Arsenal: Another bad habit that needs to be eliminated

Arsenal had the awful habit of playing out from the back all the time. They broke that habit. But now they have another bad habit that needs the same treatment.

Arsenal’s early season woes were almost entirely down to playing out from the back every single time Bernd Leno restarted play. Sokratis in particular was guilty of some shambolic decisions from the back, but midfielders like Granit Xhaka and Matteo Guendouzi weren’t spared the blame either. They all had problems.

They’re starting to kick that habit. They don’t insist on playing out from the back. They hoof it down field more often than they dilly-dally along the back line, and that’s well and good, but now they’re developing another unsavory habit.

Albeit one that is far less detrimental to our ability to withstand mental failures.

The problem is taking short corners. And we saw so much of it against Bournemouth. They’d dink the ball short, pass it back and forth, get it into the traditional semi-circle pass-a-thon and never actually mount a threat.

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From a corner.

Then Nicolas Pepe stepped up, delivered a nice ball into the box, and David Luiz put it away for a goal.

We wouldn’t have scored that goal if we kept playing the short corners we’d been playing. yet even after that goal, the short corners persisted, completely neglecting the aerial threat we possess in Luiz, and in others as well, like Calum Chambers.

The short corner amounts to nothing. And while long corners may have a higher risk of sprouting a counter attack for the opposition, at the end of the day, if we want to properly utilize set pieces like corners, we have to take advantage of the resources that we have and play to win, not play to not lose.

I have seen us run some excellent long corner routines, but have yet to see any real plan with short corners. I understand that later in matches, corners are taken short to run out the clock, but that wasn’t the case against Bournemouth. We were mixing between short and long corners for the entirety of the match.

Kick the habit. Loft the ball into the box and give the aerial threats a true chance to help out a struggling attack. Otherwise it’s just another wasted opportunity, and Lord knows we don’t need anymore of those these days. Plus it gives Luiz an added value. Which he really needs.