Arsenal dominate Atlético Madrid in the Champions League

0:22Hi everyone, welcome back to Stadio. No booster today, but we're going to be joined by our good friend Karl Anker from The Athletic to talk about all of Tuesday night's Champions League stuff so very excited about that first of all we hope everyone's staying safe and well wherever you are and just a couple of quick reminders don't forget to check the link in the description for tickets for our London Live show at the Southbank Centre tickets are on sale for December 4th and also our second show in March if you want to go and grab those nice and early and if you're listening to the clip of this on the free feed why not come and join us on Patreon patreon.com forward slash stadio you can sign up for the podcast membership which gets you every single podcast ad-free info or you can sign up for the Stadio Social Club which gets you all the podcasts plus access to the Stadio Social Club discord loads of other perks patreon.com forward slash stadio so yeah like I mentioned today we're just going to talk about some of the Champions League stuff from Tuesday and I'm delighted to be joined by our good friend Karl Anker how are you man I'm doing okay I'm entering that point this season where I don't know what day of the week it is anymore and it's all match day this and match day that um and i'm also getting really excited because we're getting closer to 10 premier league games so then i can probably do like a big trip to opta and go i need the following bits of data because now the sample size is big enough so yeah i'm doing well and also let's be real i'm a match just united report and match just beat liverpool so i'm doing well and you got yeah and you have no no midweek game to remotely spoil it.

1:51You can dine out for the whole... It's a good feeling. Sometimes I watch a Champions League game and I'm watching two top quality teams go at each other. I'm like, wow. They're like properly beating each other up. I'm stressful. I'm just going to stay over here. It's stressful. Well, I mean, it felt quite stressful for a load of teams last night. We're recording this on Wednesdays. We're going to talk about Tuesday night's games. But some wild results, a load of goals, a load of red cards, quite a lot of silliness but I think that we'll probably start with Arsenal if that's cool because felt like a big win there's a good Atleti side who started the season really badly and it was they had the worst I think they had the worst start to a season under Simeone after a few games and then they completely turned it around they've been scoring a load of goals they hammered Real Madrid in the derby and I think that something always happens with Atleti when they when Champions League comes around and they play an English side when people still think it's the Atleti of 2013 and it's just not and it hasn't been for a while there was a stat that I think they've only failed to score in two of their last 24 Champions League games or something like that so they score a bunch of goals I don't know what you felt about it but it felt like this was a real sign of how far this Arsenal side has now kind of come under Mikel Arteta and you could tell afterwards that Diego Simeone was a bit shell-shocked yeah the the images of him towards in the game, his eyes looked a bit red, his tie was askew.

3:21Kylian Mbappe has this wonderful face he pulls every now and again when a player scores an amazing goal against his team. He just sort of stands there with his hands and he sits like, fair enough, that's what I used to do to people. You saw Simeone's version of that where he's just sort of sat on the dugout going, I used to do that to the football team. My team used to do that and you're totally right this Atletico Madrid team is not. We're always still thinking of Simeone's Atletico as the sufferable team as the team that's got huge towering center backs and are going to go over to the big teams and beating 1-0 via set pieces where that's arsenal in parts now yeah uh and i think this is a really i tweeted it after the first goal of just arsenal robust now right all the words i can use to describe arsenal are some combination of robust resilient sturdy um and the arsenal right now are really interesting if you're not an arsenal fan it's a really interesting case study in what happens when a team goes from being swashbuckling as they were in in 22 23 and and with sort of the surprise darlings of the premier league didn't quite win the title and now arteta through a series of transfer winners have gone i'm going to build a team that can just grind you to dust and that's what you've got there and if you're not an arsenal fan is that more entertaining that's at your discretion but all i saw yesterday was an arsenal team that once they went went one up just went okay we're going through the gears now we're just going to drop the hammer and that's scary if you're not an arsenal fan yeah i think that's an interesting thing i mean a lot of the focus this season from a Premier League point of view is just the evolution of the league right everyone's taller everyone's now bringing the towels back yep the long throws are coming the you know the goals per game are down set piece goals are up etc etc what Mikel Arteta has done quite well I think has just evolved aside to the needs and the necessities of the modern game now aside that if you shut down one threat there are multiple other ways pick your poison yeah also kind of become that side right they've just fixed multiple issues with the squad that you could see it with the Atleti thing.

5:35They create quite a lot from open play, which is a criticism that Arsenal have had recently, and I get it. But also, it's really hard to create an open play against really, really good low blocks when you can create a set piece like they did for the first goal and then open the game up. That's, I think, the real true barometer of how good this side is because then all of a sudden you've got Myles Lewis Skelly stepping into midfield, laying it off to Gabriel Martinelli who puts in a pure Henri 2005 finish. Again, the game's just a lot more open. Few teams can put in a kind of performance like that against an Atleti side in Europe and kind of win it so comfortably.

6:12Right, this summer, Arsenal did what everyone who plays FIFA or football manager tries to do every summer, but it's incredibly hard to do in real life. So Arsenal looked at their squad, looked at their weaknesses and went, how do we address these? Right now, Declan Rice, really good midfielder. We need someone who can play next to Declan Rice now. Who's the person out there who can do it? You've got Zuby, who... as far as I'm concerned, should have cost$100 million. I think he's Arsenal's best sign in the city. He's that good. Every time I need to learn something about Arsenal, I go on Billy Carpenter's amazing sub-stack, Eddie's Barbecue, and I recommend it to every Arsenal fan right now.

6:47Very good indeed. Exceptional long reads on Arsenal. And he just outlined all the problems, all the things Arsenal need to sort out. So to me, and to how Billy explained it, was you need to reduce that right-hand side reliance, you need to get someone in next to Declan Rice, and you need a big, nasty so-and-so up front. And you go through all the activity Arsenal did. It was tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. And then because Arteta achieved all these objectives, he got a stretch goal and he got one of his favourite sorts of players. And lo and behold, Mouskeras ended up being absolutely phenomenal as well.

7:25So there are so many things in football where you end up writing a simple sentence or you end up saying a simple sentence and you can sound like a 12-year-old, but just being able to pull off that simplicity is so important to what you need to do. So Arsenal achieved all of their objectives in the summer transfer window. Pretty simple sentence. But now you look at them and you look at them play against Atletico Madrid and other teams and you go, oh, I don't see the structural flaws in this team. I don't see the personnel weaknesses that I saw in previous seasons. Ruben Amring keeps bringing up the 1-0 defeat against Arsenal at the start of the season.

8:00and he brings it up almost like a as a semi-flex of like could have won the game could have won the game yeah yeah so right after the derby he's in a he's in a back and forth with another journalist and he goes did you see the Arsenal game and he was like yeah he goes did you think we're the better team and people were like yeah and I think there's going to be quite a few teams this season that are going to leave an Arsenal game and sort of half bragging about the performance they had despite the fact they lost or being frustrated that they've played well and not got a result. And then we'll probably get to the end of the season and go, we should have stopped bragging about that because now Arsenal are holding some form of trophy.

8:37Because this is what happens, right? When you reach, providing health is good and providing levels can be maintained, which I think Arteta is very, very good at preventing those sorts of implosions. You end up, this team's on that sort of trajectory where you're going, I mean, you're better winning a trophy soonish. Otherwise, you're going to have some serious crap. But even then, you're just like, they probably will. I'm watching Yakares play right now, and okay, he's not necessarily the swashbuckling striker that many people pretended or imagined he'd be. But just by simple virtue of him being a big, nasty guy who can occupy a centre-back or two, you can see Saka and Eze go, ah, hello.

9:20Space. This is fun. Yeah, I think I agree with everything you said there. Can we just sing Lewis Scully's praises for that? Yes, let's do that. I think this is an example of something that Arsenal haven't had previously, right? Which is that Calafuri has emerged as the left back that Arteta wanted him to be, which is essentially a left back with a complete free roll, a chaos merchant. However, there are certain games where you know that Myles is a better option based on who the opposition are, but also how reliable is it and how good a position is it having Myles Lewis-Skelly, who is essentially a centre midfielder anyway, being able to bring him in for a Champions League game like that and him just be fine and he's 19 years old i just i just really love that ssd got so good for martinelli because he's running at pace yeah and it's it's a perfectly timed well-released pass and he's also that thing of he's clearly spent a fraction of a second to go i'm going to give it to this guy in a way that he doesn't need to adjust his run and he can hit it first time because this has to play at pace and again if you play a lot of FIFA if you play a lot of EAFC that's just a button press if you've watched football outside not even outside the Champions League if you've just watched any game of football for any length of time you will know how hard it is to hit that pass on the move and you'll know how hard it is to do it in that sort of high intensity scenario when you've got two or three players down your back there are so many ways Lewis Skelly can pass that and it doesn't go to Martinelli's strongest foot it doesn't go in a way where you can hit that first time and he's just he's just done it and again I'm watching this not as an Arsenal fan going uh oh That was a preview of today's episode of Stadio if you want to join up for ad-free podcasts extra podcasts access to the Stadio social club and more you can join us at patreon.com forward slash stadio

11:19Thank you.