chances that Ø and Saka are creating, I really dgaf

The two reds against Brighton and City were the extent of normal bad luck for title winners, and they were completely undeserved. Everything else has been us getting the absolute shit end of the variance stick and that includes today. We didn’t blow them out of the water but we had more tilt and xG - 2024 Arsenal absolutely win this 3-1.

We’re now relying on Liverpool to trip up, but that’s not impossible. Apparently Alisson has looked bad since coming back from injury and that may work in our favor.

We’ve known for months that that only applies to us.