Man Utd gave Arsenal a masterclass in adaptive tactics, exploiting opposition weaknesses and end product – taking almost every single chance handed to them by an uninspired Arsenal team that looked defeated after only 10 minutes into the game. Not only that, the Premier League champions also gave us a lesson in squad depth, and how to spend money wisely.

Although we’re generally optimistic here at Arsenal Report, the reality is that losing 8-2 to Manchester United is nothing short of a sporting disaster for a club at the level Arsenal wants to be, and completely unacceptable in every single way. There are rational explanations, bad excuses and issues that need to be fixed, but the indisputable fact is that Arsenal is currently nowhere near Man Utd in terms of confidence, strength, quality, depth, sharpness, end product, or even youth quality.

Of course, Man Utd spend much more money than we do (there was a £100m difference between the starting elevens), and they’ve also had more time to build their youth academy over the years. But not even teams like Swansea or QPR will go to Old Trafford this year and lose as heavily as we did yesterday, and the reason is; they won’t try to outclass the best English team in recent history with players who aren’t able to.

Abandoning the 4-2-3-1

The decision to move away from last year’s 4-2-3-1 in favour of this years 4-1-4-1/4-3-3/4-1-2-3/4-5-1 variant is hard to understand. Wenger knows more about football than most people will ever do (you and me included), so there must be a valid and sensible reason that only Wenger knows about – other than not trusting Aaron Ramsey enough to perform well in the no 10 role recently vacated by Fabregas.

Van Persie's new role is too isolated, forcing him to drop deep to get involved in play, leaving large attacking zones unused

Without the no 10 position, Robin van Persie is isolated, and there is no real sense of mutual understanding between the two central midfielders in terms of who is supposed to do what. They look lost, and Ramsey is not efficient in that withdrawn position.

Not only that, but Wenger has slowly moved towards a shapeless formation – a fully fluid setup from midfield and up, where players are supposed to make positional decisions on their own, instead of having strict instructions on what to do.

This works absolutely fine against mediocre Malaysian all-star teams, and will probably work just fine against bottom-table Premier League teams as well. But when you’re up against Manchester United – the Premier League winners and Champions League finalists – there is simply no chance you will be able to get away with fluid and vague instructions based on player decision. Especially when the players in question are normally second or third choice youth players, miles away from the quality needed to keep an in-form Man Utd at bay.

Last year’s 4-2-3-1 formation gave us impressive wins against Spurs, Manchester City, Chelsea, Barcelona and Manchester United. It suited Wilshere and Song perfectly, it allowed a player to link up with Van Persie, and it had some set instructions that meant more discipline overall. And discipline is exactly what young players need, not total freedom.

Yes, the 4-2-3-1 had weaknesses as well, like all tactics do, but most of those weaknesses were part of individual issues, not necessarily structural or positional ones. And it wasn’t the formation that caused the collapse last season – if anything, the 4-2-3-1 was one of the more sensible strategies Wenger has put into practice in the last 4-5 years.

Right now the players need to play in their preferred positions with familiar and clear instructions. They are way too inexperienced to be test subjects in Wenger’s attempts at re-inventing shapes within football.

Why we rarely look sharp when attacking

This is another area I just can’t believe we’re not immediately trying to solve or look at from a technical standpoint. The problem is simple; we don’t have enough bodies in the box during distributive attacking moves (play leading up to crosses or through balls). Our players stand around, waiting to be served a pass, so that they, in turn, can serve it to someone else. The solution, however, is much more complicated.

Attacking players constantly tries to offer short options to the ball holder (A) to keep possession...

Potent teams throw bodies forward, their players move into dangerous zones the second they notice a team-mate being in an advantageous position to distribute a forward pass. Even if the player on the ball is at a positional disadvantage, players move into dangerous areas just in case he finds a way out of his predicament.

It’s not about mindlessly lunging forward – it’s about positioning yourself in an area where you are likely to receive a pass or opportunity of any kind. Maybe it’s a cross, maybe it’s a through ball, maybe it’s a goalkeeper rebound, who cares? The argument that our players aren’t tall enough to connect to a cross might be valid, but if we don’t have anyone in the box in the first place, we can’t exploit rebounds or mistakes in there either.

The way the Arsenal team is operating in this area is that instead of positioning themselves in dangerous attacking positions (running away from the ball, stretching play), they offer the ball holder passing options instead (running towards the ball, narrowing play). That’s the difference between direct and patient play – but when you’re 5 or 6 goals down, there is no sensible reason to continue with patient play. Still, even at 7 goals down, our players were offering the ball holder short options. It’s a strategic collapse of massive proportions.

We don’t even have a player on the far post most of the time – all crosses served must therefore be distributed to the near post, giving us no versatility in that department at all. If a cross is even somewhat overpowered, it ends up in an empty zone and goes to waste. We’ve talked about that recently, in this article.

...but stretching play gives the ball holder (A) more dangerous options, while still having short options (B)

One of the reasons it’s like this is because we insist on playing a traditional secondary forward in a lone striker position this year. Van Persie is neither explosive nor looming, so he can’t play traditional poacher or target man roles.

This means we have no spear head, no point of attacking reference. Instead, Van Persie naturally drifts deep to his preferred secondary forward role, adding another body to the no 10 zone.

This behaviour worked perfectly fine in last year’s 4-2-3-1, since we had an actual no 10 naturally pushing Van Persie into attacking zones, or swapping positions with him during attacks. But in this year’s formation he is isolated, and has to come deep to even be involved in play; one less body in the box.

Another reason we lack bodies in the box is because we don’t use traditional wingers. I’ve talked about this before as well; our wide positions can be described as wide poachers – designed to cut inside and end up as central forwards. Which, again, works perfectly fine if you have a traditional no 10 behind the lone striker, as you still have a distributor behind a narrow front three.

However, without that traditional no 10, that front three now has to cover both the ‘no 10 zone’ and the ‘no 9 zone’ – without enough bodies in both those zones during an attack you have little control of the outcome, and you’d have to rely on one player creating something out of nothing. Which we don’t have anymore, after selling Fabregas.

Spend some money?

The popular argument is that we should ‘spend some fucking money’, but I disagree; we should strengthen our squad depth, regardless of whether or not money has to be spent. The issue isn’t money – we have plenty of cash. The problem is that we arrived way too late to the transfer circus – the clowns have taken off their make-up, and the elephants are asleep.

I fully understand Wenger wanting to see if the newest crop of players and signings were ready to carry the club on their shoulders before making major decisions in the transfer market, but if the biggest league defeat in Arsenal’s history since the late 1800′s isn’t a wake-up call, what is?

I also reject the notion that we don’t have enough quality – we do. What we lack is confidence, direction and form, not quality. Confidence and form can be partly solved by convincing our players that we mean business. And one way to do that is to bring in new blood. Not only to show we can attract players of the highest calibre, but also to push our current players to work harder.

My opinion is that the money we received for Fabregas and Nasri should have been re-invested immediately into new and better replacements. It would’ve been hard in the case of Fabregas to bring in a better player, but there is no valid reason why we didn’t push for someone like Mata or Hazard as a direct replacement for Nasri on the left flank.

Arsenal made a £37.5m profit so far this summer in initial fees, which could rise to £50m in profit once all the add-ons come rolling in. This means that even if we started the summer with £0 in the war chest (which we didn’t, we started with close to £50m), we would’ve been able to buy two players today of Mata’s price point without even noticing anything in the books.

Conclusion

A completely unacceptable result for Arsenal, with so many errors during 90 minutes that it would crash our server if went into all of them in detail. And to be honest, the school boy errors displayed by the Arsenal team yesterday doesn’t even deserve a tactical analysis – we’re not interested in U12 football. But at least Wenger received a proper wake-up call for once, instead of these ‘almost signs’ that could be excused by clichés.

We are supporters, not just fans, and we will continue to support the decisions made, as long as they are reasonable. Although this result is a disaster in itself, we’re far away from a club crisis…but the aftermath of this result could quickly turn into one if we don’t respond well and address our biggest problems; squad depth, tactical issues and player discipline.

Buying players unfortunately only solves one of the problems on that list, and there is much more to this than just Wenger. He is only one small part of a bigger picture, and sacking him will not solve anything.