Former Arsenal striker, Ian Wright, has advised Unai Emery to ditch his midfield diamond formation, when they host Tottenham Hotspur in Sunday’s North London Derby.
Wright, speaking on his YouTube channel, also urged Emery to switch to the 4-3-3 formation he finished the Liverpool game with.
The Gunners’ perfect start to the season ended at Anfield last weekend, as they lost 3-1 to the Reds.
Wright was scathing in his assessment of how Arsenal approached the match, saying he was ‘baffled’ by the decision to play with a diamond.
He said: “A lot of people have talked about what I said about the diamond, and how I thought it gave Liverpool the impetus, and that’s just my opinion. I thought it surrendered possession to a team that work very well in those areas of the field.
“Whatever we say, our two chances that were made, apart from the goal Torreira scored, were when we had [Alexandre] Lacazette, [Pierre-Emerick] Aubameyang, [Nicolas] Pepe and Torreira on the pitch. We made a goal, it might have been a consolation but…
“You just want your best players on the pitch. And I just feel that, yes their goals were two mistakes, Henderson and the goalkeeper, but I just thought that, with the way we started the season, we could have been a little more “let’s big up our chests”, “let’s go up there and show what we’re capable of”.
“Now people are saying, “yeah but we lost because Wenger done that” but I think this team is better than the one Wenger ended up with, and I think we’ve got better offensive players.
“I just wanted to see that. Maybe Unai is doing it for the future, in respect of the system, and maybe it might work better against teams who are not as good as Liverpool in those areas.
“It was a game that I thought would be tough for us, but I wanted to show them what we’ve got. We’d gone into two games, won two games, we had good momentum, and it kind of seemed to dampen it down a little bit. But nothing better than the derby to bounce back. I genuinely believe we are going to win.”
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