Arsenal Season Review: Right Back
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Arsenal Season Review: Right Back
Next in the continuing series looking at how Arsenal did position by position is right-back.
I have previously looked at strikers:
Attacking Midfield:
Midfield:
And Left Back:
Let's start by looking at how Arsenal's right-backs performed compared to the other Premier League teams this season.
Arsenal's right-backs have a weird sort of combined profile. A lot of that I think is down to the two guys that played right-back for Arsenal did it in very different ways.
Takehiro Tomiyasu played a much more reserved role, receiving most of his passes in the defensive half and playing much more support to the right-side attack.
Cedric played a much more attacking right-back type role, with much more overlap on the right-wing and being much more involved in the attacking play.
When these are combined it looks exactly like that, where the numbers overall look like decent attacking and decent defending but in reality, it was much more the two guys that played for Arsenal had opposite strengths and weaknesses that got lost in the aggregation.
Individual Radars
I have been upfront in that Takehiro Tomiyasu is not my ideal type of right-back. I have always been drawn to the more swashbuckling overlapping wing-back type full-back.
All that being said, I was impressed with Tomiyasu this season.
Part of that maybe is that I had lower expectations but still, I think that he was an important type of player for how Arsenal wanted to play, and when he was unavailable it had cascading changes throughout the team.
Cedric is a player I hope to see a lot less of next season.
I have never been his biggest fan and his extended run in the team this season has not changed my thoughts on him. He is a decent player in the attacking part of the field and below average as a defender. Even giving him that he is a 'decent' attacker he can still be incredibly frustrating, especially considering that he loves to spam crosses towards players that aren't especially adept at getting on the end of them.
He tried 4.1 open play crosses per 90 and was not especially good at having these crosses turn into danger.
Outlook for next season
I don't think that there are any moves this summer for any right-backs for Arsenal so what we have now, is with pretty high confidence what will see next season.
The only question is maybe around Hector Bellerin, but I really think that he will end the transfer window on another team. He was solid at Betis and I do think that he was better than Cedric.
The big thing will be that hopefully, Tomiyasu will be healthy and available. So lets all cross our fingers about this.