Jurrien Timber puts Arsenal in front against United
Since the start of last season Arsenal have scored 22 goals from corners, so their threat from set-pieces is hardly a hidden secret. Mikel Arteta's team have become Premier League experts at converting from dead-ball situations, and both their goals against Manchester United came from corners.
So good are they from this position that the Emirates crowd were singing about 'Set Piece FC' towards the end of Wednesday's 2-0 win, while Jurrien Timber, scorer of the first goal, suggested the threat had become a mental one as well as a tactical one for opposing teams.
Even without centre-back Gabriel, who causes so much of the chaos that Arsenal's corners create, they continued to look a significant danger against United. They had 13 corners in the game and it's little exaggeration to say they could have scored from maybe six or seven of them.
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Timber broke the deadlock by glancing Declan Rice’s delivery in at the near post, and that came from a corner routine Arsenal used for all of their first six or seven set-pieces, and one that has become familiar to Premier League defences.
All of Arsenal’s attacking players for the corner start outside the back post before all making the same run to the near post. With the inswinging delivery of Rice or Bukayo Saka on the money almost every time, they are difficult to defend.
When asked if Arsenal now had a physiological edge on their opponents at corners, Timber said, “I think so, I hope so. I hope so because we are scoring a lot out of it. So I hope so, definitely.”
United were clearly aware of Arsenal's threat, and they spent a good portion of their pre-match warm-up practicing defending corners. The central defenders wore coloured bibs, worked on zonal positions, and headed deliveries away.
That is perhaps a sign it has become a psychological issue, and it made no difference anyway. United rarely looked comfortable with responsibility for set-pieces moving from Andreas Georgson to Carlos Fernandes since the arrival of Ruben Amorim and his coaching team.
"The thinking is Carlos is responsible for set pieces, different stuff," Amorim explained. "Andreas is also there to help. That’s it. That’s the reason. I think if you follow Premier League for a long time you can see that they (Arsenal) are also big players for that. And you can see it in every occasion that (Bukayo) Saka and (Gabriel) Martinelli has one against one, a lot of times they go outside and cross. They already know if the cross is going well, they can score. If it’s a corner, they can score.
"So we have to be better on that situation but like in every area of our game we need time to improve also. But you can see in all Arsenal games every team has a problem with that."
Regulars at the Emirates remarked that few teams had had such a sustained problem with corners as United did on Wednesday, despite their pre-match practice. It also didn’t help that they lost the corner count 13-0 and had to do so much defending.
“They look really dangerous and we feel really confident when we go into a set piece as well which is a nice feeling,” said Timber. “We showed again how dangerous we are from set pieces.”
When United return to the Emirates in January for an FA Cup third-round tie, they will need to have a new plan for neutering Arsenal’s set-piece threat. Fernandes and Georgson have their work cut out.