Where was Plan B?

Are you saying that one of the best managers in the world, who is highly paid and is surrounded by a team of staff, studying and implementing the best football for one of the biggest teams in the world, wouldn’t have thought about the over-reliance on Martin Odegaard and couldn’t have guessed it that it could derail our season if our Captain was injured / unavailable for only a few games? If so, I don’t agree with you.

I was able to guess that we would be in a mess if the only creative player in that midfield gets injured. I was shouting for a competition for Odegaard and I was calling out of us selling Emile Smith and loaning Vieira without replacing them with a like-for-like player. Unfortunately, we are in the same situation where Odegaard is out and we have to play 3 defensive minded players with a back 4 largely consisting of CBs. If your argument was that Nwaneri will cover that position, we haven’t seen him given starts in the Premier League yet. If you thought Declan Rice would suddenly start making those visionary passes to our front 3 like Ode used to do, I don’t know what to say except you were deluded just like our manager.

We are void of any creativity. 90 mins, and we don’t see a string of play that can result in a goal. Set pieces have been saving us from long, but since when scoring on set pieces evolved into the best way to win a game? Since when you could predict there won’t be an injury to a player who is going to have to play PL, CL and some of those Carabao Cup games? Since when a player (Rice, Partey, Merino) who has played as a defensive midfield starts scoring suddenly and creating chances on a regular basis?

By the way, the solution to this problem isn’t to buy another defender.

It was clear as a day we needed creative and goal scoring heroes. Odegaard was brilliant for most of the last season but he had a bad run of games towards the end and we struggled. We saw what would happen to us if our only creative force goes out of form or injured. We had the trailer and we still gave importance to it. Rather, we made ourselves weaker by selling ESR who wanted to stay, and loaning Vieira who was fit and showed some courage.

I was also calling out for a CF. We had some discussions around the goals scoring distribution between the front 3, and Odegaard. It was all well and good but we guessed what would happen if one of the players of that group stopped performing for a period. Now, everything is broken with no Ode and Martinelli losing out on his form with Kai Havertz getting hardly 10 touches in games.

Bukayo Saka is from a different planet. He will always be good.

Someone should own this mistake of missing out on planning. If it was Edu or Mikel, it’s for the club to figure out. I don’t think the club was not interested in putting more money, because we still bought a LB when we had Zinchenko and Timber and we got a midfielder when we had Rice who could have played that role. We neglected the attack, pretty well knowing what could go wrong…

… and we are exactly in that situation where everything is going wrong.

It’s a different discussion of whether we are still in the title challenges. Bournemouth first made it difficult for us when we lost but they also beat City, keeping us in the race. We have a 7 point difference to the leaders Liverpool but that’s still fixable. We need Odegaard as soon as possible, and we need to get on the winning wagon. Last season, we played some fantastic football under Mikel and we haven’t been able to reproduce that till now. You may blame it to the unavailability of players but there’s a reason why you have 24-man squad and why the club allowed shelling 50m for back up players. I don’t have a problem if Mikel decides to go full Mourinho and keep stacking defenders till he gives us 3 points every week.

If he don’t, questions will be asked about the plannings, the money we have spent, the usefulness of the likes of Jorginho and Sterling, the injury records of Tomiyasu, the red cards and everything else. Right, that’s all I have to say after the dismal performance in last few weeks and I seriously hope we get back to winning ways.

See you on Champions League night.