Final Pieces Of The Puzzle: Three Problems the Gunners Must Solve

Eight games played, five wins, one draw, and two defeats. These stats tell you how inconsistent the Gunners have been so far this season. Especially when you consider the fact that both defeats came against Fulham and Hull City, teams who were, all jokes aside, expected to struggle at the beginning of the season.

Both defeats showed the true weakness of the current Arsenal team, which can be narrowed to three main ones:

1. Inability to compete aerially—meaning that we are struggling at set-pieces, or against teams who play direct football. Yes I know we won against Bolton and Blackburn, who are also renowned to play route one, but there is no denying that this problem cost us points against Fulham and Hull City. Gallas and Toure are both poor at winning aerial battles, and the team always seem to be so nervy when defending the second ball. This is a huge problem when we play against teams who play with a big target man.

2. Lack of Plan B—when it all clicks into place, we will create as many chances as we want. But the problem is, against Fulham, we managed only one shot on target in the whole match, we just hardly created anything.

Against Hull City we had more chances but mostly half chances. Then against Sunderland, we were very poor at creating chances also, despite having a goal wrongly disallowed. Putting Bendtner on does not change a game, he is not an impact player, only Theo Walcott is in our team. So what do we do if he is unavailable and find ourselves trailing at half time, like against Hull and Fulham?

3. Eboue—Okay, if you have read my previous articles, you will know that I do not like to blame individual players. But Eboue really does not look like an Arsenal player at the moment. He is sloppy in his passing, always wanting a few extra touches on the ball, meaning our attacking play slows down because of him, plus he does not have any composure at all when it comes to shooting, thus we would be lucky if he scores five times this season.

I can only see Walcott as a good enough right midfielder at the club, what will happen if he is out for a large chunk of a season? No creativity or goalscoring threat on the right would be like Usain Bolt running without his right leg.

These three problems are huge for Arsenal at the moment, even in games where we won three or 4-0, we looked shaky in defence. Against the better teams, we would be leaking in a considerable amount if we defend like that. And against "lesser" teams, we tend to always struggle to move up a gear.

The passing is good around the box, but we struggle to provide final balls, when that happens, we are so vulnerable to the counter attack especially with Denilson still lacking experience in where to position himself as a DM, and Clichy and Sagna bombing forward.

We are already four points behind the leaders, Chelsea and Liverpool, any more points dropped would be a disaster for Arsenal. Wenger has to address these problems, especially the defensive problem, since to be honest, we have not looked solid at the back ever since 2004...