LONDON — This shouldn’t feel sweet for Arsenal. There is every possibility that come the end of the season, this will have the look of two points frittered away by a conservative selection and a drab first-time display. The familiar tropes that are deployed against Mikel Arteta were present in abundance: a midfield that lacked guile, an attack that tilted too heavily to one flank, a side who look their most threatening from set pieces.
And yet this should and perhaps will feel like a better day than it might otherwise for one particular reason: Arsenal just inflicted on Manchester City what City inflicted on them 364 days ago. As Bernardo Silva might put it, only one team came to play football in the second half. Pep Guardiola ended this game in a 5-5-0, the man who seemed to be his match-winner warming the bench so that Nico Gonzalez could add ballast to the midfield. City conceded a higher proportion of possession to their opponents than any Guardiola team has in a league match. In the second half, they allowed 148 final third touches, a full triple figures more than they had. They tried to suffer ball their way to victory with 11 men as Arsenal had with 10 men. They failed.
Put that scenario to Arteta mind, and he was not biting.
“That game we played, I think, was 54 minutes with 10 men, so that’s a different story,” he said. “The pride that I feel is to do and to play and to dominate a game that we did against this team but with 11 players.”
A different story perhaps, not least because City put up 33 shots on 10 men to Arsenal’s 12 on 11, but a similar outcome. The team who conceded late find themselves conceding ground to in-form early-season leaders. Attempts to cling on against superior opposition — Guardiola’s assessment as well as Arteta’s — had been admirable but ultimately fell short in dramatic fashion. The team that struck at the death might be papering over a few cracks, but there should be delight in the manner in which they did so.
TruMedia
“We started the game very well, I think we completely dominated, I think after they scored in the goal, doing absolutely nothing before that, we were a bit shaky for five or seven minutes,” said Arteta, perhaps overstating how long it took his side to get back into the contest. “After that, we still got the grip of the game again and started to dominate it. In the second half, it was a continuation of that with one different player [sic, he made two changes at half time] and then with two or three different players.”
Arteta won great credit for the deployment of his “finishers” in Tuesday’s win at Athletic Club, and it is fair to say his substitutes turned the tide once more this weekend. From the moment they entered the fray at the interval, Bukayo Saka and Eberechi Eze made things happen. The former, even at a limited level of fitness, still offered an upgrade on Noni Madueke, and that was saying something given that the former Chelsea man was customarily sparky.
Eze, too, brought purpose to the attack in the most straightforward of ways. When the ball came into him in the right eight position, his body shape was such that he allowed the ball to do the hard work of moving Arsenal forward. The hosts had a drive and momentum in that position that Mikel Merino simply could not provide them. That culminated in a brilliant lofted through ball for another “impactor” (Arteta’s old word for players that come off the bench), Gabriel Martinelli.
His substitutes had changed the game again but this time that statement comes with a caveat. Arsenal had let the 40 minutes after Erling Haaland’s barnstorming opener drift away from them, an injured Noni Madueke their only convincing threat against an opponent who was already showing itself willing to hunker down. Leandro Trossard profiles as a very useful player to come off the bench and sniff out a goal but he struggled to meaningfully impact this game throughout. If the finisher role is of such value then a good performance in it should not be rewarded with a spot in the XI. And when the depth in midfield is what Arsenal’s is, there is little reason to hammer away at ill-fitting groupings.
A midfield three of Merino, Declan Rice and Martin Zubimendi was lacking in guile in the final third, the sort that Eze immediately offered. “Nobody asked me about the midfield three in Bilbao,” Arteta insisted. They had, however, at Anfield and were even more entitled to question the approach at home as opposed to in a tricky away game early in the Champions League.
The bald facts are that in the 16 Premier League games in which Merino and Rice have started together, many where the Spaniard has done a shift for the team at center forward, Arsenal average 1.3 xG. As a whole over the last two top-flight seasons, they are at 1.6 xG. It stands to reason that playing two central midfielders whose greatest attacking qualities are off the ball is going to limit Arsenal’s creativity. This is not a question of whether players are too attacking or defensive; it is whether the team itself is sufficiently well set up to exploit their superiority. In the first half, Arsenal were a team with too many off-ball players, too few who could attack the City jugular.
Arsenal were superior, though, as Guardiola himself admitted. “Sometimes you have to defend because the opponent is better,” was his explanation for an approach that ended with City camped in their own half. A Thursday win over 10-man Napoli had taken it out of the visitors, who were unchanged for a third consecutive match. “Our resilience was fantastic. We got the chances in transition but it was difficult to play how we want to play, to make a good build up and our pressing wasn’t effective. They spread a lot the two structures that they have. They are so close and they open so wide. It’s not easy to defend that concept.”
Arsenal didn’t make it as hard as they might. For 31 minutes, they were without a shot and seemed remarkably unwilling to commit numbers forward after Haaland had caught Gabriel chasing the ball into the final third. Nothing typified the first half quite like Madueke somehow getting clear of two defenders, cutting a cross back to a good area, only to find that the red shirts were nowhere to be seen.
In the second, Arsenal were hardly raining shots down on the City goal but they were forcing their opposition to adjust, to throw more bodies at their rearguard just to hold firm. Play like Still when you keep the ball in an area of the field where defenders cannot switch off throughout a 45 minute period, you at the very least raise your chances of benefitting from a tired mistake. The sort that, for instance, looks like no pressure on a ball carrier like Eze while defending with a high line. It was too easy for Arsenal’s No. 10 to pick a pass over the top, a smart first touch from Martinelli and a lift over Gianluigi Donnarumma.
“It’s a pity but it’s football, right?” said Guardiola. “Last season we equalized in the last minute at the Etihad, today they did it in the last minute.”
That in itself is worthy of some celebration within the Arsenal camp. Whether Arteta accepts it or not, they got a lot wrong from the outset. Even so, they were able to impose themselves on City and spoil a last-gasp triumph for a rival. That is not to be sniffed at.
