By Tony Attwood
Palace are 15th in the league but have the 9th-best defence in the league. Everton are 16th in the league but also have the 9th best defence in the league. Having seen last weekend’s game, this tells us something about how Wednesday’s game will go.
Looking back at the disappointment of the weekend’s result there is a sense in the world of football chatter that Arsenal’s weakness has been revealed andArsenal can be put back in their box. [The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/football/2024/dec/14/arsenal-everton-premier-league-match-report) summed up the new thought with the line, “Increasingly with Arsenal there is a sense of the game being a diverting imposition between the real business of the corners.”
Deal with the corners, the new thinking goes, and you deal with Arsenal. At least you will if you also use the same methodology to deal with Arsenal free kicks.
In fact the Guardian felt so strongly about it that it approached the subject from every possible angle, continuing for example “if you can blunt Arsenal’s set-piece threat, you are a long way to stifling them more generally.”
Although to be fair they do admit this was Everton’s fourth 0-0 draw of the season. Quite what it is like to watch so many goalless games is hard to say. Although the fact that they have only scored five away goals this season tells us quite a lot about their away support’s narcissism.
However, there is another point that has been missed, and it is highly relevant to the forthcoming two games against Crystal Palace. This relates to a statistic you won’t find in any table (or at least any I have seen) despite the plethora of statistics we get these days. (If you do know of it, please tell me, as it will leave me working it out.)
This is the number of goals for and against in total for any club. The lowest number is 35, that is with Everton. 14 for 21 against. This compares with 44 in Arsenal matches. Of course that difference looks small and its implication only becomes clear when we divide it into the conventional home and away totals. But my point here is that just as Everton are very low in terms of “goals in games” (bottom of the pile in fact) they are not far away from Crystal Palace with 38 goals in games.
Last season by this point Arsenal had 48 goals in games. Palace had 38 – and were bottom of the league for “goals in games” after 16 games.
A low “goals in games” total of course is achieved by putting the whole emphasis of each match on the defence. In short, do everything possible to stop the opposition scoring and hope that you can get one on a breakawway.
In the last five league games however for Palace there have been 15 goals: 9 for Palace and 6 for the opposition: three goals a game, as compared to their average in the league this season of 2.38.
For Arsenal the average goals per game this season has been 2.5 goals per game, although in the last five games this has risen to 2.8 which obviously shows a greater propensity for goals in Arsenal games than Palace games.
The effectiveness of Everton’s “don’t let them score” approach and indeed their belief in it, is revealed in the fact that they were quite willing to let Arsenal have the ball throughout the game. The Everton possession percentage was 23%, to Arsenal’s 77%,
Looking at the possession ratings across the league season, Arsenal are on 54.4% and Everton 39.9% (bottom of the league for possession in fact). And clearly from the weekend’s game we saw that Arsenal did not have a way to overcome this tactic of giving up possession in order to hang on for a goalless draw.
And I got through all this because Crystal Palace whom we play twice in the coming week, are very near the bottom in terms of possession percentage being the 16th lowest on 43.5%
So we are likely to be facing two games in which the tactics are identical to those used against Arsenal this past weekend. In the Everton game Arsenal had eight attempts off target and five attempts on target. Everton had two attempts off target and none on target.
This is the way Premier League tactics are going. The lower-placed clubs aiming to get points off the upper-placed clubs but giving up on possession and playing a frustration game in the hope the opposition start taking risks, with leaving space open at the back.
But there is one thing to add: the last six games. Here’s a very abbreviated table…
Team
P
W
D
L
F
A
GD
Pts
**3**
**Arsenal**
**6**
**3**
**3**
**0**
**12**
**4**
**+8**
**12**
8
Crystal Palace
6
2
3
1
9
8
+1
9
12
Tottenham
6
2
1
3
14
8
+6
7
18
Man City
6
1
1
4
7
12
\-5
4
I’ve included the Tottenham and ManC figures as they are of themselves quite interesting, and it does show that across the last six games Palace have a better attack than ManC!!! But they let in twice as many goals as Arsenal. It confirms the thought from last weekend’s game: Arsenal’s natural approach is to focus on scoring, and if the opposition are pulling everyone back in defence, we need yet more inventive ways around this.
I’d really hate for us to have another goalless draw and for the game to go to penalties.