No one said Sam isn’t a specialist. One of the characteristics of a specialist is to target specific games for points and manage the squad around the others. He showed that yesterday he’s not prepared to mess about and had one eye on the palace game by resting Coleman and taking off Walcott.
Hope you’re joking mate. He should be a specialist in making us play better all around across all games. That’s the point of hiring him in the first place. Of all TOP 7 teams, Arsenal is the easiest to play against once you get into their faces and bully them around the pitch, deny space and frustrate them.
Why don’t he just fill the team with reserve from TOP to bottom if he plans to treat this match as 0 point return? He could have possibly field Tosun and let him gain experience instead since this is a zero return game. How about giving Coleman another 60mins to further build up his fitness with the same logic?
He choose his tactics and believe he can get something from this match and it failed miserably, simple as that.