Thinking about the left

Morning.

I guess this morning Mikel Arteta will arrive for training and have a word first and foremost with the medical staff to see what the lay of the land is with the players who were away on international duty. If you want a full round-up of who did what, where, and for how long, Andrew A has it laid out over on Arseblog News.

I think we covered most of what was notable over the last couple of days, but just a couple of quick things. First, as much as you can get excited by a compilation video of a defender, I liked watching one of Piero Hincapie’s performance for Ecuador against Argentina. In particular, his off the ball movement which I think is part of why he could be such an effective addition to the squad. He looks very solid defensively, and you can see he has attributes that are slightly different to those of Myles Lewis-Skelly and Riccardo Calafiori.

For me, this is a really interesting aspect of our summer business. Arteta has often spoken about wanting to make his team less predictable, but – certainly last season – where we were very predictable was left back. Which is no slight on MLS, by the way. He broke through and deserved all of his flowers (and his new deal), but since the moment the manager deployed Oleksandr Zinchenko there when he first joined, that position has been pretty fundamental to the way we play.

I know it. You know it. The opposition managers and analysts know it. And now, perhaps, we might see something a little different. It will obviously take the new man a bit of time to bed in, but as the season progresses you would imagine it makes it a little more tricky to predict the Arsenal line-up when we have those players available. I don’t think it means we’re going to see massive tactical shifts, but a bit more variety in terms of playing style and how we operate from there might well be part of the plan. Not least when you consider how you get Eberechi Eze into the same side as Declan Rice and Martin Odegaard, something I really want to see.

The obvious way is Eze on the left, but do I think he’ll be asked to play like a traditional left-winger? No, because he’s clearly more effective in central areas. From Phil’s profile piece on the former Crystal Palace man, here’s his shot map from last season:

Assuming those are the positions we want get him into to have a crack at goal, it means him coming in from the left, and also that there’s going to be space out there. I don’t think you necessarily want Rice shuttling over from his left-8 position, so maybe there’s scope for the left-back to overlap more than we’ve seen in recent years. It looks more natural to Hincapie than the others, which is why his signing is so fascinating, but I don’t think it’s anything that Calafiori or MLS can’t do either. Something to watch as the season goes on.

The other thing I took note of was the fact Cristhian Mosquera was not in the squad for Spain U21s game in Kosovo having captained the side in the previous match. Perhaps it’s nothing to worry about, it might have been planned for reasons we’re not aware of, but our senses are so heightened when it comes to injuries that anything that even vaguely suggests there’s a problem stands out. Fingers crossed there’s nothing to it, and there was some positive reporting around Ben White during the Interlull too, so fingers crossed.

Finally for today, if you use the Arseblog apps on iOS or Android, there have been some updates lately, so you can download via the respective app stores if it hasn’t happened automatically. Some quick notes to save you some emails:

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Right, that’s it for now. We’ll have an Arsecast for you a bit later today so stand by for that.

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