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Everton snoozefest shows Arsenal have a profligacy problem

Suburban Gooners Logo Suburban Gooners Logo That was absolutely pants yesterday. I said it in my match preview, I was worried that it would be a stinky ‘non game’ in which Arsenal would need to find the answers to a low block, long ball, deep lying team with very little ambition to go forward in Everton. That is exactly what we got.

The stats are crazy. We had nearly 80% the whole game. We dominated from start to finish. Everton had just one attempt early on and that was it. The onus was on us to respond and on a day in which Liverpool dropped points, we once again showed why this season is extremely unlikely to end in a Premier League title. Title winning sides make up the gaps. Title winning sides deliver on afternoons where it doesn’t work against stubborn opponents. For the second week running we showed why that simply isn’t the case for us this season and once again the questions are being raised about our lack of attacking depth-building last summer weren’t addressed.

There are a few individual performances as well that I think were cause for concern. I thought Odegaard was poor. There were some on the Same Old Arsenal Podcast that I was on this morning suggesting that because he’s a new born father, that would have had an impact. I’m not sure that can legislate for some pretty poor finishing in the second half. I could understand it if it was the reason for him coming off for Nwaneri in the second half as fatigue set in and Arteta said afterwards that the move was ‘tactical’. So I get that, but it doesn’t really excuse the first half. And when Odegaard isn’t firing, we too struggle at times, particularly on our right hand side. We know that Saka gets doubled up on and the way we need to respond to that is give him Arsenal bodies around him, but yesterday it wasn’t quite clicking. Does he miss Ben White on the overlap? Maybe, but Timber did overlap on a few occasions and it just didn’t seem like it fell to him. I don’t think Saka was particularly bad, just quiet, but I thought Odegaard was poor. His chance inside the penalty box that he blasted straight at Pickford really should have been put away. And it’s times like that in which you’re going to get questions about the need for better attacking options than we have at the moment.

Like that left hand side, I’m afraid, because I thought Martinelli was effectively rendered redundant pretty much throughout. He’s up against a 39-year-old Ashley Young and other than a few moments in the first half, Martinelli really offered little. I talked about it on Friday, but I feel like only recently I’ve started to wake up to the concerning regularity with which he’s offering little or no end product. yesterday he was very much ‘head down, get to the goal line’ and in matches in which you face a compact and deep-lying defence, you need to have more guile about you. I am starting to think that the need with which Arsenal need to address their attacking challenges is becoming more and more urgent with every passing day. We are a couple of weeks away from the January transfer window and I really hope the club are considering their options. We need a spark and yesterday certainly showed that.

You’re always going to get games like yesterday. Pickford wasting time (let’s hear the media talk about ‘dark arts’ today, eh? Or is it only us?) was going to happen from the first minute. But you need game changers to step up and make the difference. Saka is a game changer. He’s a consistent match winner. But how many other players do we have that feel like that? How many players do we have that we think “go on, have a pop” when the ball hits the edge of the box? Because those players you would think are capable of that – Odegaard, Trossard, Rice – just don’t seem to be doing it. And it felt like yesterday needed to be one of those matches in which a 25-yarder that pops in the top corner would be difference between the two teams. City have that, Liverpool have that, maybe even Chelsea seem to have that at the moment. But we are definitely lacking that ‘spark’ right now.

I’m not really sure I want to go in to much more detail on the game yesterday, because it doesn’t really feel there was much to talk about after that good initial stop from Pickford in the second half to deny Saka. The subs didn’t really work, apparently Rice ‘felt something’ so it wouldn’t surprise me if we lost another player for a few weeks given how our season seems to be panning out right now, so all in all it feels like a pretty rubbish day at the office.

It’s Palace on Wednesday night in the cup and I guess that’s an opportunity to consign this weekend’s performance to history and have a look at some of the rotational players, then it’s Palace again on Saturday evening. I’d love to be saying it’s a ‘must win’ but we’ve had that two week’s on the trot so it feels like these ‘must wins’ are just edging us further and further away from any title talk. After yesterday’s performance I feel like that chatter has to be properly shelved. Liverpool slipping up yesterday shouldn’t be looked at with any glass half full; you have to capitalise when your opponents slip up. We certainly didn’t do that yesterday.

Back tomorrow.

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Gooner born in 1982 from Harlow, Essex, now living in Uxbridge. I say what I see - frequently wrong, but hey, it's just an opinion piece, right? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.