Eternity RPC Board
04-27-2017, 04:55 PM
Arsenal – Juventus
Earlier, me and the Blacaria played as Ajax and Schalke 04 against eachother (1-0; 0-0; 1-1) and it could not have been more boring. But now the Blacaria went with this monstrosity, Arsenal, and I picked Juventus. It could have been a great template for a Championsleague match.
I can see why Arsenal is Blac’s favourite team recently, because they perfectly fit his direct attacking style. With players like Walcott, Sanchez, and Oxlade-Chamberlain, he can attack from all angles with speed and unpredictability. My pick, Juventus, was simply because I wanted a high-class team as well and I seldom allow myself to be Juventus (in a season, Juventus is no fun because its too easy to dominate the Serie A, and online it means the other person is forced to choose a top team as well).
Game I
Blac’s Arsenal showed up in the formation I had expected, which was 4-1-4-1. I had therefore opted for a 4-3-1-2, rather than a 3-5-2, which would have enabled me to deploy Barzagli, Chiellini and Bonucci in defence. But then I’d play with three central defenders against a lone striker.
In the opening phase it was Arsenal attacking, playing mostly on my half, while Juventus tried to build-up from deep, and occasionally broke out on the counter-attack. Nothing new then in our usual confrontations.
In the 17th minute however, Juventus had a free kick in Arsenal’s half. Evra received the ball on the left flank, crossed it into the box, and Arsenal’s defenders weren’t paying enough attention so that Lichtsteiner could score the opening goal for Juventus. The Arsenal players appealed for offside, but the referee ignored them.
Arsenal resumed its siege of my penalty box, but every pass into the box got intercepted by one of my defenders, triggering a new counter-attack with long balls forward to Mandzukic and Dybala. Part of Arsenal’s problem was that, although attacking in great numbers, they too quickly tried to go for the killer-pass into the danger zones, leading to many interceptions and wasted attacking opportunities. Juventus’ counter-attacks were quickly smothered as well however, triggering counter-attacks from Arsenal. And so the game descended into more and more open match that went up and down the pitch.
When Juventus didn’t have the opportunity to counter-attack, they hung on to the ball much longer than Arsenal. The build-up began with Chiellini and Bonucci, with the goalkeeper never hitting it long. Even though Arsenal tried to steal the ball in my half, Juventus always had plenty of channels through which to move the ball forward. Lichtsteiner and Evra provided wide options, and there were three central midfielders always providing short vertical options. Arsenal, with only 2 central midfielders, could not effectively shut down the central channels. Therefore, Juventus frequently had prolonged periods of ball possession in the later first half. When playing in Arsenal’s half, Arsenal remained very compact. Juventus could play around it however, because its wing-backs tried to stretch Arsenal wide, while Marchisio operated as a very deep playmaker, directing my attacks from a position around the half-way line that was far out of reach of Arsenal’s players.
Just when I was beginning to think I had the match under control, Arsenal scored the equalizer. Bellerin, instead of crossing from the right flank, passed it back to central area in front of my penalty box. All of my players had lined themselves up for a cross, so there was no one to block Wilshere when he fired from outside the box into the upper left corner of the net.
In the 50th minute, early in the 2nd half, Juventus would turn the tiki-taka on Blacaria. Arsenal missed a corner-kick and Buffon took the goal-kick, passing it short to Chiellini. From there an elaborate build-up began, going back and forth with the central midfielders, then moving out to the left flank, back to the central midfielders, to the right flank, to the centre again, back to the right flank, and then back to the middle again: only now within Arsenal’s penalty box. The attack involved a total of 17 uninterrupted passes, finishing with Lichtsteiner dribbling into the box and reaching Pereyra waiting near the penalty spot. Okay, I admit it wasn’t ‘real’ Tiki-Taka because it wasn’t a high-tempo positional play, it was more of a clever use of passing to lure Arsenal’s players out of position to create spaces to be exploited as they appeared.
I hadn’t even finished celebrating when Arsenal scored the equalizer. Right from the moment Arsenal took the kick-off, Juventus wasted a long ball and Arsenal reached Chamberlain on the flank. Chiellini didn’t pay attention, and in his back were two players of Arsenal, completely unmarked, waiting for the early cross. Chamberlain perfectly placed it over Chiellini’s head, and Walcott behind him scored. Three minutes later, the exact same scenario repeated itself. Only this time it was Bellerin on the right flank, with Alexis Sanchez coming from behind the defender to volley-kick the ball past Buffon. Part of the reason this could happen twice in a row was perhaps because both Chiellini and Lichtsteiner, the righter half of my four-man defence, defended slightly higher up the pitch than the left side of Bonucci and Evra. And its there on the right side that I got beaten by crosses from deep. A good cross can’t be defended, but here I was perhaps giving Arsenal a little too much of an invitation.
With the score line suddenly 3-2 for Arsenal, things got worse for me as Dybala left the pitch with an injury. But I replaced him with Morata. With the match now completely open, the spectacle really took off. Juventus counter-attacked with Mandzukic down the left flank in the 58th minute. A cross landed before Morata’s feet a few meters from the goal line, but he hit the goalkeeper. In the 60th minute Morata played a high ball to Mandzukic in the penalty box, and Mandzukic attempted an overhead kick that barely missed the net. In the 70th minute a low cross from deep by Lichtsteiner reached Pereyra, waiting on the edge of Arsenal’s box. His shot was kept from goal by Cech with the greatest difficulty. In the 73rd minute a through ball by Mandzukic on Pereyra making a run into the box enabled him to score but he fired wide. In the 75th minute Arsenal had a corner-kick and Per Mertesacker headed the ball on the crossbar. In the 77th minute a distance shot by Pogda almost flew between Cech’s hands, and in the 78th minute Lichtsteiner lost the ball in Juventus’ half to Theo Walcott, and Chiellini was just in time to stop Walcott from advancing alone on my goal.
Then finally in the 82nd minute Bonucci scored the equalizer for Juventus as he was left unmarked during a corner kick. In the 84th minute, Juventus continued to attack as I hoped there was still more in it (given the amount of scoring chances). Morata dribbled into Arsenal’s box, and again Pereyra was waiting near the penalty spot and left completely unmarked. But this time he missed this ultimate opportunity to score the winning goal.
Arsenal too went for the kill. In the 88th minute, another one of those deep crosses from the right flank landed before a red shirt very close to my goal, but they hit Buffon. A few seconds later, Chamberlain got the chance to try it again and Walcott was there to score. I sent my troops out of the trenches for the remaining minutes, but it was over.
Game II
For game II I had made some adjustments within my system. Our previous game was nice to watch, but too many chances had been missed and it was still a loss of 3-4. Blac had switched to his standard 4-2-3-1 system for this game.
Although my team was defensively better organized now than in the previous match, this match would be the game of injuries for me. Lichtsteiner went off in the 8th minute, and I had no right full-backs on my bench. Evra was moved to that position and Alex Sandro came on as the new left full-back. But Evra is not familiar to playing as a right back, and in a 4-3-1-2 system, a lot is expected from these positions.
In the 16th minute a shot from Arsenal landed on the post and we got away lucky. Throughout the first half, Juve withstood the pressure of Arsenal. Occasionally Juventus attacked, such as in the 50th minute when Dybala went past his man in the penalty box and had a big chance to score, but he missed. The second half was the same as the first: Arsenal attacking, Juventus counter-attacking. My ability to build attacks was seriously harmed by the fact that Evra was now playing as the right wing-back, but on the counter the team was capable of creating dangerous situations so I wasn’t too bothered with staying deep and defending in my own third of the pitch.
In the 69th minute however, a string of individual errors threatened to ruin the match for me. Evra attempted a long pass and it was so badly placed that it was intercepted by Arsenal with not a Juve player around. Welbeck, the lone striker, was sent deep down the right flank where Evra was now absent. He cut inside with the ball into the penalty box. As if Welbeck had washed his body with onions or something, my defenders stayed far away from him, enabling him to get almost to the penalty spot with the ball. When even my keeper had decided that if the defenders did nothing, he should come out of his goal, Welbeck fired and scored. So much for tactics when your players do stuff like this.
In the 72nd minute, another one of my full-backs left the game injured. Alex Sandro this time. So I moved Chiellini to the left back position (where he once started his career) and brought on Andrea Barzagli as central defender. In the 76th minute, a sudden through-ball through the middle by Mandzukic to Pereyra enabled him to score the unexpected equalizer. And in the 79th minute Chiellini even had the chance to score 2-1 when he dribbled deep inside Arsenal’s box from the left. The match ended in 1-1 however, and I praised myself lucky considering the problems I had with my wing-backs.
Game III
For game III I was dead-set on winning it. I wanted at least one victory with Juventus against Arsenal. Arsenal had sticked to its 4-2-3-1, but this time I knew how to render it ineffective. With a few defensive adjustments, some changes in the playing style, and so extra instructions regarding the opposition players, I could make life very hard on Arsenal.
Arsenal barely got any attacking play going in the opening phase and in the 8th minute Chiellini opened the score line with a header from a corner kick. In the 18th minute Marchisio intercepted a long pass from Arsenal. Via Bonucci, Khedira and Pereyra the ball reached Mandzukic. The Arsenal defenders, thinking Mandzukic was going to shoot, quickly closed down on him to block it. Instead, Mandzukic quickly extended Pereyra’s pass with his wrong foot. The ball penetrated the Arsenal defence and Pogba ran into the box to score. This is what they’d call in Italy a moment of ‘fantasia’, the sudden, unexpected, yet simple move that puts and entire defence on the wrong foot.
As Arsenal was completely unable to respond, Blac brought on substitutions and resorted to his 4-1-4-1 formation in the 28th minute. After half-time absolutely nothing worth mentioning happened until the 66th minute as my Juventus was demonstrating its capabilities in killing off the game. I was set on winning this match and with a solid 2-0 lead I was doing everything to stop Arsenal from being able to get back into the match. So aside from a corner kick in the 66th minute, actually nothing interesting happened anymore until about the 80th minute. In the 75th minute, Buffon, Chiellini, Bonucci and Marchisio even started to do a little exercise in back-n-forth passing in their own penalty box to waste time… Now this was a reincarnation of the evil spirit of Catenaccio, reminding me of the 1965 European cup final when Inter Milan defended a 1-0 lead against Benfica by constantly playing the ball back to their goalkeeper.
Some corner kicks for Arsenal in the final 10 minutes couldn’t change the game, and Juventus won with 2-0. It was a clinical, perhaps even a cynical victory, but it was a necessary one to make things even. The team scored by deceiving and surprising the Arsenal defence – the first lesson taught by Sun Tzu, and then utilized some ‘good cruelty’, in Machiavelli’s terms, to protect the lead.
Earlier, me and the Blacaria played as Ajax and Schalke 04 against eachother (1-0; 0-0; 1-1) and it could not have been more boring. But now the Blacaria went with this monstrosity, Arsenal, and I picked Juventus. It could have been a great template for a Championsleague match.
I can see why Arsenal is Blac’s favourite team recently, because they perfectly fit his direct attacking style. With players like Walcott, Sanchez, and Oxlade-Chamberlain, he can attack from all angles with speed and unpredictability. My pick, Juventus, was simply because I wanted a high-class team as well and I seldom allow myself to be Juventus (in a season, Juventus is no fun because its too easy to dominate the Serie A, and online it means the other person is forced to choose a top team as well).
Line-ups:
![[Image: Tlmd9Us.jpg]](http://i.imgur.com/Tlmd9Us.jpg)
![[Image: ykApC2K.jpg]](http://i.imgur.com/ykApC2K.jpg)
Game I
Blac’s Arsenal showed up in the formation I had expected, which was 4-1-4-1. I had therefore opted for a 4-3-1-2, rather than a 3-5-2, which would have enabled me to deploy Barzagli, Chiellini and Bonucci in defence. But then I’d play with three central defenders against a lone striker.
In the opening phase it was Arsenal attacking, playing mostly on my half, while Juventus tried to build-up from deep, and occasionally broke out on the counter-attack. Nothing new then in our usual confrontations.
In the 17th minute however, Juventus had a free kick in Arsenal’s half. Evra received the ball on the left flank, crossed it into the box, and Arsenal’s defenders weren’t paying enough attention so that Lichtsteiner could score the opening goal for Juventus. The Arsenal players appealed for offside, but the referee ignored them.
Arsenal resumed its siege of my penalty box, but every pass into the box got intercepted by one of my defenders, triggering a new counter-attack with long balls forward to Mandzukic and Dybala. Part of Arsenal’s problem was that, although attacking in great numbers, they too quickly tried to go for the killer-pass into the danger zones, leading to many interceptions and wasted attacking opportunities. Juventus’ counter-attacks were quickly smothered as well however, triggering counter-attacks from Arsenal. And so the game descended into more and more open match that went up and down the pitch.
When Juventus didn’t have the opportunity to counter-attack, they hung on to the ball much longer than Arsenal. The build-up began with Chiellini and Bonucci, with the goalkeeper never hitting it long. Even though Arsenal tried to steal the ball in my half, Juventus always had plenty of channels through which to move the ball forward. Lichtsteiner and Evra provided wide options, and there were three central midfielders always providing short vertical options. Arsenal, with only 2 central midfielders, could not effectively shut down the central channels. Therefore, Juventus frequently had prolonged periods of ball possession in the later first half. When playing in Arsenal’s half, Arsenal remained very compact. Juventus could play around it however, because its wing-backs tried to stretch Arsenal wide, while Marchisio operated as a very deep playmaker, directing my attacks from a position around the half-way line that was far out of reach of Arsenal’s players.
Just when I was beginning to think I had the match under control, Arsenal scored the equalizer. Bellerin, instead of crossing from the right flank, passed it back to central area in front of my penalty box. All of my players had lined themselves up for a cross, so there was no one to block Wilshere when he fired from outside the box into the upper left corner of the net.
In the 50th minute, early in the 2nd half, Juventus would turn the tiki-taka on Blacaria. Arsenal missed a corner-kick and Buffon took the goal-kick, passing it short to Chiellini. From there an elaborate build-up began, going back and forth with the central midfielders, then moving out to the left flank, back to the central midfielders, to the right flank, to the centre again, back to the right flank, and then back to the middle again: only now within Arsenal’s penalty box. The attack involved a total of 17 uninterrupted passes, finishing with Lichtsteiner dribbling into the box and reaching Pereyra waiting near the penalty spot. Okay, I admit it wasn’t ‘real’ Tiki-Taka because it wasn’t a high-tempo positional play, it was more of a clever use of passing to lure Arsenal’s players out of position to create spaces to be exploited as they appeared.
I hadn’t even finished celebrating when Arsenal scored the equalizer. Right from the moment Arsenal took the kick-off, Juventus wasted a long ball and Arsenal reached Chamberlain on the flank. Chiellini didn’t pay attention, and in his back were two players of Arsenal, completely unmarked, waiting for the early cross. Chamberlain perfectly placed it over Chiellini’s head, and Walcott behind him scored. Three minutes later, the exact same scenario repeated itself. Only this time it was Bellerin on the right flank, with Alexis Sanchez coming from behind the defender to volley-kick the ball past Buffon. Part of the reason this could happen twice in a row was perhaps because both Chiellini and Lichtsteiner, the righter half of my four-man defence, defended slightly higher up the pitch than the left side of Bonucci and Evra. And its there on the right side that I got beaten by crosses from deep. A good cross can’t be defended, but here I was perhaps giving Arsenal a little too much of an invitation.
With the score line suddenly 3-2 for Arsenal, things got worse for me as Dybala left the pitch with an injury. But I replaced him with Morata. With the match now completely open, the spectacle really took off. Juventus counter-attacked with Mandzukic down the left flank in the 58th minute. A cross landed before Morata’s feet a few meters from the goal line, but he hit the goalkeeper. In the 60th minute Morata played a high ball to Mandzukic in the penalty box, and Mandzukic attempted an overhead kick that barely missed the net. In the 70th minute a low cross from deep by Lichtsteiner reached Pereyra, waiting on the edge of Arsenal’s box. His shot was kept from goal by Cech with the greatest difficulty. In the 73rd minute a through ball by Mandzukic on Pereyra making a run into the box enabled him to score but he fired wide. In the 75th minute Arsenal had a corner-kick and Per Mertesacker headed the ball on the crossbar. In the 77th minute a distance shot by Pogda almost flew between Cech’s hands, and in the 78th minute Lichtsteiner lost the ball in Juventus’ half to Theo Walcott, and Chiellini was just in time to stop Walcott from advancing alone on my goal.
Then finally in the 82nd minute Bonucci scored the equalizer for Juventus as he was left unmarked during a corner kick. In the 84th minute, Juventus continued to attack as I hoped there was still more in it (given the amount of scoring chances). Morata dribbled into Arsenal’s box, and again Pereyra was waiting near the penalty spot and left completely unmarked. But this time he missed this ultimate opportunity to score the winning goal.
Arsenal too went for the kill. In the 88th minute, another one of those deep crosses from the right flank landed before a red shirt very close to my goal, but they hit Buffon. A few seconds later, Chamberlain got the chance to try it again and Walcott was there to score. I sent my troops out of the trenches for the remaining minutes, but it was over.
Game II
For game II I had made some adjustments within my system. Our previous game was nice to watch, but too many chances had been missed and it was still a loss of 3-4. Blac had switched to his standard 4-2-3-1 system for this game.
Although my team was defensively better organized now than in the previous match, this match would be the game of injuries for me. Lichtsteiner went off in the 8th minute, and I had no right full-backs on my bench. Evra was moved to that position and Alex Sandro came on as the new left full-back. But Evra is not familiar to playing as a right back, and in a 4-3-1-2 system, a lot is expected from these positions.
In the 16th minute a shot from Arsenal landed on the post and we got away lucky. Throughout the first half, Juve withstood the pressure of Arsenal. Occasionally Juventus attacked, such as in the 50th minute when Dybala went past his man in the penalty box and had a big chance to score, but he missed. The second half was the same as the first: Arsenal attacking, Juventus counter-attacking. My ability to build attacks was seriously harmed by the fact that Evra was now playing as the right wing-back, but on the counter the team was capable of creating dangerous situations so I wasn’t too bothered with staying deep and defending in my own third of the pitch.
In the 69th minute however, a string of individual errors threatened to ruin the match for me. Evra attempted a long pass and it was so badly placed that it was intercepted by Arsenal with not a Juve player around. Welbeck, the lone striker, was sent deep down the right flank where Evra was now absent. He cut inside with the ball into the penalty box. As if Welbeck had washed his body with onions or something, my defenders stayed far away from him, enabling him to get almost to the penalty spot with the ball. When even my keeper had decided that if the defenders did nothing, he should come out of his goal, Welbeck fired and scored. So much for tactics when your players do stuff like this.
In the 72nd minute, another one of my full-backs left the game injured. Alex Sandro this time. So I moved Chiellini to the left back position (where he once started his career) and brought on Andrea Barzagli as central defender. In the 76th minute, a sudden through-ball through the middle by Mandzukic to Pereyra enabled him to score the unexpected equalizer. And in the 79th minute Chiellini even had the chance to score 2-1 when he dribbled deep inside Arsenal’s box from the left. The match ended in 1-1 however, and I praised myself lucky considering the problems I had with my wing-backs.
Game III
For game III I was dead-set on winning it. I wanted at least one victory with Juventus against Arsenal. Arsenal had sticked to its 4-2-3-1, but this time I knew how to render it ineffective. With a few defensive adjustments, some changes in the playing style, and so extra instructions regarding the opposition players, I could make life very hard on Arsenal.
Arsenal barely got any attacking play going in the opening phase and in the 8th minute Chiellini opened the score line with a header from a corner kick. In the 18th minute Marchisio intercepted a long pass from Arsenal. Via Bonucci, Khedira and Pereyra the ball reached Mandzukic. The Arsenal defenders, thinking Mandzukic was going to shoot, quickly closed down on him to block it. Instead, Mandzukic quickly extended Pereyra’s pass with his wrong foot. The ball penetrated the Arsenal defence and Pogba ran into the box to score. This is what they’d call in Italy a moment of ‘fantasia’, the sudden, unexpected, yet simple move that puts and entire defence on the wrong foot.
As Arsenal was completely unable to respond, Blac brought on substitutions and resorted to his 4-1-4-1 formation in the 28th minute. After half-time absolutely nothing worth mentioning happened until the 66th minute as my Juventus was demonstrating its capabilities in killing off the game. I was set on winning this match and with a solid 2-0 lead I was doing everything to stop Arsenal from being able to get back into the match. So aside from a corner kick in the 66th minute, actually nothing interesting happened anymore until about the 80th minute. In the 75th minute, Buffon, Chiellini, Bonucci and Marchisio even started to do a little exercise in back-n-forth passing in their own penalty box to waste time… Now this was a reincarnation of the evil spirit of Catenaccio, reminding me of the 1965 European cup final when Inter Milan defended a 1-0 lead against Benfica by constantly playing the ball back to their goalkeeper.
Buffon doing a little passing excercise:
![[Image: cuCxvXt.png]](http://i.imgur.com/cuCxvXt.png)
Some corner kicks for Arsenal in the final 10 minutes couldn’t change the game, and Juventus won with 2-0. It was a clinical, perhaps even a cynical victory, but it was a necessary one to make things even. The team scored by deceiving and surprising the Arsenal defence – the first lesson taught by Sun Tzu, and then utilized some ‘good cruelty’, in Machiavelli’s terms, to protect the lead.