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Arsenal’s efficiency against Palace is welcome indeed

Suburban Gooners Logo Suburban Gooners Logo Howdy peeps, from an overcast Johannesburg, in which me n the Management are spending our Christmas with friends.

The time zone is a couple of hours ahead of the UK which meant I was able to time the watching of the game with an early dinner, meaning no disruption to the most important activity of the day:

Watching The Arsenal.

I still missed the first goal though; nature called just at the wrong moment and so when Gabriel Jesus struck early, I was only privy to the information from the gents loo’s. You’d think that a man in his 40s could time his body to work better and around The Arsenal, but c’est la vie, as the French say.

When I got back to my seat in the hotel restaurant (who conveniently has the game on two big screens in the bar attached to it) it was 1-1 though; the goal itself was decent, the finish was clever from Sarr, but I do wonder what Arteta and his coaching staff will be saying this week as they do a re-watch. He probably should have had a tackle made before Sarr struck the ball, but thankfully we didn’t have to wait too long before we got our noses in front again.

Gabriel Jesus’ second goal was a peach though, wasn’t it? Absolutely perfectly placed after a knock down from Partey in the box and he found the tiniest of gaps to place the ball in. What a difference a week can make in football. I’d speculated last week and after the Palace League Cup game that Gabriel Jesus could potentially go on a run now and I know it’s only two games against the same opponent (in his head this morning he’ll be doing the whole “can we play you every week” chant I’d wager), but he’s been a bit of a streaky player historically in his career and perhaps this is his ‘streak’ happening now. How long it goes on for remains to be seen, but with Saka limping off yesterday evening, it’s good to see other players step up.

That Saka injury will be a big worry for Arteta; Sterling was also missing and with games coming thick and fast for the foreseeable future, you wonder just how many he might miss as we hit the busy festive period. Arteta admitted his concern afterwards and we just have to hope that the scans bring back positive news.

Positive news did come in other areas yesterday though; Palace are a good side, a tricky side to play, but we decided that we would be super efficient in taking our chances. The game certainly didn’t feel like the dominant walk in the park it might look like on paper with that scoreline. Raya was called into action a few times and Mateta will certainly have felt that he should have bagged his second goal against us this week with his one-on-one.

He didn’t take his big chance, but plenty of our players did and it’s good to see Kai and Martinelli on the scoresheet, with some poachery-style goals too. Both felt quite instinctive and after a few games without a goal, Kai will be happy to get that feel of the ball hitting the back of the net. He played as a left eight yesterday and I thought that was interesting; we haven’t seen Kai in midfield since Villa at home last season and as we all know, it didn’t quite work on that day. But Arteta referenced it yesterday in the post-match presser and clearly they’d spotted a tactical switch from the League Cup game in midweek.

I do wonder if the fact Palace played their strongest team and we rotated a bit had an impact on this game too, you know, not just with fatigue for them being a factor either. Arteta will have known how they would set up, where the danger areas are, studied his opponent and he will have spotted something to go at them with; hence the decision to select the side that he did with Kai in the left eight. Of course Palace would carry more threat when at home, so perhaps from a tactical perspective there was a little

More simplicity to the result than I’m reading in to – when teams venture forward and ‘have a go’ you’re always going to get more space to attack, so perhaps it was as simple as ‘let’s get more attacking threat on the pitch from midfield because we’re not going to have a low block team today’?

He said afterwards that we were better against Everton and to some extent I think he’s right, because we certainly had more control and limited any real chances for Fulham, Everton and then Palace at home. But we were certainly more ruthless; the stats show that because Palace had more total shots than us (15 to our 14) and the same number of shots on target (six-a-piece). We dominated possession, as you’d expect us to, but we took five of the six chances on goal on the day. Do that every week and we’ll be seeing a lot of high scoring games indeed.

Of course we know it won’t always be like that, perhaps the media narrative about us being profligate in front of goal and only being able to score from set pieces was hyperbole, but as much as that was probably one way too far, talking us up as having now fixed all of our attacking questions on the basis of this game alone, feels like it’s a bit far in the other direction.

But we have a nice weekend and plenty of goals to be happy about, the team will take plenty of encouragement on the goals and the likes of Gabby J, Martinelli and Havertz will all be buzzing for their goals. As will Rice, who added the cherry on top towards the end. Lovely stuff.

Right, I’m off to Durban to see my mate Paul, who will also have been very happy with the result yesterday.

Catch you all 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.