Yes, I also agree with Franchise. I've said this a few times before, but Koscielny and Vermaelen are far too similar to work together. Vermaelen isn't the physical beast we make him out to be, and his positioning and game reading are not world class. Mertesacker is. He compliments Koscielny perfectly because he's the sort that hangs back and clears anything with ice cool nerves. In case of trouble, Kos comes and helps him out with his great speed. But Kos is never left open, simply due to Mert's excelent positioning. He's always in his line. The Kos injury also changed the game, since we all know of Djourou's reckless ways.

The game? Horrible. Rosicky was frakking awesome I have to say. Only guy with drive out of all that midfield, and was sadly deployed out wide for some reason. When we all saw that possession wasn't working, why not sub in AOC, and put Rosicky down the middle which is how we've gotten our positive results? Milan's weaknesses are it's flanks, and we didn't do whit down the flanks. In the first half everything was down Walcott's flank, with the middle completely null due to Ramsey sucking too much. Arteta is good, but he cannot singlehandedly control a very physical and tough 3 man midfield. Can I repeat the point about Ramsey sucking? We've played miles better with him benched, I dunno if it's a confidence thing or just bad form, but he pretty much breaks all our plays, does not short pass well enough and lacks drive when it really matters.

God, good thing Gervinho is coming back because I can't stand seeing him anymore. I also agree with the point that our best players sucked... Sagna wasn't his usual rock, Vermaelen was all over the place, Song had his usual DM/AM personality syndrome and van Persie and Henry were sadly extremely isolated due to the suck that was behind them. I hope Kos ain't out for that long, because we really don't need another CB injury in such a critical time.

I'm all out for deploying our reserve side in the home game... there's no way we're winning 5-0. We should concentrate on 4th place and winning the FA cup which would be a welcome boost to morale and finally kill the annoying trophy drought.

Crap, crap display.

Anyone have passing statistics?

I dont know why everyone is putting all the blame on Ramsey because he didnt cause any of the goal and he wasnt the reason we played shit. It wasnt just Ramsey it was the whole team who played shit. Only players who played oke were RVP and Kos. Too bad Kos got injured and things went from bad to worse.

I dont understan how ppl can say that Rosicky played well as he lost the ball very cheaply. Yes he tried to move ball quicker and thats what we lacked in our performance but he also lost the ball plenty of times. He was also the reason we conceded 4th goal.

Rosicky was the reason we conceeded the 4th goal? I guess I missed Djourou's running over of Ibra, then.

Rosicky had a great game, IMO. He pressed like hell, even tackled a few times, put in some cheeky passes and was one of the few to be able to retain the ball well. It's not really his fault he was out of position.

Ramsey's not a bad player... but in AM he's totally lost and ineffectual. We all know this. Our whole game is based on our AM doing his job, and he's just not ready or built for it as of now. I know he'd be miles better in a deeper position, such as Arteta's.

But yeah, overall team fail from the forward line back.

i thought rosicky had a good game,he was creating some chances and had a shot that made me shet bricks

He had one decent shot to start it off then he ruined every forward play he was involved with, unable to complete one pass forward.

He was also directly at fault for losing possession in the attack that led to the penalty.

@ Joe26

Ramsey is not directly @ fualt for the defensive lapses but contributed a great deal. Milans intention was to be a whole lot more compact because of their fear of Arsenal's pace in attack. Enter Ramsey who always seemed to somehow hit a cul-de-sac when there was an opportunity to inject pace into the attack. Like i said earlier, some1 like Nasri (not as physically imposing as Rambo, mind u), would have bundled his way trough the Milan defense.

Rozza may hav misplaced his passes but he at least tried option like being direct and trying some flicks an through balls. The best Ramsey could have done would b to hav at least tried to make some runs for him. Instead, he'd just sit in the middle and slow down the attack.

Not knocking him as a player or his talents, but his positioning and performnance was not for this game

I agree that Ramsey didnt play well but he is not the only one to be blamed. The reason i picked Rosicky out was becuase some of us thought he played well. There were lots of players who didnt do well like Verm and Sagna who are our best players.

@beatrix
for stats check out:
http://www.whoscored.com/Matches/569499/MatchReport/Europe-UEFA-Champions-League-2011-2012-AC-Milan-Arsenal
http://www.uefa.com/match-centre/cup=1/season=2012/day=7/session=2/match=2007669/index.html

What a game, just heart broken.

I am still total shock.

Emmanuel Petit: "This match was a disgrace. It is surely the worst performance of the club in the European Cup."

Petit: "Arsenal is worse than I thought. What's perhaps the most worrying thing is to say that the club will not do anything this summer."

Petit: "Arsene must quickly regain balance. Arsenal were a contender, now they are mere participants.

http://bit.ly/xfPoPk

Samuelj29060 wrote:Emmanuel Petit: "This match was a disgrace. It is surely the worst performance of the club in the European Cup."

Petit: "Arsenal is worse than I thought. What's perhaps the most worrying thing is to say that the club will not do anything this summer."

Petit: "Arsene must quickly regain balance. Arsenal were a contender, now they are mere participants.

http://bit.ly/xfPoPk

The whole world can see it, Wenger will not listen to anyone. Wenger is slowly turning us in to joke.

We have so many players who should not be at Arsenal let alone start game after game.

Samuelj29060 wrote:
Petit: "Arsene must quickly regain balance. Arsenal were a contender, now they are mere participants.
http://bit.ly/xfPoPk

This sums up everything currently wrong with our mentality.

Somewhere around 50 minutes into Arsenal's meltdown Wednesday night in the San Siro, the British commentator on the American television feed said more with seven words than any scribe could have written with 10 times as many.

"This is not," he said, "a great Milan side."

-Bleacherreport

he did say that,

he said this is not a great milan side, arsenal has juste been very poor, this is not a great Milan side at all, and the further they get into the competition the more they will be exposed to merely show what i mean...

can u get more f*ckin biased than that? i was watching the match on sportsnet with those 2 morons as commentators. Shit man ok fine maybe Arsenal did have a bad game sure it happens to everyone, but dont downgrade us to a Blackburn or something like that. and its not the first time, last year against tottenham it was exactly these 2 b*stards and when crouch scored they were like YES!!!!!!!!1 YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 TOTTENHAM ARE SLAYING THE GIANTS!! YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 IN THE SAN SIRO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS wtfff man relax.. biased sons of b*tches man.. what do u guys think, im sure you heard also, this is AcMilan for Gods sake, a little respect, as i fan, i felt very very offended man... its like as if he was saying, pffffffff i cant believe Arsenal is being beat by a bucnh of nobodies

Easy there, friend.

I don't think he was consigning you to that category of 'nobodies' or Blackburn but rather saying that it wasn't Milan being so great that was the reason for Arsenal's epic fail but more Arsenal being so terrible that they Milan didn't have to be that great to win.

like i said, everyone has its bad days, but just the way it came out, i didnt like it, and what i said about tottenham last year and all the things they said is 100% true... n e ways wtvv, we showed them at the expense of arsenal though.. sorry

I take nothing from Milan, your team played clinically and composedly.

But we didn't even make it hard for you, so I think our crappiness was a bigger factor.

crapiness what a sick word lolll

lol, welcome to the Arsenal FC section of Goallegacy.

I expected us to lose but getting humiliated? Really? At the very least, I expected an away goal, but no - we were completey shit defensively and offensively.

We wouldn't win CL anyway, and I don't give a damn about that FA Cup, we should get Top4, and hope for a better season.

this was a team that lost at san siro
trololol

Sina wrote:
this was a team that lost at san siro
trololol

GoonerJay29 wrote:http://www.zonalmarking.net/2012/02/15/milan-4-0-arsenal-tactics/

Zonal Marking's summation of the tactics in the match, which elaborates more on what I mention in my own "analysis".

Or if you prefer, the conclusion of the article, which is pretty accurate as far as I can tell:

These are clearly two very different sides – good in some areas, bad in others. One’s strengths are the other’s weaknesses, and vice-versa. Here, one side focused strongly on putting energy into their preferred areas, with Milan dominating the centre ground and outmuscling Arsenal throughout. The away side, however, barely even attacked down the flanks, and it wasn’t really clear what Arsenal’s gameplan was, or what they were trying to do on the ball.

Milan certainly played well, but their performance was more about maximum efficiency than great skill. They actually only managed five shots on target in the game, and there were rarely slick passing moves or periods of utter dominance from them. They were just brilliantly ruthless when they went forward – ZM has questioned whether the approach of bullying their way past opponents is good enough to defeat top opposition, as shown by their poor record against big sides in Serie A – but Arsenal were weak, and Milan were brutal.

This is a genuinely shocking result for Arsenal. In terms of style, Milan seemed the ideal side for them to face, because of their vulnerability to pace and width, but Arsenal didn’t show either of those features here. It’s staggering that Arsenal didn’t go wide more readily, and difficult to explain.

In one of their long-running spats at the turn of the century, Arsene Wenger once commented upon Sir Alex Ferguson, saying that “His weakness is that he doesn’t think he has a weakness.” Wenger’s weakness is that he doesn’t seem to know his side’s strength.

RealGunner wrote:

The Franchise wrote:Wenger said something about always letting balls over the top of the defence, I have to agree with him. Last season vs Barca, tonight against Milan I felt this was a problem.

Maybe im reading too much into it, but I noticed that these have happened when both Kos and Verm are in the center. I always was concerned with those two together because both strike me as those who enjoy coming to close down rather than waiting and reading. But these two games give me some kind of evidence, albiet not much.

I know Kos is very mobile and I often see him covering round and picking off runs. But I also notice, many of those are along the floor.

But balls over the top, they seem to really trouble Arsenal when those two are paired.

Am I reading too much into it?

Thats completely true.

This is why Mertesacker is important to this team, and probably the reason why wenger bought him.

Was reading a bit if history including how Man U used to out muscle Arsenal, and Fergie even said it after a win over them, get at them and put them off their game and they get upset and wont perform as highly. This was way abck and a different Arsenal team, but under Wenger I believe essentially thats still how they are, they are just not used to going to fight consistently, they are weak in that they dont do even physical battle and work defensively as a team. They always seem to focus on technical play going forward more, and leave defensive work to the defenders and CMs... Milan are not a great side, but certainly won the battles and just had much more desire and determination...

Too bad Mertesacker looks to be out for a long time...was eager to see if he can toughen up Arsenal's defense...

Ill say again, Wenger looks like leaving this summer?

TonyDaBeast wrote:he did say that,

he said this is not a great milan side, arsenal has juste been very poor, this is not a great Milan side at all, and the further they get into the competition the more they will be exposed to merely show what i mean...

can u get more f*ckin biased than that? i was watching the match on sportsnet with those 2 morons as commentators. Shit man ok fine maybe Arsenal did have a bad game sure it happens to everyone, but dont downgrade us to a Blackburn or something like that. and its not the first time, last year against tottenham it was exactly these 2 b*stards and when crouch scored they were like YES!!!!!!!!1 YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 TOTTENHAM ARE SLAYING THE GIANTS!! YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 IN THE SAN SIRO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS wtfff man relax.. biased sons of b*tches man.. what do u guys think, im sure you heard also, this is AcMilan for Gods sake, a little respect, as i fan, i felt very very offended man... its like as if he was saying, pffffffff i cant believe Arsenal is being beat by a bucnh of nobodies

Agreed, a little respect. We drew against Barcelona at the Camp Nou and lost 2-3 to them at San Siro, but Barcelona needed a Van Bommel own goal and a dodgy penalty call to win.

What other team in the world can give Barcelona that kind of competition over two legs?

leemhuis wrote:

TonyDaBeast wrote:he did say that,

he said this is not a great milan side, arsenal has juste been very poor, this is not a great Milan side at all, and the further they get into the competition the more they will be exposed to merely show what i mean...

can u get more f*ckin biased than that? i was watching the match on sportsnet with those 2 morons as commentators. Shit man ok fine maybe Arsenal did have a bad game sure it happens to everyone, but dont downgrade us to a Blackburn or something like that. and its not the first time, last year against tottenham it was exactly these 2 b*stards and when crouch scored they were like YES!!!!!!!!1 YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 TOTTENHAM ARE SLAYING THE GIANTS!! YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 IN THE SAN SIRO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS wtfff man relax.. biased sons of b*tches man.. what do u guys think, im sure you heard also, this is AcMilan for Gods sake, a little respect, as i fan, i felt very very offended man... its like as if he was saying, pffffffff i cant believe Arsenal is being beat by a bucnh of nobodies

Agreed, a little respect. We drew against Barcelona at the Camp Nou and lost 2-3 to them at San Siro, but Barcelona needed a Van Bommel own goal and a dodgy penalty call to win.

What other team in the world can give Barcelona that kind of competition over two legs?

*cough cough*