Arsenal: 4 tactical issues with Xhaka & Partey

4. Reverting to Predictable Build-Up Play

Seeing Xhaka and Tierney in the same team brought back memories. How often would we see that pass sequence in the game, then?

There was some of that on show in the game, and Arsenal’s only goal came from a move that culminated in Tierney receiving the ball high up on the left and whipping it in for Odegaard to score, yet everything else aside from that was mind-numbingly predictable.

Xhaka and Partey can bring out the better qualities in each other, but how Arsenal approach games and the patterns they look to create are more one-dimensional as a pair. Granted, they haven’t played together in a while with one of them barely fit and the other crippled with self-doubt, so fluency is hardly going to pop on the grass straight.

As this team attempted to shift away from the previous Xhaka and Partey pivot, albeit completely enforced, there ends up being some muscle memory reactions in the players not too dissimilar from the football played last season.

And, at Everton, it felt an awful lot like the previous campaign: relatively neat and effective build-up play out of phase one and then not much invention, idea or patterns in phase two onwards.

It’s also something the opposition is familiar with. There are data points aplenty to pour over in preparation to facing a Xhaka and Partey midfield, not least as the pair are only just reunited there with neither at their best either physically or in terms of form.

All of the above does not infer that the duo can’t and should not play together, but they are points that need to be looked at or addressed for Arteta moving forward.